On Tuesday, the Tampa Bay Rays announced a slew of coaching changes. Most notable among them was the decision to part ways with longtime pitching guru Jim Hickey, who was replaced internally by Kyle Snyder. The Rays still need to hire one more coach (perhaps two, should Charlie Montoyo be tabbed as someone else's manager), but they could enter next season with three coaches who are 40 years old or younger -- including 39-year-old skipper Kevin Cash.
The Rays' staff is younger than most teams', yet their approach is a natural extension of the league's recent trend toward youth in the dugout. It's not clear whether this shift is worthwhile.
The New York Mets are said to want their new skipper cut from the Mike Matheny cloth -- the same Matheny who our Dayn Perry implored the St. Louis Cardinals to dismiss due to his strategical shortcomings. Brad Ausmus is similar to Matheny -- both former catchers who are closer to their playing days than not -- and he just finished up his tenure as the oft-maligned manager of the Detroit Tigers. Heck, Cash himself hasn't won more than 80 games in a season.
Meanwhile, the postseason is full of retreads. Dusty Baker is with his fourth team. Terry Francona is with his third. Bud Black, Joe Girardi, and A.J. Hinch are each with their second. Joe Maddon and Torey Lovullo both wore the interim tag before eventually getting their own gigs -- and Maddon, obviously, was such a commodity that he dumped the Rays before they ever had the chance to dump him. Ditto for John Farrell, who forced a migration from Toronto to Boston. The one manager in the postseason field who is with the only team who has ever employed him as a skipper is Dave Roberts.
A lot goes into a manager's success that is beyond their control. Nobody thought Maddon was a genius when he had to rely upon Shawn Camp and Ruddy Lugo as his top relievers. Still, the contrast between the league's obsession with fresh faces in the dugout and their near complete absence from the playoffs is … well, curious -- and leads to some natural questions. Primarily, why do teams keep chasing this rabbit if it doesn't seem to have Trix? This is the "Moneyball" generation of executives after all -- shouldn't they be zigging while everyone else zags in order to chase those almighty inefficiencies?
The cynical answer for why teams seem intent on hiring the same type over and over is twofold: because younger managers lack cachet, they tend to cost less and have less authority to shoo away an overreaching front office. Think about it this way: the Rays handed Cash a five-year deal before they'd seen him manage a game or run a camp. There's showing confidence in your pick and then there's ensuring you have someone in place who'll do what you tell them to do -- and who'll do it without necessitating a pay bump if things go well.
None of this is to say that managers like Cash, Matheny, and Ausmus are doomed. Hinch and Girardi fit the current model. The difference is they received pink slips from their first employer, moved on, and seemed to have learned from those experiences. (Even if, in Girardi's case, it was to never again work for Jeffrey Loria.) Managing, then, is a bit like playing. There's never any way of knowing which prospects will be able to make the necessary adjustments to their game to avoid being overmatched -- to avoid being "figured out by the league," as the saying goes. Staying flexible and open-minded are keys to succeeding, in baseball and in any field. Failure, it just so happens, is a great ossification repellent.
Not every manager who fails will learn from what went wrong. Some end up like Terry Collins, losing the clubhouse with every subsequent stop. Some managers do learn though. This postseason is proof of it. Let's see if teams like the Mets, Tigers, and Philadelphia Phillies -- all seeking new skippers for 2018 -- concede as much.
