Upon entering enemy territory Friday for the first time in a year–the visitors’ dugout at U.S. Cellular Field–Cubs manager Dusty Baker was made to feel right at home by a smart-aleck fan. .
“Fire Dusty!” the man in a Paul Konerko replica jersey yelled from the box seats.
On that point, dumping Baker, many Sox and Cubs fans found common ground this weekend.
All over Chicago, the topic of Baker’s fate has been as unavoidable this month as rain. The Cubs’ long losing streak and continued lack of fire and fundamentals have helped fill hours or sport-radio programming and run up bar tabs across the city.
Baker himself brought up his job status before the Sox series when he acknowledged gossip he would be fired if the defending World Series champions swept his club.
“That’s bull,” Baker said.
He meant the criticism, but many longtime baseball observers have used the same term to describe the assumption that teams changing managers at midseason guarantee themselves instant success.
“It depends who you are replacing and who are you replacing him with,” said Tim McCarver, the Fox Sports analyst and a major-league catcher for 21 seasons. “Changing managers in the middle of the season is [no sure cure].”
Indeed, only 15 teams in major-league history that switched managers during the season turned things around quickly enough to qualify for the playoffs. Thus most baseball executives consider changing managers in the middle of a season the same way parents view dipping into a college fund to pay bills–a last resort.
The Cubs dumped Don Baylor with a 34-49 record in 2002, and we all know how well that turned out. Bruce Kimm finished 33-45, and Baker arrived in 2003.
The White Sox last did likewise in 1995 when they replaced Gene Lamont (11-20) with Terry Bevington (57-56).
Since Major League Baseball instituted divisional play in 1969, a manager has taken over a team with a record of .500 or below during a season and played at a .600 clip the rest of the season eight times, according to statistics available on baseball-reference.com.
Since 2000, only two of the 22 teams that changed managers during the season earned playoff berths–Florida in ’03 and Houston in ’04. The Marlins going on to win the World Series created the effect in baseball that George Mason making the Final Four last April duplicated in college basketball.
Fans of Cinderella teams start believing that example to be the rule when, in fact, it is more of an exception. In the context of the Baker situation, fans may want to believe the Cubs are the ’03 Marlins, but around the league they are known to be closer to, say, the ’05 Orioles because of a lineup that will have weaknesses no matter who fills it out.
“It’s stupid to even consider the possibility of firing Dusty Baker, and people in baseball realize that,” McCarver said. “When you lose a Derrek Lee and don’t have Mark Prior and Kerry Wood [until last Thursday], it isn’t fair to judge. So right now, it’s not a legitimate subplot because he has been stripped of all his guys.”
Switches in time
Change for the sake of change has worked, though, as much as GMs resist that temptation.
Six teams with winning records that switched managers, for example, wound up winning division titles: the Yankees of 1978 and 1981, the 1981 Montreal Expos, the 1983 Phillies, the 1988 Red Sox and the 1989 Blue Jays.
Cubs announcer Bob Brenly was a backup catcher on that Toronto team when Cito Gaston replaced Jimy Williams and went 77-49 on the way to capturing the AL East title. When Brenly was manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks, he once fondly recalled that “everybody just relaxed a little bit more” after Gaston took over.
Asked Friday to describe that dynamic in more detail, and the notion of changing managers in general, Brenly declined to comment out of respect for the sensitivity of the Cubs’ situation.
McCarver had no such qualms. “Andy MacPhail and Jim Hendry are under a different kind of pressure because it’s tough to reason with the masses,” he said. “[But] if a change is made, it will be because [they] gave in to the masses.”
To an objective observer, it reminds Roland Hemond of 1964. The longtime Sox executive recalled the Cardinals struggling so badly early that season that owner Gussie Busch courted Leo Durocher to replace Johnny Keane after St. Louis started 28-31. The Cardinals regrouped well enough to win the World Series, but Keane remembered the rumblings after the season and bitterly left the Cardinals for the Yankees, for whom he replaced Yogi Berra.
“The criticism was so unfair of Keane during the season that he finally told St. Louis to shove it,” Hemond said.
He is not suggesting the Cubs have a team worthy of World Series contention or giving Baker advice, but the rush to judgment on the opposite side of town troubles the baseball lifer.
“The best way to pick up the Cubs is if Lee and Wood and [Mark] Prior come back and not by firing the manager,” Hemond said. “I’ve always had compassion for managers being asked to win with players who aren’t on the field.”
Yet the losing record sticks to them like pine tar no matter the circumstances.
Change may be catalyst
Sox bench coach Tim Raines has been part of two midseason changes that worked.
Raines was a rookie outfielder with the Expos in 1981 when Dick Williams was fired after 81 games and replaced by Jim Fanning in the second half of a strike-shortened season. Fanning led Montreal to a second-half division title that the Expos turned into a playoff series victory over the Phillies before eventually bowing to the Dodgers in the NLCS.
“We had a good team, and even more than changing managers we had the players who started playing well after the change,” Raines said. “A lot of times, a manager has nothing to do with it.”
To make his point, Raines referenced the 2003 Marlins team that thrived after replacing Jeff Torborg with Jack McKeon. But Raines credits the decision to bring up Miguel Cabrera near midseason and the emergence of Dontrelle Willis as much as the change in the dugout.
“I don’t know if it was so much the manager as it was the kids who played a big role and there was that enthusiasm,” said Raines, a minor-league instructor for the Marlins that season.
There are 25 players. There is only one manager. When GMs of losing teams do the math, managers of struggling teams such as Baker can end up on the wrong side of the equation regardless of extenuating factors.
“How many times do you see a manager fired and then fans’ feelings are temporarily soothed and then the whole thing starts all over again?” McCarver asked. “Rarely are the issues valid for a firing.”
He paused, and the reality of his point made McCarver sigh.
“That said,” he added, “fairness doesn’t always factor into the decision.”
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dhaugh@tribune.com
