Behind the curtain of one of MLBs mysteries: How are managers hired? -

When the San Francisco Giants hired Bob Melvin away from the San Diego Padres last month, they had just 48 hours to do it. San Diego set the short timeframe to avoid the news leaking out while Melvin was still technically a Padre. Giants GM Farhan Zaidi — who had worked with Melvin for years in Oakland — wasted no time getting Melvin on a Zoom. The Giants were already through a first round of interviews, and they had a script they went through with potential candidates. “We never pulled that out with Bob,” Zaidi said.

Zaidi had earmarked weeks in late October and early November to deal with a managerial search after the late-season firing of Gabe Kapler. Instead, Melvin was introduced on Oct. 25, and rather than being holed up at the office, Zaidi found himself out running errands with his wife, Lucy Fang, the next day. “It was like I had senioritis,” Zaidi said. “Beyond the fact that we’re really excited we got the perfect guy for us, it was just nice to be able to bypass the process.”

Manager searches can be a tedious and exhausting process that’s at best a good guess and, at worst, the start of an organizational civil war. For managers, it can feel like “The Hunger Games.” For front offices, it’s like dating, with a lot more public failure at stake.

Nothing about Melvin’s situation — switching to a division rival with a year left on his contract — is normal. But there aren’t any rules or regulations when it comes to filling the manager job, as evidenced by the Chicago Cubs’ stunning move to hire Craig Counsell and dismiss incumbent David Ross earlier this month. The Cubs’ courting of Counsell from start to finish? A mere five days. Meanwhile, the Padres took nearly a month to name Mike Shildt as Melvin’s successor, the fourth managerial hire (not including interim manager Pat Murphy) since A.J. Preller took over as GM in August 2014.

How do teams decide who gets the job? What goes on in the interview room? The Athletic spoke to more than a half-dozen front offices and several veteran managers to peel back the curtain on a process shrouded in secrecy.

Who is making the decision?

On the morning of Nov. 7, Ron Washington was picked up from the Phoenix airport by Angels owner Arte Moreno. That night, he was offered the job.

In his introductory news conference, Washington — the Angels fifth manager since 2018 — joked that general manager Perry Minasian wouldn’t have veto power because Moreno was already set on hiring Washington in the first car ride. Moreno is an incredibly hands-on owner, and while Minasian had already done hours of background work and flown to New Orleans to spend a day with Washington, the sentiment that nothing was stopping Moreno was probably true.

In Miami, former general manager Kim Ng won over some skeptics in the Marlins ownership and baseball operations group with the hiring of Skip Schumaker, who was voted NL Manager of the Year in 2023, his rookie season.

In San Diego, it’s unclear how much owner Peter Seidler’s death on Nov. 14 may have influenced the managerial selection process, which was done by Preller, new control owner Eric Kutsenda and CEO Erik Greupner. As The Athletic’s Dennis Lin reported, some people in the organization favored bench coach Ryan Flaherty over Shildt, who beat out Flaherty and former Angels manager Phil Nevin. Those three were among the roughly eight candidates San Diego interviewed, according to team sources who requested anonymity in order to speak freely.

Whoever is making the call, ownership support is paramount. When the Brewers failed to reach an extension on Counsell, Cubs president Jed Hoyer brought up the idea of pursuing Counsell with Tom Ricketts, who gave him the go-ahead and agreed to a record-setting, five-year, $40 million deal for their new manager.

“The owner has to answer questions at the country club and to the city about his hirings. There’s a lot of pressure on the owners to justify why they hired this guy and then explain it to the board,” said Dusty Baker, who has managed five teams over a three-decade managerial career. “Like Bob Dylan said, ‘Everybody has to serve somebody.’”

Generally, meeting with a team’s owner is one of the last steps in the process, if not the last, and something that only happens in the later rounds of an interview, though some teams — like the Angels and Padres — didn’t seem to have formal rounds so much as ongoing conversations. Minasian, who is up at all hours, told reporters he’d wake up and scribble down managerial characteristics in a notebook. The Halos cast a wide early net, including former players with no experience, managers who had been out of the dugout for a while and grizzled vets like Washington and Buck Showalter, who was a free agent after the Mets gave him the option to resign or be fired at the end of the season.

