Don’t be surprised if Sandberg joins the big league club in September, as he did last fall. And if the Phillies shake up their coaching staff—a good bet in light of their hugely disappointing season—Sandberg is likely to be working under manager Charlie Manuel in Philadelphia in some capacity in 2013.
Phillies senior advisor Dallas Green, the team’s scouting director when Philadelphia selected Sandberg in the 20th round of the 1978 draft, worked with former Phillies GM Pat Gillick to help bring Sandberg back to the organization in November 2010. He’s perplexed why the Cubs let him get away, but is convinced that Sandberg is destined to achieve big things in a major league dugout.
“I’m scared to death we’re gonna lose him ourselves,” Green says. “He’s in our plans, I will say that.”
The obvious question: Why does a Hall of Famer who needed only 456 games of minor league seasoning as a player require 845 games in Peoria, Knoxville, Des Moines and Allentown to prove that he can manage?
...“Triple-A is a horse[bleep] place to manage,” Green says. “Guys are always pissing and moaning about not being in the big leagues, or being sent down, or not getting a chance. You have all these grudge-holders with different agendas or an itch under their saddle, and there’s all that ragging going on. [Sandberg] is able to cut that ragging out and make them play the game of baseball. He’s done it everyplace he’s been.”
Repoz
Posted: September 01, 2012 at 10:15 AM |
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1. Barry`s_Lazy_Boy Posted: September 01, 2012 at 11:08 AM (#4224368)Universally well-liked: check.
By all accounts, pretty good manager: check.
It is a bit weird he's still in the minors.
Same with Mike Matheny more or less. Although I do think catchers probably have some equivalency coaching experience by the nature of being a catcher.
In the minor leagues, winning games is secondary to developing players - so you do things differently than you do in the majors. For that reason, I think few major league teams look on the minors as a training ground for managers.
I think that if Ryne Sandberg is going to get a major league managing job, it's going to be with a team for which he didn't play - simply because it would be really hard to fire an icon should that become necessary.
-- MWE
I heard somewhere that managers are hired to be fired. Just sayin'.
How many managers have died on the job? I don't mean on the job like John McSherry, but died instead of being fired.
Well, a lot more of them have voluntarily retired.
Well, the three that first came to mind (Danny Murtaugh, Dick Howser, and Fred Hutchinson) all resigned in failing health and weren't the active managers at the time of their death.
on behalf of the elderly i resemble that remark
Sandberg isn't THAT much more of an icon than Robin Ventura with the White Sox, or even Ozzie Guillen when he was with the Sox. (Or Alan Trammell with the Tigers.)
But other than those two, of the biggest stars now managing - I would count Kirk Gibson, Don Mattingly, Dusty Baker, and Mike Scioscia in that group - it's true that none of them have ever managed the team(s) they're most noted for.
Anybody here or in the media really have a good clue as to whether Sandberg would be a good ML manager?
I feel for the guy because he did get kinda screwed over by the Cubs. He was interested in managing and they're the ones who sent him off to the minors to get experience and they'd talk later. In fairness to the Cubs, he seemed to kinda come out of nowhere and I can understand they might have had doubts as to how committed he really was to this career. As noted above, it's not clear that's quite the career ladder that it used to be. If the Cubs really wanted to develop him as a manager, they'd have made him the ML bench coach or hitting instructor or at least base coach.
But, yeah, Sandberg has done nothing but do what he was asked to do to prove he was serious. He clearly is serious about this as a career so if somebody thinks he'd be a good manager, he's more than deserving of a shot.
I don't know if there's been much discussion of this, but the Cubs really screwed themselves over as well. It's hard to know how good a manager Sandberg would be, but he's gotta be better than a guy you had to fire after one season.
Miller Huggins, perhaps most notably.
Today's players seem to to prefer a manager who has played in the big leagues; the fact that Sandberg is a Hall of Famer would give him additional credibility. I think he'd be a good choice for a team like the Royals or the Astros.
Stupid me. Sandberg is the one manager Cubs fans would never turn on. It’s a shame that he left the organisation, but as long as we lose 95 games he can’t stay.
rather grislyly (is that a word?), the the 1966 Tigers had 2 die in the same season.
I'm trying to decide if this is a typo or a really great nickname that I've never heard before.
They want Chick Stahl to kill himself again? What kind of people are Red Sox fans???
I say we start calling him Sandblern. After all, he was a hitting machine for a while back in the day.
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