How will Dodgers reward Dave Roberts? Will they land Roki Sasaki?

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This year couldn’t have gone much better for the Dodgers.

They won their first full-season World Series championship since 1988 and second title in the last five seasons. They were transformed on and off the field by Shohei Ohtani, who lived up to every expectation in the first season of his 10-year, $700-million contract. And as the new year approaches, they will pursue dynasty status, trying to become the fifth franchise in MLB’s live ball era to win three championships in a six-year span.

Already this offseason, they’ve begun positioning themselves with several important moves. They signed two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell. They retained slugging outfielder Teoscar Hernández and top reliever Blake Treinen. They even extended key utility man Tommy Edman. As a result, at this early juncture, they are the clear-cut favorites to win the World Series next season.

More moves remain to be made before the team reports to spring training in early February. As the calendar flips to 2025, here are four New Year’s resolutions for the club.

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A new contract for Roberts

When Craig Counsell was lured away from the Milwaukee Brewers by the Chicago Cubs last offseason, it set a new benchmark for managerial salaries. Five years, $40 million.

This winter, Dave Roberts might be poised to break it.

The Dodgers are expected to negotiate a lucrative contract extension with their longtime manager, ahead of what would be the final year of the three-year extension he signed in 2022. And barely a year after Counsell reset the expectation for top manager contracts, Roberts has the credentials to reestablish the market.

Roberts’ nine-season tenure in L.A. has been marked with highs and lows, but his résumé speaks for itself: eight division titles, four National League pennants, two World Series titles and the highest winning percentage in MLB history (outside of the Negro Leagues).

Last season might have been Roberts’ most impressive feat, as he helped the Dodgers navigate a litany of pitching injuries and a fraught postseason pitching plan to join franchise icons Tommy Lasorda and Walter Alston as a winners of multiple World Series. The question now: How handsomely will the Dodgers reward him?

Roberts’ impact, after all, goes beyond the field or clubhouse. He is effectively the frontman for the entire organization, with his twice-daily media availability making him one of its most publicly visible faces. He is also a key conduit between the Dodgers and the community, regularly enlisted for team charity events, pregame meetings with sponsors and special guests, and more.

Dodgers executives said they would focus on their roster before engaging in negotiations with Roberts. As the calendar turns, that time appears to be approaching, with a new contract that should rival, if not top, Counsell’s record-breaking deal one of the last big boxes on their to-do list.

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Landing Sasaki

Japan's Roki Sasaki delivers a pitch during a World Baseball Classic game against Mexico in 2023.

It likely will be at least another couple of weeks before Roki Sasaki, the star 23-year-old pitcher coming to MLB from Japan next season, announces which team he will join.

Joel Wolfe, Sasaki’s agent at Wasserman Media Group, said at the winter meetings that the pitcher — who will be restricted to signing a minor-league contract with a modest signing bonus, since he is not yet 25 — will wait until the international signing period opens Jan. 15, when clubs will have bonus pool money available to sign him.

In the meantime, though, Sasaki’s list of potential destinations has become increasingly clearer.

Dodgers officials, as expected, met with the hard-throwing right-hander before the holidays at the Westwood offices of the Wasserman Media Group, according to people with knowledge of the situation not authorized to speak publicly. Five other teams also are known to have met with Sasaki: the New York Yankees, New York Mets, Chicago Cubs, Texas Rangers and San Francisco Giants. It’s likely Sasaki’s full list of meetings was longer too, with other teams like the San Diego Padres seen as contenders for his services — though Wolfe, in a video call with reporters Monday, would not say how many teams met with Sasaki. The Philadelphia Phillies are the only team known to have been denied a meeting.

Around baseball, the Dodgers still are seen by many as the favorites to land Sasaki. Their interest in him dates to last offseason, when there was brief hope among some in the organization that Sasaki would come for the 2024 season. Entering this offseason, the Dodgers also had the most money remaining in their international signing pool, an indication to some around the sport that they were saving to sign Sasaki.

Ultimately, however, Sasaki decided to wait — a decision Wolfe said Major League Baseball preferred “to make sure this was going to be a fair and level playing field for everyone.”

Wolfe has strongly denied speculation about Sasaki already having a “predetermined” deal with the Dodgers or any other team. Nonetheless, the Dodgers are viewed by many as the most logical landing spot, given their status as World Series champions, the presence of fellow Japanese stars — and Sasaki’s World Baseball Classic teammates — Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and their long track record of pitching development. (However, Wolfe did point out that one of the criteria for the initial in-person meetings was that no players attend, so neither Ohtani and Yamamoto were present for the Dodgers’ pitch.)

If the Dodgers do land him, on what effectively would be a league-minimum salary, it would only further reinforce an injury-prone rotation that was among the team’s few weaknesses last season.

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Rounding out the roster

This offseason, president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman set an ambitious goal for the Dodgers’ roster.

“My goal is to not buy in July,” Friedman said, long wary of what he sees as inflated prices for players at the midseason trade deadline. “I am setting that out there right now. My goal is to do everything we can right now to not buy in July.”

To do that, the Dodgers have a few more areas of depth to address.

The bullpen is the biggest, with the team still interested in adding another high-leverage reliever. The Dodgers’ pursuit of a trade for All-Star closer Devin Williams didn’t come to fruition, with the Brewers instead dealing the right-hander to the Yankees. But other big-name free agents remain available, headlined by stalwart left-hander Tanner Scott, who, while with the Padres this past postseason, was the only reliever to have repeated success limiting Ohtani.

Fan favorites like Kiké Hernández and Joe Kelly also are lingering in free agency and could be options to return. One member of the team who seems more unlikely to return is Jack Flaherty, who likely will need to look elsewhere to find the lucrative, long-term deal he reportedly is seeking. Although the Dodgers heavily relied on Flaherty in October — after he arrived as the kind of deadline acquisition Friedman was hoping to avoid — their rotation is well stocked. Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Yamamoto, Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May should be ready for opening day. Ohtani will return to pitching early in the season. And Landon Knack, Bobby Miller and Clayton Kershaw (who is expected to be re-signed) also should provide depth.

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Fixing the pitching injuries

Though the Dodgers’ pitching depth might look adequate, much will depend on their ability to avoid the injury bug that ravaged their staff the last couple of seasons.

The rise of pitching injuries has not been exclusive to the Dodgers, becoming such a troubling trend around the sport that MLB commissioned a study on it that was released a few weeks ago. The findings, however, provided few concrete answers, other than confirming that as pitching velocities rise, so does the risk of injury.

The Dodgers have made their injury problems a point of emphasis this offseason. “We’re going to spend a lot of time on our pitching and injuries and just trying to wrap our arms around it more,” Friedman said.

But to this point, it’s unclear what changes the organization plans to make, leaving pitching injuries as a major issue to rectify as the new year begins.