Welcome to Snyder’s soap box! Here I will pontificate on an issue related to Major League Baseball. Some of the topics I cover in the coming weeks will be pressing topics, others might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will fall somewhere in between. The best thing about this website is that it is free and you are allowed to click. If you stay you will get smarter, however, it is a money back guarantee. Let’s go.
Today I would like to talk about managers. More precisely the almost bloodthirsty calls to “fire him!” ” too often. I know in the age of social media things get amplified, but I remember going to games in the 1980s and constantly hearing cries to fire the manager. It’s been like this for a long time.
Of course, sometimes it’s deserved. We saw the Phillies in 2022, replace an outdated Joe Girardi with Rob Thomson and they have been great since that move. Sometimes teams evolve on the fly, such as Small replacement of David Ross with Craig Counsell only a few days ago. Other times, however, the moves are made just for the sake of moving (eyewashing), when sticking with a good manager would have simply been a game.
This fall we saw Torey Lovullo guide an underdog Arizona Diamondbacks National League pennant team and is very close to having a 2-0 lead in two road games in the World Series. Watch his progress as a manager.
- 2017: 93 wins and first wild-card spot in the NL
- 2018: 82-80
- 2019: 85-77
- 2020: 25-35, no playoffs
- 2021: 110 defeats
We can stop there, because in the overwhelming majority of jobs, the manager gets fired after losing 110 games in his fifth season, including reaching the playoffs in his first season and being shut out since. Can’t you just hear the list of reasons? Stale, lost the clubhouse, needs a new voice, his first year only has so much weightetc. We could go on and on, couldn’t we?
Lovullo is a good manager and that 110 loss season was much more the product of horrible personnel, but still, very often in this situation the manager getting the ax would just be part of the equation. No one would have even batted an eyelid.
The problem with firing a manager purely for eyewash reasons is that there has to be a replacement. One of the mottos I have adopted in life is that you cannot complain about a problem without presenting a solution. Applied specifically here, you can’t say “fire the manager!” » unless you can explain who the replacement would be and why said replacement would do a better job. I suppose we could make exceptions if there’s a manager so terrible at their job that any reasonable replacement would be an upgrade, but I don’t think there’s one in recent memory who would deserve such treatment . Obviously, off-field irregularities are an exception.
In Lovullo’s case, a good manager was left in place and the Diamondbacks can now raise a 2023 NL champions banner at Chase Field.
David Bell in Cincinnati is another example. Let’s go back to the early 2000s to illustrate my problem with the bloodthirsty “fire him!” calls. THE Reds went through an uninspiring assembly line of post-Jack McKeon managers: Bob Boone, Dave Miley, Jerry Narron and Pete Mackanin. Then they hired Dusty Baker. The Reds didn’t go to the playoffs any time between 1995 and 2009, and then Baker led them to the playoffs three times in four years. There has also been a wave of Cincy fans calling for Baker to be fired for the better part of the last two years.
Their wish was granted after 2013. Baker was fired. He was replaced by Bryan Price, who is best known for clubhouse collapse. He never had a winning record, although he did have three losses in the top 90.
The Reds hired David Bell before the 2019 season. He helped improve their record by eight games in his first season. The Reds went 31-29 in 2020 and while it’s hard to judge this season, they were a playoff team. They won 83 games in 2021. Then, in 2022, the Reds started 3-22. It was one of the worst starts in baseball history. In many cases, with this type of file, the manager was fired. They ended up losing 100 games, so again there would have been plenty of excuses to fire him. But what would this actually have solved? And who would take over? Would the replacement definitely be better?
The Reds stuck with Bell and were one of baseball’s funniest stories in 2023. They went 82-80 while employing a slew of rookies. They will be in the running in 2024.
It’s hard to know how things would have played out if Bell had been fired after that 3-22 start or even after the 2022 season. What we do know is that Bell had a successful season in 2023 and firing him n would not have erased this terrible beginning. one year earlier.
Look, I don’t think Lovullo and Bell’s cases will change anything. I would be stupid to think that. The second a team hits a rough patch next season, local radio broadcasts will light up with callers demanding the manager’s head on a spike. And I don’t feel sorry for the managers in any way. This is the nature of the job and they are highly compensated for it. I just think we would all do well to pause and reflect.
Will firing the manager really solve personnel problems? If the manager is fired, who will be the replacement? Will this replacement definitely be better?
I can promise you that no matter who the manager is, you will hate the lineup on occasion (or more often) and complain about his management of the bullpen, probably regularly. This doesn’t mean he should be fired.
Too often, amid the struggles of a fan base’s favorite team, it’s the virtual scene in front of the manager’s office…
…while the majority of the crowd has no idea who the replacement would be.
We can do better. The cases of Lovullo and Bell say the same.
