Here Comes Your Manager: Three Teams Pick New Skippers

An entire offseason’s worth of managerial reshuffling took place early Monday afternoon, as the most coveted managerial role was filled and the most coveted managerial candidate found a home — just not how you’d think.

The Guardians first announced the hiring of Mariners bullpen coach and golden-voiced baritone Stephen Vogt. Shortly thereafter, news broke that the Cubs were hiring outgoing Brewers manager Craig Counsell, despite already having David Ross under contract for that position. Counsell had been expected to follow former Brewers baseball ops boss David Stearns to the Mets, but when he landed in Chicago, the Mets unveiled Yankees bench coach Carlos Mendoza as their new manager.

Counsell, regarded as one of the top skippers in the sport, has reset the market for manager salaries with a five-year, $40 million contract. A free agent after his Brewers contract expired, he interviewed with both New York and Cleveland and was regarded as both teams’ top choice. When he made his unexpected switch to Chicago, that made the other teams’ decisions easier, and thus followed the busy afternoon on the coaching carousel.

All three of these managerial hires depended on what Counsell decided to do, so let’s go through them in the order he would have considered them.

First: Cleveland. The Guardians are replacing Terry Francona, their highly decorated and highly successful manager of 11 seasons’ tenure. He had suffered several health scares over the past few seasons and stepped down at the end of 2023 at the age of 64.

From the outside, I don’t know why Counsell would leave Milwaukee for Cleveland, other than to pursue change for change’s sake. If he wanted to live on the Great Lakes and manage a team built to find the cheapest possible route to 88 wins, Milwaukee has a better roster and more financial support from ownership.

Counsell had been with the Brewers, either as a player, in the front office, or as manager, for the past 17 seasons, and was very much the face of a team run by a GM entering his second year. Had Counsell gone to Cleveland, he likely would’ve had less influence working under the Chris Antonetti-Mike Chernoff duo that’s been entrenched there for years. I don’t know what Cleveland could have offered in terms of finances, team competitiveness, or office politics that would’ve been an improvement on what Counsell had in Milwaukee.

So the Guardians turned to Vogt, whose single year with the Mariners represents the sum total of his professional coaching and managerial experience. They aren’t hiring a complete neophyte off the active roster or the broadcast booth — a strategy that was popular a decade ago and quickly became unpopular after it repeatedly ended in disaster — but it’s close.

Of the 30 full-time MLB managers at the end of the 2023 season, only three had as little professional coaching and/or front office experience as Vogt: David Ross, Alex Cora, and Aaron Boone. Only two others, Counsell and Kevin Cash, had three years of experience or less when they got their first managerial gig. Ross just got fired to make room for Counsell after four disappointing seasons. Cora won a title in his first season, though he had additional front office and managerial experience in the Puerto Rican winter league, and there were… extenuating circumstances. And Boone — well, how are we feeling about Aaron Boone these days, Yankees fans?

On the other hand, Counsell and Cash are two of the best managers in the league. So the right guy can come in and be successful even without much experience. We won’t know about Vogt as a manager for a while, but he’s very well-liked within the game; more than that, he made his reputation as the mother duck to a young Oakland pitching staff in the middle of the last decade. Vogt has had Future Manager written all over him for years, but we’ll see if he’s coming out of the oven underbaked.

Counsell was supposed to end up in New York with Stearns, the latest top-class baseball mind brought to the Big Apple by Steve Cohen’s hideously swollen wallet. Nevertheless, Milwaukee reportedly offered to make Counsell the highest-paid manager in the game on a $5.5 million-a-year deal and expected to be competitive until he made his final decision. Ultimately, the Mets (and Cubs, it turns out) were willing to go higher. Brewers owner Mark Attanasio seems to be taking it well.

