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How Common Are Early-Season Manager Firings?

By charliewilmoth | April 20, 2015 at 8:32pm CDT

Already, in late April, there are rumors surrounding Marlins manager Mike Redmond, whose job could be in jeopardy after the team’s 3-10 start. April sounds awfully early in the season to fire a manager, and in fact it is — in the past ten seasons, there have been no manager firings in the month of April. There have been plenty of firings in the first halves of seasons, however. Here’s a look at the nine firings in the past decade that took place before a team had finished 81 games in a season, and a brief glimpse at what happened in the next few years after each dismissal. As we’ll see, the outcomes of these firings run the gamut of possible outcomes, making it difficult to say whether replacing a manager early in a given season is a good idea.

  • The Reds fired Dave Miley on June 21, 2005, replacing him with Jerry Narron. Narron lasted barely two seasons and was replaced by Dusty Baker, who had two sub-.500 seasons before leading the Reds to three seasons of 90 or more wins in his next four.
  • The Mariners fired John McLaren on June 19, 2008 after a 25-47 start. After Jim Riggleman finished out the season, the Mariners turned to Don Wakamatsu and Eric Wedge, neither of whom had success, before finally turning to Lloyd McClendon, who had a good first season in 2014.
  • The Rockies fired Clint Hurdle on May 29, 2009 after they got off to an 18-28 start. Jim Tracy took over and the Rockies went 74-42 the rest of the way, making the playoffs.
  • The Diamondbacks fired Bob Melvin on June 8, 2009, replacing him with A.J. Hinch, who managed the team for less than a season and a half before being fired himself.
  • The Royals fired Trey Hillman on May 13, 2010 after a 12-23 start, replacing him with Ned Yost. Yost’s tactical managing gives fans fits, and his first two-plus seasons with the Royals were unsuccessful, but the team has played exceptionally well since then.
  • The Orioles fired Dave Trembley on June 4, 2010. The team struggled for about two months with interim manager Juan Samuel at the helm, but performed well for the last two months of the season under Buck Showalter, whose hiring has so far been a boon for the franchise.
  • The Marlins fired Fredi Gonzalez on June 23, 2010, replacing him with Edwin Rodriguez. Rodriguez posted a .500 record the rest of the season, but he resigned during the 2011 season as the team struggled.
  • The Diamondbacks fired Hinch on July 1, 2010, replacing him with Kirk Gibson. The D-backs had a 94-win season in 2011, but after two .500 seasons and a poor 2014, they fired Gibson, too.
  • The Athletics fired Bob Geren on June 9, 2011, replacing him with Melvin. The team continued to struggle down the stretch in 2011 but has made the playoffs in three straight seasons since.

The Rockies’ swap of Clint Hurdle for Jim Tracy in 2009 (along with the Marlins’ own Jeff Torborg/Jack McKeon switch in their World Series-winning 2003 campaign) is exactly what a team hopes for when it fires a manager early in the season. The Rockies turned their season around under Tracy and made the playoffs after an amazing stretch run.

But the Hurdle/Tracy swap could also be read as evidence of how difficult it can be to identify or predict a manager’s effect on a team. Tracy had previously managed the Pirates, but was fired after two ugly seasons. He lasted only three more years in Colorado. Meanwhile, Hurdle ultimately took over in Pittsburgh and led the team to its first two winning seasons in two decades, earning praise for his leadership and his integration of sabermetrics into the Pirates’ day-to-day strategy. Perhaps Tracy really was the right manager for the Rockies in 2009, and Hurdle the wrong one. A manager’s job is to lead, and his ability to lead the ever-changing cast of players around him is surely somewhat fluid. But a team’s performance is informed by any number of factors that have little to do with its manager.

With that in mind, it’s difficult to draw conclusions from the list above. Some teams’ manager swaps appear to have worked well, like that of the Rockies, or the Athletics’ switch of Geren and Melvin. Others didn’t, although that’s not surprising, given that teams who fire their managers tend not to be the best ones.

