By Hannah Keyser, CNN
New York (CNN) — Before hiring a manager for his mid-market franchise, a general manager and five other team stakeholders sat in a room with a whiteboard to brainstorm what they believed to be the attributes of a championship skipper. The last manager had been fired at the end of a disappointing season and they needed a fresh voice.
They ended up with more than 40 characteristics written on the board, narrowed the list to the five they felt were the most important for exactly where they were in the competitive cycle, and interviewed only candidates they believed to be strong in at least four of the five. The man they hired won Manager of the Year, led the team to the playoffs multiple times – and was fired just months after the team had picked up his option.
He was replaced the following season with someone who had also been fired from his last job for the disappointing performance of a different club.
“Like general managers,” the former GM, who now works in a different front office, told CNN Sports recently, “managers are hired to be fired.”
And yet he – along with seven other executives and coaches CNN spoke to for this story, all of whom were all granted anonymity to speak candidly – does not believe that is a manager’s highest and best use. The people who hire and ultimately fire managers, and the coaches who spend six-plus months in the daily grind of the dugout with them, believe managers matter for a multitude of reasons.
In fact, that same former GM mused that the modern manager is actually spread too thin.
“They matter a tremendous amount,” said another former GM who now works for a different team. “But I don’t know if they matter a tremendous amount in the way that people think that they matter.”
The 2026 baseball season has already given two primary examples of managers losing their jobs for reasons that may or may not have actually been their fault – or reasonable.
The Red Sox were in last place when they fired manager Alex Cora and nearly all of his staff in a stunning Saturday night bloodletting that came just hours after a blowout victory. After several disappointing seasons, Boston was off to a sloppy, sluggish start. And yet, it was only 27 games into the season.
The aggregate response – after the initial wave of sheer shock – seemed to be that Cora didn’t deserve to be fired because he is an obviously brilliant World Series-winning manager and also because modern managers don’t have enough authority to meaningfully impact the record. And yet, how could both of those things be true?
When the Phillies fired Rob Thomson just a few days later, the reaction seemed to be that he similarly didn’t deserve such a fate – in this case because the team had made the playoffs in every season since he’d taken over the helm amid another mid-season firing in 2022 – but also that, indeed, part of a manager’s job is to lose their job.
When a team with high expectations underperforms at a point in the season when there is little opportunity to shake up the roster, the manager gets fired. But is it a ritual sacrifice necessary to appease the angry fanbase or because a new voice can meaningfully tap into latent talent?
In both situations, there are nuances that contextualize the apparent paradox of the response (a power struggle in Boston, a concern of complacency in Philadelphia). But the question at the heart of the paradox extends beyond any one hiring or firing: How much does the modern MLB manager matter?
From the epicenter to the ultimate glue guy
Decades of increased emphasis on statistics and ballooning front offices has brought baseball to a point where savvy commentators know better than to ascribe total strategic responsibility to the manager. It’s the nerds in khakis and quarter-zips, not the guy dressed unnecessarily in full uniform, cal