"Baseball is extremely hard and extraordinarily rich in ways for things to go wrong, and firing a manager when things go wrong is the simplest way for an organization to signal to fans that it is addressing those things. It doesn't work, really, because managers only do so much, and are generally not the reason why bad baseball teams are bad."
"The Los Angeles Angels have had four managers over the last five seasons, during which the team has won 77, 73, 73, 63, and 72 games. During the first three of those seasons, the team had Shohei Ohtani on the roster; in none of them was the team meaningfully in the wild card mix in September. GM Perry Minasian has been around for all five of those campaigns,"
Manager firings are commonly used as visible fixes while having limited effect, because managers control only a fraction of team outcomes. Baseball contains many ways for performance to fail, so organizations often signal responsiveness by changing managers even when deeper structural issues persist. The Los Angeles Angels example shows four managers in five seasons with consistently poor win totals despite featuring Shohei Ohtani and stable front-office personnel. The team's struggles extend over a decade with similar failure patterns. Firing managers often satisfies external perception but rarely addresses roster construction, ownership decisions, or long-term organizational dysfunction.
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