The Miami Marlins Are Weird, But Maybe Not Stupid

It's not weird that the Marlins fired manager Mike Redmond after a 16-22 start. Managers get fired all the time, and managers of losing teams or ones with, shall we say, engaged owners have the noose around their necks from the moment they're hired. Even the fact that Redmond had signed a two-year contract extension to take him through the 2017 season as recently as last September isn't supremely strange. It seems pretty stupid and speaks to inconsistencies in organizational decision making, but it's not overly strange. Earlier this year, the Brewers fired their manager, Ron Roenicke, just two months after they picked up his option and gave him a one-year contract extension on top of that. We are not in uncharted waters here. Stupid waters perhaps, but they're stupid charted waters, and navigable ones.

These are the waters in which the Miami Marlins swim. What makes this situation so deliriously Marlins is who the Marlins hired to replace Mike Redmond: their own General Manager. The man tasked to find the next great Marlins manager decided he is the next great Marlins manager. You don't have to search far to find a problem with this. Being the GM and being the manager are two separate jobs requiring separate skill sets. Negotiating contracts, designing free agent strategy, managing the internal issues of the organization, and running draft strategy are nowhere in the purview of a field manager. It's a lot of work, especially if you are also trying to get a bunch of 24-year-olds to do something like what you want them to do.

Managers are hired because they understand—or because someone believes they understand—the psychology of baseball players, the ins and outs of a major league clubhouse, and, maybe, some in-game strategy. Jennings may know some of those things through having worked in a major league front office. He may have studied some of those things, he may have discussed some of those things with actual big league managers. But he's never done any of those things, and that's potentially a problem for the Marlins. For the rest of us it's less a problem and more of a "look at that drunk guy walking down the street, let's see what he falls into."

It has been pointed out that Jennings was a coach at a high school 30 years ago; as long as that's your standard, there are something like a million managerial candidates (some of them presumably non-white guys!) just waiting for an interview. From that standpoint you can at least understand why the team promoted their GM. Interviewing a million people is time consuming business and the Marlins have lots of games to left to lose this season!

But let's put aside our well-considered skepticism and give some benefit of the doubt to the Marlins. Maybe this will work. Maybe Jennings—who is regarded as a smart and charismatic guy, for whatever that's worth—is really the best man for the job. It's unlikely, but one thing we do know is that managers generally don't have the largest impact on teams. Typically, anyway, as that understanding refers to a typical manager managing the team. If a team hired, say, a bear to manage the team, perhaps that would alter our dataset.

The Marlins probably haven't hired a bear, or a goat, or a pencil sharpener to manage their team. But one school of thought is that they might as well have, because managers just don't matter that much. Maybe Jennings will ruin the clubhouse. Maybe his inexperience with dealing up close with major league personalities will be his downfall. Even if all that happens, it's not like the other managers the Marlins had hired under owner Jeffrey Loria were doing much better. And even the best manager isn't going to turn a mediocre player into Mike Trout, or a mediocre starter into Clayton Kershaw. To expect that is to demand failure.

Loria isn't an idiot. He's extremely self-serving and probably morally bankrupt, but he did not make this hire because he's stupid. If he were actually stupid he wouldn't have figured out how to trick the city of Miami into buying him a new baseball stadium; again, he's not a great guy. Loria made the move, it appears, because he's impatient and cheap (he is already paying Jennings, in addition to paying the since-fired managers Ozzie Guillen and Redmond) and reckless. All of which boils down to Loria making the hire because he's delusional in the way that fans can be. In an increasingly corporate game, it's almost refreshing when a team makes eccentric decisions, like hiring their GM to manage the team despite never having any experience at all as anything involving a major league clubhouse.

But despite the ballpark, the Giancarlo Stanton and Christian Yelich contract extensions, the success of Jose Fernandez, and the general promise of the Marlins, this is still a flawed team. The pitching staff and offense are middle-of-the-pack and a general manager taking over in the dugout is as unlikely to fix those problems as a manager with two decades experience.

It's unlikely, but maybe—just as bringing up Fernandez during his age 20 season from Single-A was—picking Jennings to manage will be a masterstroke. But even if it is, and even if this untested front office veteran is a brilliant strategist and deft dugout psychologist, we probably won't notice. The truth is, despite all the outrage from the baseball establishment, this hire and any other simply isn't in a position to make a difference either way. The Marlins path to relevance this season will be to win a few games, keep their good players healthy and wait for the return of Jose Fernandez from injury. The managers can change. If the plan changes, Marlins fans will have something to worry about.