The Miami Marlins were nearly no-hit on Sunday, and it was only a Justin Bour single with two outs in the ninth that prevented them from finishing a game with zero hits for the second time in less than eight months.
But apparently, “almost” is good enough for Jeffrey Loria and the Marlins – manager Mike Redmond was fired after the 6-0 defeat to the Braves.
The #Marlins dismiss manager Mike Redmond and bench coach Rob Leary.
— Miami Marlins (@Marlins) May 17, 2015
There’s no sugar coating this firing – it’s a raw deal for Redmond. He was hired before the 2013 season by the Marlins with no major league coaching experience, and immediately thereafter, Loria ripped his high-priced team apart, leaving Redmond with a roster consisting of Giancarlo Stanton, Jose Fernandez, and “stuff”. The Marlins went 62-100 in Redmond’s first year, and improved to 77-85 last year, despite Fernandez blowing out his elbow.
This season, the Marlins fell to 16-22 after the loss to the Braves on Sunday. But there are still plenty of injury issues that Redmond has been forced to deal with this year – Fernandez hasn’t thrown a pitch, Henderson Alvarez spent nearly a month on the DL, and Christian Yelich has missed significant time. Several of the veterans brought in by the team’s front office have also struggled, including the recently released Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Michael Morse, and Mat Latos.
Pinning Miami’s rough start to the year on Redmond is foolish. He’s not the one who signed or traded for those veterans. He’s not the one who refused to sell high on struggling closer Steve Cishek this winter. Yeah the Marlins are six games under .500, but they’ve only been outscored by eight runs on the season. They’re (somehow) 2-7 against the Braves, but 14-15 against the rest of the league with a positive run differential.
On an extra pathetic note, when the Marlins announce their new manager in the morning, he’ll be the third manager currently getting paid by the team, joining Redmond and Ozzie Guillen. Yes, Ozzie Guillen, who Redmond replaced after the 2012 season.
#Marlins still paying Guillen; this is final year of his four-year, $10M contract. Redmond signed two-year extension through ’17 last Sept.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) May 17, 2015
This team is obviously better than they’ve been, but crazy stuff happens early on in the MLB season. We’re not even a quarter of the way in, and Miami apparently had seen enough to pull the plug on Redmond. Now when the team brings in a new manager, and Marlins healthy and starts playing towards its true talent level, they’ll get all of the credit when anyone with a brain could realize that this was going to happen.
But hey, this is standard protocol for Jeffrey Loria’s Marlins. Redmond is the *fourth* manager that Loria has fired in-season since 2003. That’s incredible, and quite frankly, inexplicable. In addition to those four in-season firings, he’s fired two more after the season. The only Marlins manager that’s gotten a fair shake under Loria is Jack McKeon, and at 84, I don’t think he’ll be taking the bench for the Marlins for the third time in his career.