“None of your process matters if your owner thinks he knows better than you,” said one National League baseball executive involved in multiple manager searches, granted anonymity so he could speak freely. “You hear stories of guys about to be hired and (an owner) steps in and gets ‘his guy,’ or does someone a favor. No one is more important than the guy (who) owns the team.”

What can the interview process look like?

“A lot of late nights, a lot of dinners out,” Reds general manager Nick Krall said, recalling the process that led Cincinnati to hire David Bell in October 2018.

The Reds were lucky in some ways: They had fired Bryan Price that April, and with Jim Riggleman as interim manager, spent the rest of the season collecting bits and pieces of information for their upcoming search. Krall said they had people watch and take notes on prospective candidates managing in the minor leagues. They made reference calls and put together a list of more than 50 potential hires before the season was up. They interviewed the internal candidates first, and hit the ground running with external interviews in the offseason.

The Guardians — who hired first-time manager Stephen Vogt on Nov. 6 — were also aware that Terry Francona would be retiring, and their first list had upwards of 80 names, all recommended as potential successors. They narrowed it down to 45, then 15, with roughly half of those candidates getting a Zoom interview. Just a few finalists flew to Cleveland, where they spent time with 30 people within baseball operations. By then, president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti estimated Cleveland had roughly 90 pages of notes on each potential manager, the product of dozens and dozens of phone calls to people in every facet of the game who had interacted with the finalists.

“We wanted to make sure we weren’t just getting a front office view of any candidate, so we understood the totality of the person,” Antonetti said, noting that when they hired Francona more than a decade ago, many of these jobs and departments within baseball operations didn’t exist. “The same thing within our environment. If you think about all the people in areas that a manager can impact, it’s pretty extensive. We wanted to give (the finalists) an opportunity to interact a little bit with all those groups.”

Kansas City had a list of guiding principles, seven or eight tenets it was looking for when it hired manager Matt Quatraro from the Tampa Bay Rays last offseason. A lot of their job requirements emphasized a development background, which was seen as a vital component for a rebuilding Royals team. That list helped Kansas City emerge with five candidates as potential replacements for Mike Matheny, who was fired after three disappointing seasons. That criteria is markedly different from the calming presence a win-now Astros team was searching for before 2020, after a sign-stealing scandal caused the dismissal of manager A.J. Hinch.

“Every situation you have to bring a little something different as far as what a team needs,” said Showalter, who has interviewed for more than a dozen big-league jobs as well as general manager positions in Kansas City and Seattle over a three-decade managerial career. “(You ask yourself) ‘Where is this organization at now and how can you serve what they think they need?’”

Sometimes, it’s well-defined. Other times, it’s more nuanced. There was little chance the Padres were going to hire someone who didn’t already have a working relationship with Preller, given the well-documented communication issues that arose between him and Melvin. Immediately that put Shildt, who had previously served as an advisor, and Flaherty as favorites.

San Diego started interviews with Shildt on Oct. 25 and progressed from there in what Preller called a thorough process. That was put on hold in the days following Seidler’s death.

“If you are always taking notes of how attractive (candidates) would fit in your organization in certain situations, you start with a big group, and we did, “ said Preller. “We didn’t just talk to Shildt, one day or two days, it was the course of weeks. It’s a big decision.”

Even the most thorough interview process can’t match the familiarity that comes with having seen someone in action in the dugout, as the Astros had with new manager Joe Espada. (Bob Levey / Getty Images)

How to avoid focusing on the wrong things

After Vogt was interviewed, word leaked out in the media that he had wowed Cleveland. But teams are understandably wary of putting too much stock in interviews.

“We don’t base it on the interview,” Antonetti said. “That’s just a sliver of the pie. What we really focus on are references, what is this person like performing alongside (them) every day? If you do any research on interviewing, it is a very inexact science. Even if you structure the interview perfectly, and that’s almost impossible to do, that’s not a good basis for a decision.”

There are multiple managers in the game who weren’t great interviews, a trait that may have delayed them from getting the job but didn’t totally impede it. Front offices understand that an interview is nothing like being in a tied game in the seventh inning or having to navigate through a 10-game losing streak.

Teams don’t want to end up with a candidate who interviewed well but isn’t good in the dugout. “That’s what we are trying to avoid,” Royals executive vice president of baseball operations J.J. Picollo said.

Kansas City had candidates work through three scenarios under different time constraints. One involved trade scenarios, another putting a lineup or roster together, and the third a game scenario in which candidates were asked how they would manage this game. There weren’t necessarily right or wrong answers.

