It was 65 years ago next month when owner Philip K. Wrigley used the Cubs’ annual media luncheon to make a bold announcement about the club’s next leader.
That is to say, there would be none.
“These are the days of specialists,” Wrigley said, according to the Sporting News, “and I think it makes sense to get the best guys for each individual job. They do it in football and it works pretty well.”
With that, the Cubs, in 1961, became the first — and last — major league team to move away from a traditional manager and instead use what they called a “Coaching College.”
Over the next two seasons, a “faculty” of people named El Tappe, Charlie Grimm, Goldie Holdt, Bobby Adams, Harry Craft, Verlon Walker, Ripper Collins and Vedie Himsl temporarily held the “head coach” position at some point or another.
In the midst of all that rotation, the only constant was defeat. The Cubs lost 90 games in 1961 and 103 in 1962.
By the spring of 1963, even US President John F. Kennedy was criticizing them, amid a speech about how automation was shrinking the American workforce.
“Chicago … provides the exception to this pattern,” Kennedy said, “as it now takes 10 men to run the Cubs instead of one.”
When it comes to rethinking the role of manager, nothing could match that unfortunate and short-lived Cubs catastrophe.
But the world of Major League management is strangely intriguing these days.
Ten of MLB’s 30 teams formally filled their vacancies this winter, either by removing the interim tag for a manager who had taken over midseason in 2025 (Don Kelly of the Pirates and Warren Schaeffer of the Rockies), promoting them from within the same organization (Walt Weiss of the Braves, Skip Schumaker of the Rangers, Craig Stammen of the Padres and Kurt Suzuki of the Angels) or hiring them from outside. (Tony Vitello of the Giants, Blake Butera of the Nationals, Craig Albernaz of the Orioles and Derek Shelton of the Twins).
The only hires of that group who have managed a full MLB campaign at some point are Schumaker, Weiss and Shelton. The others are examples of teams that give new blood the opportunity. And some of those decisions demonstrate the extremes of who qualifies as a managerial candidate in the modern game.
Stammen, for example, was a Major League pitcher as recently as 2022 and, although he served as an assistant on the Major League coaching staff in San Diego and in the baseball operations department, he had never coached or managed a game at any level. That he went from taking over games to directing them only adds to the historical rarity of his hiring. He went from helping the Padres interview candidates to becoming the one who got the job.
Suzuki is another former MLB player who had never coached a game before, and Kelly was in that same category when the Pirates named him as Shelton’s replacement in mid-2025.
Butera followed a slightly more traditional path, having managed at least four Minor League seasons within the Rays organization (though none above Class-A, and most recently in 2022). But it was his accelerated path — promoted to major league manager at the age of 33 — that makes him an exception. He is the youngest manager in the Major Leagues since the Twins hired Frank Quilici in 1972.
And then, of course, there is Vitello, who after a successful stint at the University of Tennessee, is making history as the first college manager to become a major league manager without any prior experience as a professional manager.
All of this means that no one-size-fits-all mentality or groupthink was applied to these hires. The teams did it in very different ways.
And some, while not as creative as the 1961 Cubs, weren’t afraid to go off the rails.
“It’s amazing,” Tigers manager AJ Hinch said, “to see our position grow.”
In May 2009, Hinch was named manager of the Diamondbacks, replacing Bob Melvin mid-season. Hinch had been the manager of Arizona’s minor league system and had never managed before. He was barely 34 years old.
D-backs players, for the most part, were stunned, and their discontent was a big reason why Hinch, who was fired in July 2010, didn’t last long in that particular experiment.
“A lot of the guys were saying, ‘We fired a good manager, and [Hinch] He hasn’t even been on the field,'” the team’s then-catcher, Venezuelan Miguel Montero, told The Athletic in 2018. “He hadn’t even coached.”
Obviously, as this group of hires indicates, times have changed.
So, if experience as a manager, or turning 40, or even having a previous connection to affiliated professional baseball are not necessarily requirements to be a manager in the Major Leagues, what the hell is?
What makes a good driver candidate in the modern game?
At the Winter Meetings, we posed that question to several of the people currently in office, and you know what we didn’t hear?
Nothing about bullpen management.
Nothing about drawing up the lineups.
Nothing about deciding when to bunt the ball or when to let a batter swing on a 3-0 count, or when to call a hit-and-run, or when to make a mound visit.
