Woo, it's draft day! I'm gonna wait until some of the dust settles for commentary, since I'm not liveblogging. Instead, I'll pick up on a piece of news from a few days ago.
In the midst of an abysmal season, the Baltimore Orioles fired their manager (Dave Trembley) and replaced him with a rookie (Juan Samuel). The problems with the Orioles this year don't have much to do with the way they're managed: new ace Kevin Millwood hasn't won a game (0-6), their first basemen and shortstops have hit a combined zero (0) home runs, and Ty Wigginton is the club's lone offensive producer.
But when a team struggles, one of the classic strategies is to oust the guy in charge rather than enter into a full-on roster overhaul. Which got me thinking about how well the practice has worked out in the past. I did some digging and here's what I came up with.
Since the start of the Wild Card Era (1994), 51 teams have replaced their managers mid-season. The obvious first question is: How well did these teams fare? Of the 49 teams that have played complete seasons (we're not counting the '010 Orioles or Royals, both of whom underwent managerial changes this year), only 12 finished with overall winning records (24.4%). Of those 12, six made it to the playoffs. Of those six, only two have won playoff serieses: the '04 Astros beat the Braves before falling to the Cardinals in the NLCS, and the '03 Marlins took the World Series against the Yankees.
How did the new managers compare to the guys they replaced? 37 out of 49 replacements led their teams to better records than their predecessors, for a pretty impressive 75.5% success rate. Beware of sample size alert here, because I didn't do as dutiful due diligence as I might have. I didn't count the replacements who managed just one or two games before being replaced themselves - six teams of the 49 (12.2%) used three managers in a single season. The Royals have done it twice and counting - 2010 is still relatively young after all.
Who have changed their managers in this way? Four teams have changed managers four times in this span: the Reds, the Royals (and counting), the Astros, and the Blue Jays. Three teams have changed three times: the Brewers, the Mariners, and the Orioles (and counting). The pattern does not continue, with eight teams changing two times - I'm counting the Expos/Nationals as one team for the purposes of this exercise. Nine teams have had one change. I haven't listed them all to avoid just rattling off all the teams.
If you've been doing the math, you'll see that not every team has undergone a mid-season managerial change. The following six teams have been well-managed enough to avoid replacing their skippers on the fly: the Yankees, the Twins, the A's, the Braves, the Padres, and the Giants.
When did these mid-season managerial changes occur? Well, they mostly occurred in 2002, when seven teams changed the man in charge. That's 1/7th of the total changes over the 16 year span I'm measuring. The next most changes-per-year is five (2001). Then six years had four managerial changes ('09, '08, '07, '05, '04, and '96). Two years had three changes, four years had two changes, and one year had one change. Only in 2006 did no teams find it necessary to fire their manager in the middle of the year.*
*When counting the number of managerial changes per year, I'm counting the number of teams that changed their managers rather than the number of actual managerial changes.
Who has been replaced the most? That honor goes to Phil Garner who was unseated three times ('07 Astros, '02 Tigers, and '99 Brewers). Three managers have been replaced twice: Jimy Williams , Buddy Bell, and Bob Boone. Five managers have done double replacement duty: Pete Mackanin, Joe Maddon (both for the Angels), Jim Riggleman, Jerry Narron, and Jack McKeon.
I'm not going to list everyone here, but this is an interesting statistic: there are an astounding 21 managers who have both replaced someone and have been replaced. Some of that is because a guy replaces someone, fills the position for several years, and then is replaced himself (e.g. Clint Hurdle, Dave Trembley). Some of it might be because some people just have a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
What can we learn from all this? Questionable. It's more trivia than evidence for anything. The factors that go into making a team perform well or poorly are so expansive and encompass so much more than just the manager that you can't really pin a dramatic turnaround or collapse on just the man in charge. But it was at least fun for me to sift through the stats to mine some percentage sound-bytes.
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