When last season began, Major League Baseball had eight minority managers. After an off-season in which there were 11 potential openings for managers, the 2011 season will begin with six minority managers. It wasn’t a good winter for black, Latin and Asian managerial candidates.
It especially wasn’t good for Willie Randolph. The former manager of the Mets not only didn’t get a managerial job, but he also didn’t get even an interview for a managerial job.
“I didn’t get a call,” Randolph said.
Randolph didn’t get a job either until last week. I reported at the start of last week that Randolph and Larry Bowa were the most notable coaches who had lost their jobs and hadn’t found new ones. Randolph, I wrote, had spoken with Buck Showalter about the Baltimore bench coach job but that the Orioles had hired John Russell.
A couple of days later Showalter decided to make Russell, the fired Pittsburgh manager, his third base coach and hire Randolph as his bench coach. Randolph began his coaching career under Showalter with the Yankees in 1994, coaching third base for him that year and the next. He lost his job as Milwaukee’s bench coach after this past season when the Brewers fired Ken Macha as their manager.
Why was Randolph also let go?
“That’s a tough question to answer,” he said. “I hope it wasn’t guilt by association. But I’ve been in the game long enough to know that general managers and owners make decisions and you never know how that dynamic works. Sometimes they think we want to change the look for fans.”
In this instance the reason might have been simply a case of relationships. Doug Melvin, the Brewers’ general manager, replaced Randolph with Jerry Narron, a long-time friend, who was a minor league teammate and roommate years ago and who managed for him in Texas in 2001.
Melvin, however, said Narron was the choice of the new manager, Ron Roenicke, who met with Narron and spoke with others about him. And what happened with Randolph?
“The main thing was we had a new manager and we let him pick his coaches,” Melvin said. “The bench coach is tied with the manager.”
“I like Willie,” he added. “He certainly is good at what he does. He has a lot of experience in his own way. He has a lot to offer. It just didn’t appear it was going to work out in our situation.”
The general manager added one other element. “We didn’t have a good year last season,” he said. “The chemistry wasn’t good on the team or with the coaching staff.”
The coaching business has always been filled with friendships. A manager who played with a player hires him for his coaching staff. A coach who gets a managing job hires the out-of-work manager for whom he worked.
The only difference in those scenarios is that in recent years some general managers have taken away the hiring authority from the managers and told them who their coaches would be.
Meanwhile, Randolph read and heard about coaches and former players being interviewed for the unusually high number of managerial vacancies, and his phone remained silent.
“It’s very difficult for me to figure out what’s going on,” Randolph said in a telephone interview. “I didn’t get any interviews.
A lot of guys want the privilege of managing in the big leagues. I want another shot. You understand a lot of times it’s who you know and how they want to make changes.”
Randolph is a veteran of the managerial interview process. Before the Mets named him their manager for the 2005 season, he had been interviewed for 14 other managerial jobs. No such records are kept, but if they were, Randolph’s name might be on the line, most unsuccessful managerial interviews.
But he didn’t add any this time around despite the many openings. “It turned out there weren’t as many jobs open as it seemed,” Randolph said.
Four of the 11 jobs were filled by those who finished last season as interim managers of their teams – Mike Quade of the Chicago Cubs, Eddie Rodriguez of Florida, Kirk Gibson of Arizona and Ned Yost of Kansas City.
That left seven openings, and they went to John Farrell in Toronto (Cito Gaston retired), Fredi Gonzalez in Atlanta (Bobby Cox retired), Don Mattingly in Los Angeles (Joe Torre retired, at least for now), Eric Wedge in Seattle (Don Wakamatsu was fired), Roenicke in Milwaukee (Macha was fired), Clint Hurdle in Pittsburgh (Russell was fired) and Terry Collins in New York with the Mets (Jerry Manuel was fired).
But no Willie, an African-American, who used to be the token minority interviewed for jobs under the commissioner’s guidelines that clubs had to interview minorities in their search to fill decision-making positions.
The younger Randolph was reluctant to go to some of those 14 interviews because he knew he was being used and they weren’t going to be serious. But he went anyway because he didn’t want any club to hold it against him that he declined an interview.
At 56, he is too old and has too much status to be a token, which is probably one reason why he didn’t get any interviews. Teams most likely figured that if they didn‘t view him as a serious candidate they weren’t going to waste his time.
“I still want to manage,” he said. “I feel in my heart I want to do it in a different setting.”
Omar Minaya, the majors’ first Latin general manager, hired Randolph to manage the Mets in 2005. It was a bold but risky move because Randolph had never managed anywhere, including the minors, whose experience he rejected, preferring instead to remain at home in his role as the Yankees’ third base coach.
In his second season as a manager, the Mets won the National League East title, but a seventh-game 3-1 loss to St. Louis in the league championship series set a late-season tone that would plague Randolph and the Mets the following September.
Ahead by 2 ½ games with 7 games to play, the Mets lost 6 of the games and the division title. Randolph did not see another September as a manager. He was fired June 16, 2008 with the Mets struggling in third place, 6 ½ games out of first with a 34-35 record.
The dismissal was controversial because it came after the first game of a West Coast trip (why did they make Randolph go to the West Coast if they were going to fire him, the critics asked) and because the news media reported that the Mets fired Randolph at 3 o’clock in the morning when, in reality, they fired him at midnight when he returned to the team hotel after a game in Anaheim. The critics obviously had trouble telling time.
Randolph has said little, if anything, about his dismissal and his experience with the Mets, but he readily recalled his Mets’ experience in our conversation.
