Dave Roberts has had a pretty good tenure as the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, recording an 851-506 record (.627 winning percentage) in the regular season while winning four pennants and two World Series titles with the franchise.
Set to enter the 2025 season as a "lame duck" manager, it was clear the Dodgers and Roberts needed to negotiate a new deal to keep the status quo on the "best team in baseball".
After weeks of negotiations, both parties have finally reached an agreement, and Roberts will be a wealthy man in exchange for his managerial services — in fact, on a per year basis, he'll be the richest manager of all time.
Before Roberts' four-year, $32.4 million extension ($8.1 million AAV), the biggest managerial deal in the sport was Craig Counsell's five-year, $40 million pact with the Cubs. Those two deserve their flowers for pushing what was a long-stagnated market in successive offseasons.
Dave Roberts' Los Angeles Dodgers extension finally pushes MLB manager market forward
Obviously, the Dodgers have had a profoundly lucrative offseason, bringing in stud starting pitchers Blake Snell and Roki Sasaki, among others. Keeping Roberts on a record-setting deal is just par for the course for the wealthies and most talented team in baseball.
But in the larger scheme of things, Roberts' AAV actually matters. Besides Counsell, no manager had a salary larger than $5 million last year, and only the Arizona Diamondbacks' Torey Lovullo even met that threshold.
In 2023, the highest paid manager was Terry Francona (Cleveland Guardians) at $4.5 million. The going rate for a "premium" MLB manager has long been in the $3-4 million range, with only a rare few exceptions.
Given the inflation of the salaries and revenue of the sport in the last few decades, that's hard to believe. Joe Torre once made $8 million per season with the Yankees over two decades ago and walked away when the team tried to reduce his salary to $5 million per season with team performance incentives.
At the time, the next-highest paid manager was the Cubs' Lou Piniella at $3.5 million.
When Torre left New York in 2007, the highest MLB salary was Alex Rodriguez at $27.7 million, more than $4 million above second-place Jason Giambi. Now, there's four players with salaries above $40 million for the 2025 season, and two players in possession of contracts worth $700 million or more.
It's amazing that managers (and their coaching staffs) are the one piece of MLB rosters that haven't seen proper escalations in their salaries in recent years. It's likely Roberts and Counsell are in the first wave of head coaches trying to change that.