Craig Stammen didn’t actually map it out this way when he was convinced by general manager A.J. Preller this past offseason to take the job as manager of the Padres.
He leapt out of the front office as a former relief pitcher with no on-field experience as either a coach or manager. That was two strikes against him.
His star offensive players – Manny Machado, Fernando Tatis, Jackson Merrill and Xander Bogaerts – have all been struggling at the plate, leading to a Major League-worst .225 batting average and .671 OPS. His starting rotation has been so riddled with injuries that its ERA is 4.71, almost equally as bad at 26th in MLB.
Could that be strike three?
Not yet. The Padres are 46-47 with three games remaining before Monday’s four-day All-Star break. They host Toronto, the also struggling defending American League champions, Friday night at Petco Park.
All the Padres – save for their sole All-Star representative, closer Mason Miller – will have a chance to take a deep breath and reset when the downhill part of the season, the final 69 games, opens in Kansas City next Friday. Miller will head to Tuesday’s game in Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park as his teammates disperse.
This is as good a time as any to take a critical look at Stammen’s first four months-plus as a big league manager. On paper the results aren’t good. The Padres are 14 1/2 games behind the first-place Dodgers in the National League West and 5 1/2 games in arrears of the NL’s third and final Wild Card spot. That’s far from where they were supposed to be.
Padres fans have widely called for Stammen’s dismissal along with hitting coach Steven Souza Jr., also a former player with no experience in that job or any at all in a big-league dugout.
Yet, Stammen has faced the music with a constant smile and good humor. His pre-and-postgame media sessions always begin with a salutation to the group asking how everyone is doing. The pregame session is in the dugout, and postgame, at least at home, is in a media room.
A reporter can grab him for a brief one-on-one question on the fly, but mostly there’s little time to develop a relationship.
“There are times when I have to take five minutes before I see you guys, collect my thoughts and get in the right frame of mind,” Stammen said earlier this week in the dugout. “It’s definitely not easy, to manage the ups and downs of life and how things go. I’m just trying to do my best and be someone who’s a positive influence that the players can rely on to be the same every day.”
Fans can blame this all on Preller, who doesn’t have much of a track record in his hires for manager. He’s been through nine of them, including three interim, since taking over the job for the fired Josh Byrnes on Aug. 6, 2014.
Preller inherited Bud Black, who didn’t last a year when he was canned with a 32-33 record about midway through the 2015 season. Black was hired back by Preller this offseason as a consultant and could very well replace Stammen. Wouldn’t that be a turnabout?
Preller’s two interim hires to replace Black that year were Dave Roberts and Pat Murphy, who both went on to do spectacularly well in other places, but weren’t good enough to manage the Padres.
Roberts has won three World Series with the Dodgers, including the last two, and has 1,005 regular season wins and counting on his way to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Murphy has led the low-spending Brewers perennially to the top of the NL Central.
Roberts, who managed one game after Black’s firing, said his interview with Preller, to permanently take over the club, lasted 15 minutes, and “he never lifted his head out of his computer.”
Murphy compiled a 42-54 record before being let go at the end of the 2015 season. Oddly, Preller wouldn’t let Murphy talk about player injuries, sending an assistant general manager to the dugout each day to take on that task. At least Murphy was the club’s Triple-A manager at the time of his promotion.
When told he was never given a chance in San Diego, Murphy said recently he wasn’t ready. Good for him. Neither were the Padres. It was their loss.
Andy Green and Jayce Tingler followed. Green had some minor-league experience, but Tingler had none at all. Tingler said at his introductory press conference he had managed some games in his head. That didn’t augur well. Together the pair lasted five losing seasons.
Green is now back managing the underachieving Mets, having replaced the fired Carlos Mendoza, and Tingler is bench coach under Tony Vitello on a Giants team that’s floundering toward a horrific season. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Four years under veteran managers Bob Melvin and Mike Shildt produced three playoff appearances, including Melvin’s 2022 trip to the NL Championship Series – the Padres’ first since 1998 – where they lost to the Phillies in five games. Both men had their issues with Preller and he with them.
Shildt left last offseason after winning 183 games in two years. It was then back to Stammen and the playbook of inexperience.
What’s the toughest adjustment Stammen has had to deal with on or off the field this season, he was asked?
“It always boils down to communication and how much you can communicate with these guys on a daily basis,” he said. “With the coaching staff, the front office. You have to be really good about having conversations, but you have to be willing to listen and think about other people’s ideas and their feelings. Put yourself in their shoes. If you do that you have a chance to make better decisions.”
Stammen will have 69 games after the break to keep adjusting or suffer the same fate as his Preller predecessors.
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