Marlins’ Loria is tired of floundering
The telephone started ringing in the early morning, from former players, managers and baseball executives, all with the same response. “This is a joke, right? “Tell me this is a joke. “Come on, they can’t be serious.” You know it’s absurd when even the mother of Dan Jennings, the new manager of the Miami Marlins, asked him, “Have you lost your mind?”
In the 139-year history of Major League Baseball, few, if any managerial hirings have been more shocking than the news Monday that the Marlins demoted Jennings to become their new manager.
This is more bizarre than Jerry Coleman leaving the San Diego Padres broadcast booth to become their manager in 1980.
Crazier than Paul Owens becoming the Philadelphia Phillies general manager in June 1972 and five weeks later becoming the manager for the rest of the season, which he did again later in his career.
Yet Owens was a playermanager in the minors, even if at Class C Bakersfield (Calif.). Coleman played on six World Series teams with the New York Yankees. Jennings? Well, he played baseball for Southern Mississippi, but never professionally, and his coaching experience consists of three years at Davidson High School in Mobile, Ala., before becoming a scout in 1986.
We’re not making this up.
Now he’s the full-time manager of the Marlins, a team that underachieved (16-22) under Mike Redmond, who had a 13-year big-league career, two years of minor league managerial experience and 2 years, 6 weeks of big-league experience when he was fired. Good luck, big fella. “There’s going to be cynics, there’s going to be critics,” Jennings said at his news conference. “But there are a lot of managers who have arrived in that chair from different paths.
“We now have a new path for someone arriving in that seat.”
Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria told USA TODAY Sports he was part of the organizational decisionmaking process to bring in Jennings but says he did not make the call on his own and doesn’t understand the uproar.
Loria thinks this hiring makes perfect sense. Really.
“People like to say this is controversial, different, outside the box,” Loria said by telephone. “I can’t think of anyone better suited for this job. There was a tremendous lack of energy and fire in that clubhouse and dugout. We needed to bring some life in there.”
And that simply wasn’t going to happen, Loria insists, under Redmond.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see the team wasn’t performing,” Loria said. “Everybody in baseball can see it. A lot of players lost accountability, and structure was lacking.
“We’re supposed to be the Fish. The Marlins. We shouldn’t be the Flounders. A Marlin isn’t a flounder. We’ve got to get it going.”
Still, Jennings’ appointment drew an outpouring of anger and resentment among baseball hierarchy.
Yet there also were a great deal of knowing nods and reservations of judgment.
Jennings is well-liked in the game, a gentleman who’s widely considered one of its finest talent evaluators. Folks in the game were thrilled when he was appointed Marlins general manager after the 2013 season.
Yet these same people are now feeling sorry for Jennings, worrying he has been set up to fail. They hope that if this doesn’t work, he can still return to his old job in the organization, even though vice president Mike Berger will fill his duties.
“Dan still is going to be very much involved in trades and things,” Loria said. “We’ll internally figure out what will happen at the end of the year, but our hope is that it stays. The only difference is our GM is now the manager. We just dropped the general.”
The danger with this hire, of course, is that it’s a huge right-cross to the chops of every major league manager and minor league field personnel.
You’re supposed to pay your dues before you get this opportunity.
Sure, Mike Matheny of the St. Louis Cardinals, Robin Ventura of the Chicago White Sox, Walt Weiss of the Colorado Rockies, Brad Ausmus of the Detroit Tigers and Craig Counsell of the Milwaukee Brewers had no managerial experience, but they all had glossy résumés as players and were well-known as clubhouse leaders.
It’s safe to say the Marlins made few friends in the managerial fraternity with this stunt.
“I have a lot of relation- ships with managers around the league,” Jennings said. “I respect that position, because in my time I know how hard these men have worked to get here. I also know the different avenues they took to arrive in that seat. This is certainly a different avenue to arrive here.
“I’m not naive enough to think I can do this on my own.”
Still, there will be plenty of times Jennings might feel like a man on an island. No wonder he insisted on taking Mike Goff, a longtime major and minor league coach, as his bench coach. Goff, most recently the Marlins’ advance scout, last coached in the big leagues with the Seattle Mariners in 2007.
The Marlins, who discussed firing Redmond a month ago, decided over the weekend he no longer was capable of resurrecting their season. You don’t get swept by the rebuilding Atlanta Braves at home for the second time in two months to realize you have problems. When Marlins presidents David Samson and Mike Hill spoke with Jennings during the weekend and talked about the qualifications needed for Redmond’s replacement, they realized he was on the phone.
“As we looked at what we thought this team needed,” Hill said, “we wanted a leader, we wanted someone with knowledge in the game. We wanted someone who knew our players.
“If we feel like we didn’t have the right person with the right skill sets, we wouldn’t have made the change.”
Sure, Jennings is a leader and motivator in the front office and beloved by his scouts and assistants. He has been treated almost like a son by Loria and has a contract through 2018. And he was largely responsible for helping persuade Giancarlo Stanton to give up free agency and sign a $325 million contract.
Now, Jennings must win the trust of a team that just watched its manager and bench coach replaced by a guy who hasn’t managed since he was a high school coach 30 years ago and a bench coach who until Sunday had been their advance scout.
And they’re aware nobody else, either in the organization or outside, had the opportunity to interview for the job.
Common sense tells us this will be a disaster. It’s almost unfathomable that a man can walk downstairs, slip on a baseball uniform for the first time in three decades and suddenly lead a team to the playoffs. Still, if the Marlins didn’t believe this would work, Hill said, they never would have made the choice.
“My dad was a coach for 50 years,” Jennings said. “Our motto: ‘You can’t win if you’re afraid to lose.’
“I’ve never shied away from challenges.”
And, oh baby, does he have one now.
“Dan is very imaginative,” Loria insists. “Very creative, with a high baseball IQ. This is going to be fun to watch.” Surely, it will. One way or the other.