WEST SACRAMENTO — The first 1,000 wins are the easy ones.
The Dodgers at least made No. 1000 easy for Dave Roberts, battering the A’s for another 14 hits and beating them, 9-3, on Tuesday night at Sutter Health Park.
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The win was the 1,000th of Roberts’ managerial career, making him the 69th manager in MLB history to reach the milestone – only the 11th in that esteemed group to also have won as many as three World Series championships.
And Roberts did it in the fewest games ever (1,606).
He is the fourth Dodgers manager to reach 1,000 wins, joining Walter Alston, Tommy Lasorda and Wilbert Robinson. All three of those managers are in the Hall of Fame, a path Roberts is also clearly on.
This win was only in question slightly more than the 15-0 victory at Petco Park on April 4, 2016 that started Roberts’ career as Dodgers manager (Roberts was 0-1 as Padres interim manager the year before).
The Dodgers scored twice in the first inning on Tuesday and never trailed. Singles by Andy Pages and Mookie Betts sandwiched around a walk of Freddie Freeman (courtesy of an ABS overturn) produced one run. Teoscar Hernandez drove in the other with a sacrifice fly.
Two innings later, the Dodgers pulled away.
Freeman led off with a double. Kyle Tucker drew a two-out walk and Tommy Edman followed with his first home run of the season. The 428-foot, three-run drive to straightaway center field was his longest homer since the 2021 season.
Miguel Rojas added a solo home run in the sixth and the Dodgers put the game away with three runs in a seventh inning that featured Edman’s third of four hits in the game and fourth RBI of the night. In his 11 games since a season debut delayed by last fall’s ankle surgery, Edman has gone 15 for 37 (.405) with eight RBIs.
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The Dodgers have won seven of eight games on this road trip through Minnesota, San Diego and Sacramento, batting .321 as a team, hitting 12 home runs and averaging seven runs per game.
Justin Wrobleski did his part to make it an easy-chair evening for Roberts. Wrobleski reached a milestone of his own, joining Aaron Ashby of the Milwaukee Brewers and Cristopher Sanchez of the Philadelphia Phillies as the first 10-game winners in MLB this season.
Wrobleski left little for Roberts to do, going seven innings for the sixth time in 14 starts this season. He allowed a first-inning run on Jonah Heim’s RBI double but cruised from there, retiring 14 of 15 batters at one point.
Wrobleski struck out a career-high 11, relying mainly on a fastball that continues to gain velocity as the season goes on (his four-seamer averaged 95.1 mph on Tuesday). He got 12 of his 19 swings-and-misses with the fastball.
The game was well in hand by the time he gave up a two-run home run to Colby Thomas in the seventh.
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More to come on this story.