“You’re watching how people think, instinctively, and how quickly they can react to situations,” Picollo said. “It’s impossible to replicate a game, but what Q (Quatraro) represented was creativity and thought.”

Preller said the interview holds some weight in the Padres’ process, but the amount differs with each candidate and situation. Asked if he had learned or refined anything after conducting multiple manager searches, he said:

“I don’t necessarily think we view (past hires) as mistakes. We feel like (Jayce) Tingler was a Manager Of the Year candidate (his first season), got us to the playoffs, did a bunch of winning and the same thing with Bob, we got to the LCS (in 2022). I think it’s about fit … some of these things aren’t right or wrong, they just aren’t a fit.”

Getting the job (or not)

Showalter interviewed for the Astros job that eventually went to Baker. The charismatic and experienced Baker, lauded as the perfect hire for a team in need of a new identity, won his first World Series as manager in 2022 and retired last month.

“A lot of times, teams pretty much know who they want unless something in an interview puts up a red flag,” Showalter said. “In Houston when I met with Jim Crane, he said ‘Who would you hire?’ I said, ‘I’d hire Dusty.’”

Baker echoed that sentiment. In more than half the jobs he took, he was told he was the top choice early on. In D.C., he got a call after one interview to let him know the job was still open because Bud Black had turned it down. Only in Philadelphia did Baker recall having to do more than one round of interviewing.

“I feel for these guys who have to go back for two or three interviews because some of it is eyewash,” Baker said. “Especially the minority candidates.”

If many teams do have a candidate in mind before they start the process, people from underrepresented groups, already in the minority in baseball, can be at a disadvantage. Baker said he gets calls all the time, particularly from Black or Latino candidates, expressing frustration over what they view as a rigged interview process.

It’s worth noting that three of the six managerial jobs this offseason went to people from underrepresented groups, and MLB will have eight such managers this year, the most since 2010. The League does tell clubs they are obligated to ensure candidate pools for filling senior baseball positions — like managers — are diverse, and in that vein made some adjustments to the Selig Rule in 2021.

The best way to ensure that continues to happen is to establish a solid pipeline. In 2024, there are projected to be 11 bench coaches and three associate managers who are from underrepresented groups. That’s important because familiarity is often king. There is no substitute for time already spent in the dugout for an organization to intimately know a candidate, and vice versa.

The Astros didn’t give serious thought to anyone but longtime bench coach Joe Espada to take Baker’s place. New Brewers manager Pat Murphy — who was Counsell’s bench coach — was the only managerial candidate Milwaukee’s GM Matt Arnold publicly mentioned during their search.

Having previously worked together can also eliminate the need for laborious reference calls. Zaidi instead spent the two days the Giants courted Melvin having him meet the people with San Francisco whom Melvin didn’t already know. At the finish line, before they talked financial terms, Zaidi asked Melvin: Is there anything we need to talk about?

“It was really funny, there was a pregnant pause on the phone,” Zaidi said. “I think he had kind of taken it for granted, too. Then he was like, ‘Oh, where are you on pitchers with reverse splits these days?’ And I was like, is that it? Is that really where we left things 10 years ago in Oakland?”

But what if that relationship isn’t readily available? Manager hires are rarely unanimous. There are too many people involved, too many factors to consider. Multiple GMs interviewed for this story said the decision is often much closer to 50-50 between the final two or three candidates.

The difference depends on who is making the decision and what they value most. When Quatraro, the Royals’ second in-person interview, walked out of the room, Picollo said you could sense the excitement from the group assembled. And the more digging Cleveland did on the 39-year-old Vogt, who is only a year removed from playing, the more positive the picture became. Vogt had been a manager-in-training for years, peppering managers as far back as Counsell (who he played for in 2017) with questions about in-game strategy.

Picking a manager may be the most important decision a team makes in 2023 in which data doesn’t really help — though there is plenty of debate on how much the manager is really a difference-maker in today’s game. As analytic and measured and efficient as today’s front offices are, there is still room for subjectivity, some emphasis on feel.

“This isn’t a numbers game,” said one GM. “This is real life.”

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(Top image: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images; Andy Kuno / San Francisco Giants via Getty Images; Matt Dirksen / Chicago Cubs via Getty Images)

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