“I have nothing but great memories,” he said. “When I got fired, there were rumors that some of the coaches were going to be fired. I wound up being a trifecta.”
But what to Randolph was an unexpected development did not shatter the experience. “It was in my hometown,” he said. “It was a dream come true.”
“The stuff that went on was nothing pretty, but that goes with managing in New York,” the New Yorker added. “Even though I would have loved to have managed them for 10 years, it was a great experience getting the opportunity to do it in your hometown.”
Randolph said he met with Minaya before the team left for the West Coast. “I told Omar,” he recounted, “if you have to do this, don’t worry; I’m a big boy. I’ve been around. I know this town.”
Minaya, however, wasn’t ready to make the move. It was a difficult decision, one New York kid firing another.
“I felt Omar was being straight with me,” Randolph said. “We won a couple games, I got on the plane and I guess they decided overnight to make a move. They had to get the wheels in motion. They had some guys in Triple A they had to get there.”
The Mets, meanwhile, began their trip with a win over the Angels. “I felt good the way the team was going,” he said. “We won three out of four.
I felt really confident I’d at least get to the All-Star break. But I didn’t get there.”
Minaya left Randolph a message to meet him when he returned from the ball park, and that’s when he got the news.
“Initially I was stunned,” Randolph said. “No one wants to get fired. If you’re going to be fired, you hope it’s a soft landing.”
It wasn’t then, but it has softened since. “I’ve let that go,” he said. “I feel really good about the experience I had.”
Now he looks forward to his next managing experience, but first the phone has to ring.
VALENTINE DEVALUES HIMSELF
Bobby Valentine’s reputation seems finally to have overtaken him and his chances to manage in the major leagues again. Valentine, back from his managerial tour in Japan, was not a hot commodity in the manager-seeking market this winter.
At one point during the past season and afterward, it appeared that the Florida Marlins would hire him, but that idea flopped and has never been publicly explained.
An official familiar with Marlins’ developments said hiring Valentine was the idea of the owner, Jeffrey Loria, but no one in the front office agreed with it
“They were told ‘don’t do this; it’ll be a nightmare,’” the official said. “It was not a popular choice.”
Loria did not return a call seeking comment on the Valentine matter. David Samson, the Marlins’ president, declined to comment. “Unfortunately there’s nothing I can add,” he said.
Valentine has resorted to the safe haven of many former managers and executives. He works for ESPN in its baseball coverage and is expected to do its Sunday night games next season.
WAS HE OR WASN’T HE?
The Mets’ choice of Terry Collins (at left) to be their manager continues to raise questions.
As I noted here last week, I initially reported that Bob Melvin (at right) was getting the job, but the Mets announced it was Collins and I acknowledged what appeared to have been a mistake.
However, subsequent to the Mets’ announcement, the person who was my source for the Melvin report said that Melvin was upset because he had been given reason to think he was getting the job.
What happened? Best speculation is that Paul DePodesta, chief aide to general manager Sandy Alderson, persuaded Alderson to switch to Collins, whom DePodesta had planned to hire as the Dodgers’ manager in 2005 before DePodesta was fired as the general manager.
“Sandy puts a lot of stock in what DePodesta says,” said the person who told about Melvin.
The Mets, however, denied there was any validity to the Melvin matter.
In response to my e-mail to Alderson, Jay Horwitz, the team’s spokesman, said, “Terry Collins always was the number one choice to be the Mets manager no one else had reason to believe he had the job.”
DRAMATIC CHANGE IN LABOR LANDSCAPE
Troubling labor news surfaced last week, and Major League Baseball wasn’t mentioned.
The National Football League’s players union sent letters to politicians in all league cities warning them of financial consequences to their cities and states if the N.F.L. imposes a lockout on the players after the current agreement expires March 4.
At the same time, the head of the National Basketball Association’s players union said a labor stoppage next summer is inevitable. And the players are preparing accordingly. Billy Hunter was quoted as saying “I’d be 99 percent sure as of today that there will be a lockout.”
Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig has long complained that baseball gets greater scrutiny than the other sports so I wondered how he felt about the potential pending problems in football and basketball while no one is raising concerns about what might happen when the baseball labor agreement expires Dec. 11, 2011.
“It’s too early,” he said. “We haven’t started yet. The atmosphere is certainly different. Both sides will bargain hard. I don’t delude myself. I give Michael and Rob credit for having a conducive atmosphere.”
He referred to Michael Weiner, the union chief, and Rob Manfred, management’s top labor executive.
I asked Selig if he derived any perverse pleasure from seeing the other leagues headed for possibly cataclysmic confrontations while his sport functions smoothly and richly.
“I’m proud of the 16 years of labor peace,” he said. “History should have taught us that the atmosphere in the ‘70s and the ‘80s was destructive.”
THANKS FOR NOT ASKING
In a Thanksgiving day article last week Ron Washington, the Texas Rangers’ American League pennant-winning manager told MLB.com of the many things he was thankful for.
“It was one heckuva year,” Washington was quoted as saying. “I have a ton of things to be thankful for: family, friends, wife, my team, my organization.”
He omitted one thing for which he is presumably very thankful, that the Rangers and just about everyone else, including the news media, didn’t question his story of how he came to test positive for cocaine use in July 2009.
Washington said it was a first-time, only-time use of cocaine that caught him and that it was a mistake to have used it and he regretted using it.
His explanation defied credibility, but everyone bought it, never questioning the likelihood of a 57-year-old man using cocaine for the first time and being tested randomly at just that time. It had to be an incredible coincidence for Washington to be believable.
But even if he was being truthful, someone had to question him about the coincidence, and no one apparently did.