Mandatory Credit: Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports
With the amount of turnover each offseason (and during the regular season) between coaches and managers, it’s hard for the hardened baseball fan to keep up with who is a coach on their favorite team.
In recent years and especially this offseason, teams are adding more and more coaches (the San Francisco Giants had 15 coaches in 2021, for example) when just 30 years ago, some MLB teams had just four coaches (a hitting coach that often doubled as a first or third base coach, pitching, bullpen, and the other base coach that the hitting coach didn’t occupy).
Now, teams have coaches with titles that the common fan may not even understand.
The pool of prospective MLB managers has vastly increased in recent years.
But with the expansion of coaching staffs and the retirements of some of the older managers, the pool for prospective MLB managers has vastly increased.
And despite the change in how many coaches there are, the vast majority of managers will come from a coach on the MLB staff. A few years ago, there seemed to be a wave of managerial hires of people with no experience at all … but that has virtually gone away.
There are only four current MLB managers that were a) not an MLB coach before they were hired by their current team or b) an MLB manager before their current team hired them. Those managers are Yankees manager Aaron Boone, Seattle’s Scott Servais, Milwaukee’s Craig Counsell, and the Cubs’ David Ross. And for the latter three, all of them had front office experience. Boone is the only one with no experience whatsoever.
Otherwise, the other 26 had coaching experience on an MLB coaching staff. And even if you look at each manager’s full-time predecessor, nearly every one of them was a former manager or MLB coach when they were hired. The only one that wasn’t was former Colorado manager Walt Weiss, who was in Colorado’s front office for a handful of years in the mid-2000s before he left the team for a few years until they gave him the manager job.
For that reason, for our top 100 managerial candidates, nearly all of these people served on an MLB coaching staff, were an MLB manager since 2017, or are slated to serve on an MLB coaching staff in 2022.
However, we did make one exception for our list: for a former MLB coach or manager prior to 2017 to be included, they had to have interviewed for an MLB managerial job since the 2019-2020 offseason.
While we will consider some of the “retired” managers of recent years, one that we will not is former Twins and Tigers manager Ron Gardenhire, since he retired due to medical concerns.
We start in the American League East by alphabetical order of the coach’s current or last team.