Perhaps there’s a distinction between firings in April and firings in June and July. In April, it’s hard to be completely out of the race, but in June, it isn’t, and maybe it makes sense for a team to make big changes rather than having a lame-duck manager limp through the rest of the season. There’s also the problem of how best to hire a permanent manager while a season is going on. Many teams on the list above turned to interim managers after firings, and surely that’s not what the Marlins would do if they fired Redmond. It probably isn’t easy to hire a permanent manager in-season. Of the teams on the list above, only two, the Royals (Yost) and the Athletics (Melvin), immediately replaced their outgoing managers with managers who turned out to be real long-term replacements.

Then there’s the lack of stability an early-season firing can betray. As FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal points out, the Marlins’ struggles are due in part to pitchers’ injuries and to Mat Latos’ ineffectiveness. Those problems have little to do with Redmond, and replacing him would probably do nothing to solve them. Perhaps Redmond isn’t the right manager for the Marlins, but what might be most striking about the list above is the absence of many  successful franchises who seem to highly value organizational stability, like the Cardinals, Giants and Tigers. Of course, it’s surely true that those franchises are mostly stable in part because they’re successful, and not the way around. And there are other franchises who are generally stable, like the Rockies and Twins, who haven’t done well lately. But the Marlins have had five managers since 2010 (Gonzalez, Rodriguez, McKeon, Ozzie Guillen and Redmond). One wonders how difficult it must be for players to develop given that many changes of leadership.

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View Comments (11)

Comments

  1. Christopher Vanzandt

    7 years ago

    Why can’t the GM’s take as much fault as the managers? Did the marlins expected to be undefeated after acquiring all that talent and no chemistry? Besides firing managers so early in he season does nothing more than become a distraction to everybody. What if those teams have a better second half?

    Reply
    • Out of place Met fan

      7 years ago

      Because on an organizational level the GM would still have the draft, IFA signing period to contend with. Without that vision, it leaves a lot of organizational decisions moving blind in a very future orientated time. I would understand an August GM firing though

      Reply
  2. Blue387

    7 years ago

    Didn’t the Mets fire Willie Randolph on a road trip to Anaheim in mid-June 2008?

    Reply
    • Out of place Met fan

      7 years ago

      Correct, after a victory none the less

      Reply
    • PI by Nature

      7 years ago

      That was a hot mess! Many were saying that if Randolph was to be fired, either fire him before the road trip or after it.

      Reply
      • Tesseract

        7 years ago

        That was a bad move. It’s like your employer firing you on a business trip. Unless you got drunk and trashed the hotel and company convention party there is no reason to do it on the spot

        Reply
  3. Derpy

    7 years ago

    I think the Marlins are going through growing pains. The core of their team is young and untested, they will go through ups and downs before they really settle. It could take two or three seasons before a core clicks together. They made a mistake is trading away pitching and now they are paying the price. Latos has has a horrible few games, but he’s getting better. The team really just needs more time together to click, and the franchise needs to stop trading pitching. I think it was unrealistically hopeful to press so hard this season given how little time and experience guys like Yelich and company have. They need more seasoning before you can expect them to be consistent leaders on a club. It’s not like the team has a bunch of veteran players anchoring the team, they have Stanton and Prado and a bunch of kids who are still green behind the ears.

    Reply
  4. John Northey

    7 years ago

    I remember in the 90’s when the Jays fired a manager (Tim Johnson – whose lies on his resume became clear the season before, Ash decided to let him start spring and see how it went the team lost every game in spring that he managed) during spring training. Gord Ash was a horrid GM and that really made it obvious. Jimy Williams fired 36 games into 1989 with a 12-24 record, Gaston came in and won the division.

    Reply
  5. Mike Gorman

    7 years ago

    You forgot Sam Perlozzo, fired by the Orioles on June 18, 2007 with a 29-40 record. The equally horrid Dave Trembley took over.

    Reply
  6. GED 300+ Club

    7 years ago

    Not as recent, but the O’s fired Cal senior six games or so in in ’88. Club lost its next 15, but would have been horrible for anybody.

    Reply
    • Mike Gorman

      7 years ago

      I think that was as much about his DWI/DUI as it was on-field performance.

      Reply

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