The Orioles are hiring former Padres manager Mike Shildt as their upper level minor league coordinator of instruction.
I think everyone has thought about it, but almost no one has delved deeper: what's behind Shildt's departure?
So, the guy said he was tired and wanted to go home, but then he suddenly accepts a job with another team. I remember when the news of his supposed retirement broke, it raised a lot of questions, but his sudden return to the major leagues raises even more.
Did someone in particular dislike Shildt, or did something happen behind the scenes? We might not know for a long time, but it's still strange. đź‘€
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Lots of talk around this, most people just came to the idea he didn’t want to be a manager anymore.
There’s been wild speculation ever since he surprised everyone with his retirement. Plenty of threads in this subreddit and a few on r/baseball.
I am much happier that he was honest with himself that he didn’t have what it took to be the manager any more and stepped down rather than force himself to manage the team when he wasn’t 100% committed to it. His new role is way lower stress and the Padres are better off with a committed manager in Stammen. It’s a win/win, nothing to be upset about as a Padres fan.
Conflict that was kept under wraps, you won’t be able to convince me otherwise. Shady business all the way around.
My assumption is internally there were people upset with the roster management and Shildt’s responses to the media that boiled over with the WC loss.
I don’t think it’s a case of “I don’t want to be manager anymore”. He pretended like he needed to leave the game completely and then found a job a few weeks later. Doesn’t add up.
Dude probably didn’t want to deal with the stress of being a manager.
I believe he was pushed out because of internal complaints about his management style. He didn’t want to change his ways or get nagged anymore, so they came to an agreement that this isn’t a great fit anymore. His statement read that he was retiring from being “the manager of the Padres”, nothing about retiring from the game. He also said, “I was tired of dealing with the stress and inability to please everybody”. He doesn’t want to change, doesn’t want pushback, and doesn’t want to answer questions. His new role is more suited to him, he can just focus on teaching young players. He’s closer to home and he has ties to the Orioles organization. It’s ironic and it sucks because even though he’s not mentally or emotionally suited to be a big league manager, he was very good and successful at it.
He stepped down from being the manager and we can speculate/make educated guesses all we want. Like all managers, he’s not perfect and there’s a lot more one way traffic coming from the front office than some managers can cope with. I’m glad he’s still in the game at some capacity and with the focus of coaching.
Just be aware that AJ has not had the best of times with managers. There’s a track record that some people continue to ignore. There have been two interim managers who have become successful managers – Dave Roberts and Pat Murphy. They were overlooked and instead, AJ hired two first time managers who will probably never become an MLB manager again, Andy Green and Jayce Tingler. Tingler was a horrible decision, way over his head. Andy was overseeing bad teams but wasn’t the worst. Then two successful, older school managers, in Melvin and Shildt, had the most success in the regular season and playoffs. They both made decisions to step down and go to another organization in different capacities.
And now there’s another first time manager, young like Tingler was, but with the benefit of being a teammate of some players on the current roster, lengthy MLB career, and coming from the Padres front office.
The Padres also have a ready-made manager currently in Scott Servais in a front office position. Why he wasn’t part of the candidates is very telling to me.
The grind is real. A major league manager’s job is practically 24/7 and 365 days per year. Remember the news reports that a week after the Padres season was over was when he and Preller were scheduled to get together to start working on 2026.
As a player development guy you show up in late February to camp and in September your year is over. Maybe you show up for a bit in the AFL, but its not an all consuming position. Add to that the fact that the position in player development for the Orioles upper level minor league teams in Norfolk Virginia and Bowie Maryland will keep him close to his home in Charlotte North Carolina.
His tenure in SD ended for the same reasons as it did in STL, due to his harsher management of his coaches and his overall inability to deal with people and criticism. I would imagine given his contract and success on the field, the Padres to tried to retain him, but they probably reached an impasse. I suspect they released him with a severance agreement of some sort. In those severance agreements its pretty common to include non-compete and non-disparagement clauses. The non-compete part could be something like not accepting a managerial role at the MLB level for some length of time. The non-disparagement clause probably covered the whole “retirement” cover story that both the Padres and Shildt put out to the public. The optics on the “retirement” story is clearly a lot better for both Shildt and the Padres moving forward.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Shildt in a manager position or at interviewed for openings during a future managerial hiring cycle. For whatever faults he had with managing his coaching staff and dealing with the media he did win consistently here in SD and with STL and that does carry weight.