No. We hear some variation of the same sentiment, over and over again.
“It’s your message to the group,” said White Sox manager Will Venable, who was hired before 2025, “and being able to connect with the group.”
Added D-backs manager Torey Lovullo, who has been in charge since 2017: “Being able to connect people. The strategies? We’re all the same. We’re not smarter than the next manager. We can do the right thing. But I think managing the personalities is going to be the most important thing.”
Also Hinch, now on his third team and entering his 13th season as manager, had this to say: “The most important thing is communication skills. Those communication skills are important for the player to be committed to the goal, and they are also important in association with the front office to be a leader in the organization.”
And Schumaker, who was the National League Manager of the Year while with the Marlins in 2023, added this: “The ability to relate is very important for a lot of people in the game today and knowing how players think.”
Being an effective communicator has always been important in this or any leadership position.
But in baseball, that characteristic means something very different now than it did in generations past.
Rosters expanded to 26 players this decade. Everything else has grown too.
Managers have bigger coaching staffs than they used to. The baseball operations staff, which today includes analytics and development groups (also known as advanced metrics) and medical groups, has grown tremendously. (At the Winter Meetings, some teams had their staff dispersed in various hotels in the area, because it was impossible to accommodate them all in the same place.)
“There are many people.” Venable said, “and a lot of people you have to communicate with.”
Obviously, media responsibilities in what has become a 24/7 news and social media environment are a world apart. The modern manager has been compared to a White House press secretary, but not even the White House press secretary speaks at the podium twice a day like major league managers (and never after a late bullpen lead is blown).
That’s why teams try to find the best of both worlds: Someone who can say the right thing, both publicly and privately.
(And yes, hopefully they know how to run a bullpen, too.)
“It’s OK not to have the answers,” said the Guardians’ Stephen Vogt, who has managed two seasons and won American League Manager of the Year after both. “It’s okay to say, ‘I don’t know,’ or use the resources around you.” “I think one of the things I learned very early was that if I don’t know, I’ll ask the smart people around me so that hopefully they have the answer.”
Given his rapid success as a manager after his own playing career ended in 2022 (with a stint as the Mariners’ bullpen coach in between), some consider Vogt a model for what teams are looking for today. He is personable and approachable, a lover of people and also humble enough to know what he doesn’t know everything about.
But when asked why people like him, Suzuki and Stammen are getting these managerial opportunities so soon after retiring as players, Vogt gave an illuminating answer.
“I think people my age or that era of players, we played in a unique time where we came to the major leagues and came up through the minor leagues with absolutely no information,” Vogt said. “And then during our major league careers, every bit of information possible was thrown at us, and we were expected to use it on the field. And so I think we grew up in an old-school world, but then we played through the transition.
“So now I feel like we have a very good understanding of how to apply the data, without losing sight of maybe intuition. So, I think it’s a unique period of time, from 2008 to 2020, where we learned all of that.”
It’s probably not so simple to suggest that the ideal managerial candidate played in the Major Leagues from 2008 to 2020 (although it turns out that’s exactly the length of the MLB career of Venezuelan catcher Francisco Cervelli, who will manage Italy in the upcoming World Baseball Classic), but that ability to navigate the overload of game data is essential.
Reds manager Terry Francona is, along with Brewers manager Pat Murphy, one of only two current managers born in the 1950s. And Francona is the only current manager to have managed an MLB game before the 21st century. So pointing out to you that the group of foremen is getting younger is simply stating the obvious.
But Francona also made an interesting point when he noted that teams’ baseball operations groups, increasingly made up of young, analytical minds, must be careful not to base their manager hiring decisions too much on how the prospective manager communicates with the front office.
“¿Es [la contratación] to [la oficina principal] or for the players?” Francona said. “Someone who can talk to the front office is great. But you also have to be able to talk to a player. And sometimes, that’s very different. If you can do both, you’re fine.”
As this new group of hires indicates, helmsmen can come from all sorts of experience levels. And considering that six of the 12 Manager of the Year awards given out this century have gone to people no longer with those clubs, the job is always subject to change.
But at least we can say that the importance of communication is a constant, although its application is evolving.
And at least we still have one manager for each team… until one club goes rogue and brings back the College of Coaches.
