At first blush, it appears the San Diego Padres have thrown in the towel with the pick of Craig Stammen as their new manager. But so have the Washington Nationals, Los Angeles Angels, Baltimore Orioles and San Francisco Giants.
Stammen, Blake Butera, Kurt Suzuki, Craig Albernaz and Tony Vitello. None of these latest choices have one minute of Major League Baseball managing experience among them. Butera, who will take over the Nats, is 33, the second youngest manager in baseball history.
Most of these above teams have gone young and cheap, although Vitello, an accomplished college coach at Tennessee with no pro experience of any kind, signed a three-year deal worth $3.5 million a season, with an option for a fourth with the Giants. Buster Posey is staking his entire club presidency on that decision.
But then, there’s no way of predicting how things will evolve. As my old friend, former manager and pitcher Bud Black, always said: “That’s why you play the games.”
“How did we get here?” beleaguered Padres president of baseball operations A.J. Preller said Monday during a press conference at Petco Park introducing the club’s surprise choice in Stammen.
That’s the question from a macro sense and certainly on a micro one for the Padres. Preller followed with a number of characteristics about Stammen, but none of them included managerial experience. Stammen, a former Padres relief pitcher, came from within baseball operations.
To be sure, there have been other hires since the regular season ended. The Texas Rangers signed Skip Schumaker, the Atlanta Braves tabbed Walt Weiss and the Minnesota Twins went with Derek Shelton. All have been hired, fired or forced out before as big-league managers. The Colorado Rockies are still looking.
The Padres didn’t go in the direction of trying to resurrect success out of failure—although Bruce Bochy, a four-time World Series champ as a manager who was recently let go by Texas, was out there.
“[Stammen] has a clear understanding of what’s been very good here,” Preller said. “But there’s still another step in what we need to do to be great. I know nationally it may be a little bit of a surprise, but for anybody who’s been around Craig in San Diego it was a pretty easy fit.”
Preller has done some good things since he took over as GM in August 2014, including building high-priced teams that won at least 90 games the last two seasons but were bounced early in the playoffs, causing the recent departure of manager Mike Shildt.
Hiring a manager has not been one of his successes. Stammen is his ninth, including three interim skippers. Two of them were Dave Roberts and Pat Murphy, who both succeeded Black, fired with a 32-33 record in 2015.
Roberts went on to win the World Series three times as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, including the last two. And Murphy was just voted National League Manager of the Year for the second straight season after guiding the Milwaukee Brewers to back-to-back NL Central titles. The Brewers, at 97-65 in 2025, had the best record in the major leagues.
Neither was deemed good enough to manage the Padres for the long-term. Roberts, who was given the reins for one game, once disclosed he had a 15-minute interview for the interim job during which Preller never even looked up from his computer. Murphy, then the club’s Triple-A manager, was not given much support when he managed the Padres to a 42-54 record and was fired at the end of the season.
And now Preller has given Stammen a three-year contract when his last three managers—Jayce Tingler, Bob Melvin and Shildt—lasted no more than two years each. Preller himself has just the 2026 season left on his current contract.
“There’s a lot of different directions we could’ve gone in,” said Preller, who also considered the untried Albert Pujols. “It was a strong pool. As far as Craig is concerned, we have a team we think can win and we wanted to hit the ground running.”
It’s just a fact that pitchers don’t usually make good managers, as Black’s tenure for the Padres and Rockies indicates. Black was a credible left-handed pitcher, mostly as a starter with 121 victories in his 15-year career, winning the World Series as a member of the 1985 Kansas City Royals.
But as a manager in parts of 18 seasons—nine each in San Diego and Colorado, the latter where he was fired 40 games into this past season—his .460 winning percentage is the lowest in Major League history for any of the 39 men who managed a minimum of 2,500 games. His teams had only four .500-plus seasons and made the playoffs twice—the Rockies in 2017 and 2018—never winning a single postseason game.
Black fully admitted he knew nothing about hitting, which plagues every pitcher who tries to manage.
It’s no coincidence only five pitchers have won the World Series as managers in baseball history: Eddie Dyer with the 1946 St. Louis Cardinals, Bob Lemon with the 1978 New York Yankees, Dallas Green with the 1980 Philadelphia Phillies, Tommy Lasorda with the 1981 and 1988 Los Angeles Dodgers, and most recently John Farrell with the 2013 Boston Red Sox.
Lasorda is the only pitcher who managed his way into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and he only made 26 appearances as a big-league player. Lemon went in as a pitcher after winning 207 games in 13 seasons, mostly starting for the Cleveland Indians.
Asked if he ever thought about being a manager when he played, Stammen said, “a little bit.”
“But then you have the stigma of being a pitcher and then being a relief pitcher,” he added.
Preller evidently believes Stammen, primarily a reliever during his 13-year career—the last six with the Padres—has some magic elixir that will help San Diego win its first World Series, but history doesn’t support that assumption.