April managerial firings are uncommon.
The baseball season is 162 games and many teams have overcome slow starts. Early in the season, decision-makers often fall back on the old “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” cliché.
April managerial firings after making the previous postseason are even more uncommon.
According to The Athletic’s Jayson Stark, Alex Cora was just the second skipper in MLB history to get an April ax following a playoff run. It had been 44 years since someone in Cora’s situation had been fired, and the last executive to do so had a reputation for being ruthless with his managers.
“Only one other manager in history had ever been gonged in April after a visit to the previous year’s Octoberfest — and George Steinbrenner hit that ejector button, because of course he did," Stark writes. “Bob Lemon took the Yankees to the World Series in 1981. He was the ex-manager of the Yankees by April 26 (14 games) the next year."
The long-time Yankees owner and Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow quickly got some more company in the record books, however, as Dave Dombrowski fired Phillies manager Rob Thomson three days after Cora. Philadelphia had also made the preceding postseason.
Dombrowski later admitted that he tried to hire Cora before even firing Thomson, but the ousted Red Sox manager wanted to reset instead of jumping right back into things.
“We talked about potentially taking the job,” Dombrowski said. “I had told him I had really come to the conclusion that if he took it, I was going to make a change. I thought he might take it. As time went on over the next day into Monday morning, it was apparent from his perspective that he wanted to take time with his family.
“It wasn’t because of pay or because he’s paid through the next year. He just felt that he wanted, at this point, to be a father first and foremost. That’s what he had decided.”
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