How Much Longer Than April 2018 Can Byran Price Continue as Cincinnati Reds Manager
Welcome to FTW Explains: a guide to catching up on and better understanding stuff going on in the world. The Reds fired manager Bryan Price on Thursday. a move that brought little surprise but nonetheless represents the first in-season MLB managerial firing in almost a year. Let's figure out what's happening…
So why did the Reds fire Bryan Price?
Presumably there's a whole handful of reasons, but the biggest one, pretty clearly, is that the club got its 2018 season off to a 3-15 start and felt something needed to change. Cincinnati's pitching staff has been especially awful, with a collective 5.42 ERA that ranks dead last among NL teams. Price spent four seasons as the Reds' pitching coach and had a great reputation in that role before taking over for Dusty Baker as manager after the 2013 season, but the team's well-regarded group of young starters has struggled in the early part of the season. The team also fired pitching coach Mack Jenkins.
It seems like baseball teams never fire their manager during the season anymore, no matter how often I clamor for it.
You're right! Bryce's is the first in-season managerial firing since the Braves sacked Fredi Gonzalez after a 9-28 start to the 2016 campaign. A whole slew of managers left their roles after the 2017 season ended, but not a single guy got canned in its midst — the first time since 2006 in which no managers were fired during the regular season.
The 2006 blip occurred in the middle of an 11-year stretch in which the Major Leagues saw, on average, about four in-season manager firings per year. If you squint (and ignore the inherent volatility of practically all baseball numbers), you can see a downward trend starting in 2012 before in-season manager firings mostly dried up in 2016.
So what gives? Are all the managers good now?
Well, probably not, but perceptions of the role have changed a lot in recent years. Where the manager was once seen as the primary face of a club's success or failure, he is now more often viewed as the uniformed steward of the front office's plan — the foreman on a construction site architected by the general manager.
(AP Photo/Tampa Tribune, File)
To varying degrees, every manager in baseball is now expected to implement game plans and strategies devised by in-house analytics teams based on the overwhelming wealth of data now available about practically everything that ever happens on a baseball field. So it seems likely that, if front offices seek managers willing and eager to carry out their designs, they are not only more likely to wind up with generally like-minded managers, but also less apt to pin the blame on the manager when things go awry. If your binder full of spin-rate returns shows that one particular reliever matches up well against Bryce Harper, you can't really go pointing fingers at the manger when Harper blasts a 450-foot homer. I mean, you can, but it's a jerk move.
And the increased flow of communication and information between front offices and field managers also means that canning a manager in the middle of the season is probably a bigger pain in the butt than ever before. Now you've got to train some new guy on how to read the proprietary data after you already spent two weeks training the last guy on the same stuff in spring training? C'mon, man, I'm trying to catch up onHomeland.
Is that all?
No! In addition to the way the role of manager has changed, managers are no longer seen as nearly as important to their club's fate as they once were. People in baseball used to joke a lot about the manager getting fired because the team can't fire all the players, but now, the post-Moneyball appreciation for (and, some might say, fetishization of) the importance of front offices in building baseball teams means not a lot of people are willing to buy that the manager is really the man at fault for an underperforming club.
They'll still blame him for fouling up bullpen decisions, of course, but no one really holds a manager responsible for culling greatness out of lousy players at this point. If anything, it feels like there's now a greater emphasis — rightly or otherwise — on hitting coaches and pitching coaches than the men overseeing them, with veteran players credited for fostering clubhouse culture. Being an MLB manager in 2018 often means negotiating public relations as much as private ones.
Over the course of a season, with all the randomness inherent in baseball, the difference between the best in-game strategist and the very worst is unlikely to swing more than a couple of games for a team. So if you've got a guy you like and the players seem to like and it doesn't seem like he's actively hurting anybody, you probably just ride it out for the season and worry about whether he's the perfect fit in October.
Wait, then why did Price get fired?
The Reds are 3-15, and they're coming off three straight last-place finishes. Their long-awaited climb back to contention appears delayed, for now, until young pitchers like Luis Castillo, Tyler Mahle, Cody Reed, Robert Stephenson and a host of minor-league hopefuls develop into the good arms they have, at times, been expected to become. Their best player, Joey Votto, has struggled at the plate in the early part of the season, and their next best player, Eugenio Suarez, is out until at least mid-May with a fractured thumb. Homer Bailey, a frequently injured veteran whose massive contract they'd likely love to get rid of, has been their only effective starter this season and is nonetheless 0-3.
The Reds are not this bad. Votto will hit, Suarez will return, guys like Adam Duvall and Scott Schebler will pop a bunch of homers, and at least a couple of the young starters will improve. But right now, it all looks bleak. And, you know, you can't fire all the players.
Source: https://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/04/cincinnati-reds-fire-bryan-price-first-in-two-years-fc
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