Here is Brewers principal owner Mark Attanasio's full opening "Craig has lost us and he's lost our community" statement. pic.twitter.com/fJ57oEQuMA

— Curt Hogg (@CyrtHogg) November 6, 2023

As for the Mets, once they were relegated to runner-up, they acted quickly, offering the job to Mendoza. In contrast to the affable but inexperienced Vogt, Mendoza is the very image of a first-time manager. He spent about a decade as a minor league infielder, then retired at age 29 and joined the Yankees’ minor league coaching staff. He spent the ensuing 15 years with the organization, the past six of them in the majors under Boone. He has become a serial managerial candidate of late, interviewing for about half a dozen jobs, including the open Cleveland gig. He’s been around long enough to have risen through the ranks and paid his dues and is still relatively young; he turns 44 in a few weeks. If you were going to design a résumé for a good first-time manager, you’d end up with something that looks like Mendoza’s.

And good luck to him, as the Mets have ridden managers hard and put them away wet, even before Cohen started waving $300 million payrolls around in front of a very excitable set of fans and local media. The most recent Mets manager to last more than two seasons was Terry Collins, who not only won a pennant, but was also on the more… tenacious end of the spectrum as far as major league bench bosses go. Bobby Valentine was the only other Mets manager in the past 30 years to last more than 600 games in charge; surely no one else before or since has matched the energy of the franchise so well. Cohen and Stearns obviously hired Mendoza expecting someone a little less weird. And that could end up being the smart play in the long run; maybe finding a safe custodian is what they need right now, instead of another headline-grabbing name.

Which leaves the Cubs, a club that wasn’t even part of the conversation until the news broke. (No offseason institution is more fun than Jon Heyman dropping “mystery team.” The mystery team has to come through at least some of the time in order for the bit to keep working. This should sustain us for another winter or two.) Given that the club didn’t dismiss Ross until it hired Counsell, it’s fair to assume that this was an opportunistic move. It’s the second time in three managerial hires that the Cubs cashiered an unobjectionable bench boss in order to bring in the top name on the market; we all remember the Rick Renteria-for-Joe Maddon shuffle of 2014.

Chicago’s ability to compete in the past decade has had a lot to do with how much money the Ricketts family is willing to invest. As the Maddon era collapsed, Chicago sagged from a top-five payroll team to something closer to the median. Under Ross last year, the Cubs were the ninth-biggest spenders in the league and nearly made the playoffs. If this move is meant to signal a new commitment to winning, there’s no reason to expect Counsell to be less successful than Maddon was. If this is an attempt to get him to do his middling payroll-to-division title alchemy an hour and a half down I-94, there are no guarantees. When the Cubs are good, there are few better places, if any, to win. When they’re bad, well, imagine the Mets, but poor. It can get ugly fast. But the Rickettses have more than doubled Counsell’s salary and made a huge splash to make this upgrade, so let’s be optimistic for the time being.

So why would Counsell choose the Cubs over the Mets? Well, first of all, it was the most lucrative offer, which shouldn’t be ignored. Second, the Mets are going to be in a retooling phase for at least another year, in a division with three teams that made the playoffs last year, including an Atlanta club that should be the class of the National League for some time. (I reserve the right to revisit this opinion if another NL team signs Shohei Ohtani.) The Cubs need to replace Cody Bellinger, Jeimer Candelario, and Marcus Stroman this offseason in order to tread water, but that’s not an impossible task. And nobody knows better than Counsell how winnable the NL Central is. There is upside here, perhaps even more than exists for the financially flush Mets.

Then there’s the lifestyle component. Counsell was born in Indiana, grew up in Wisconsin, went to Notre Dame, and spent the past 17 years working in Milwaukee in some capacity. He has two sons who play baseball in the Big Ten. Moving to Chicago nets him an extra $2.5 million a year compared to what he would’ve made by staying in Milwaukee and is at the absolute worst a lateral move in terms of team infrastructure. And it presents a fraction of the disruption that moving to New York would’ve entailed.

It certainly came as a shock that Counsell would end up with the Cubs, and in some respects turning down the Mets does carry risk. But it’s also Counsell’s best chance to have his cake and eat it, too.