We all write things, whether it happens to be for a living or not. We write emails and texts (and texts) and checks and lists, and you know that’s just a short list. But the other day, I asked Dodgers manager Dave Roberts if he has ever enjoyed writing anything more than he does his lineup card every day, starting with these four names at the top of his batting order: Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Will Smith.

Here was Roberts’ response:

“Not ever.”

The way the Dodgers are hitting these days, it’s not just those four, though Betts was at .360 after Saturday night’s pounding of the Braves, Ohtani was at .345, Freeman got his average back to .300 with three hits, and catcher Will Smith continued to have a career year at .347. And guess what? Not one of them was the biggest Dodger batting star on Saturday night, because that was Roberts’ No. 5 hitter, Max Muncy, who had three homers, four hits and knocked in four runs.

Andy Pages, the 23-year-old Cuban kid who is already looking like a star himself and who won Friday night’s game with an 11th-inning hit, was at .338 and hit a home run, as well. This was also a night at Dodger Stadium when Ohtani also hit his 8th home run of the season. But just the top four in Roberts’ order, before the Dodgers even got to Muncy for his biggest game of the year so far, had eight hits, knocked in six, scored four. There are other offenses in baseball to watch. Not the way you want to watch this one. Not one with top-of-the-order star power like this.

It wasn’t so long ago, April 20, after a loss to the Mets, when the Dodgers’ record was 12-11, this in a season into which no team brought higher expectations, not one, than they did. Since then, they have won 10 of 12 -- and the only team in baseball hotter than they’ve been over that stretch of games has been the Twins, who won their 12th in a row against the Red Sox on Saturday.

“This is gonna be a great series against the Braves,” Roberts told me on Friday.

So far it has only been great for Roberts’ team. Walk-off win in the bottom of the 11th on Friday, after they’d tied it in the bottom of the 10th. Then, all those hits and all those runs on Saturday night -- 16 hits in all, the five homers -- to go with seven dazzling innings from Tyler Glasnow, who is 6-1 now after seven innings and 10 strikeouts against the Braves, who had shown up in Los Angeles with a 20-9 record of their own.

Glasnow has been terrific. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the $300 million starter who got off to a slow start in the regular season after an even rockier Spring Training, is suddenly 3-1 with a 2.91 earned run average and 42 strikeouts in the 34 innings he’s pitched so far. The Dodgers still have pitching issues behind them, but so does just about everybody else on the planet. There are still some microscopic averages at the bottom of the order. Still: Over the last two weeks, the Dodgers have suddenly begun to look like the powerhouse everybody expected them to be when they laid out over a billion dollars to sign Ohtani and Yamamoto, no matter how much of Ohtani’s salary was deferred.

Of course, the Dodgers weren’t the only team that brought high expectations into the season. It never works that way, not with the kind of balance there is in baseball right now, and the talent -- young talent, especially -- spread out all over the baseball map. The Orioles are still loaded. The Yankees traded for Juan Soto because they’re trying to get back to the World Series for the first time since 2009, which feels like a baseball Ice Age at Yankee Stadium. The Braves got knocked off by the Phillies when they thought they were on their way back to the Series last October. The Phillies thought they were going to another World Series before the Diamondbacks won the last two games of the National League Championship Series.

Just look at the standings after Saturday night’s games. The Orioles and Yankees were 1-2 in the AL East. The Phillies and Braves were 1-2 in the NL East. But the Dodgers were right back where we expected them to be and where they belong, back on top in the NL West. With the three MVPs whose names Roberts writes on his lineup card every day -- Betts, Ohtani, Freeman -- sure looking exactly like that against the Braves.

The Dodgers started out the season playing the Padres in Seoul, and Yamamoto got hit hard in just the second game, allowing four hits and five runs in a single inning. Then, it was the Dodgers looking as if they’d been hit hard in April when they were only a game over .500. You see what they’ve done since, how they’ve responded. Roberts addressed that, too, on Friday, the way his team survived getting punched in the face.

Roberts: “I’ve got a really tough, smart team.”

You hit them? They hit you. Write it down.