The first thing that you are probably asking right now is, "Who the hell is Ron Roenicke?" Trust me, you're not alone. The only reason that I know of him is because I follow Brewers news like white guy follows a suspicious noise into a creepy dark house in a horror movie. Roenicke was the bench coach on the Anaheim Angels for the last 5 years under one of the finest managers in the American League - Mike Scioscia. He had been with the organization for the past 11 years and managed in the minor leagues but this will be his first time managing in the majors. Roenicke was the dark horse candidate for the open manager job in a group that included former Mets manager (and favorite for the job) Bobby Valentine, former Diamondbacks manager Bob Melvin and White Sox bench coach Joey Cora. There are many reasons why I didn't feel like Roenicke had a snowcone's chance in hell at his gig, but in the end I really like the hiring and I am very much looking forward to seeing who he picks for his coaching staff and to see if he is the right fit for this team. The first question will be answered before baseball resumes down in Spring Training in February, but the second questions may take years to answer. Let me set the record straight on my opinion of the last 3 Brewers managers before I continue.
Ned Yost. He was the lightning rod of criticism, but the majority of that didn't take place until the last 2 years of his reign as skipper. I liked Ned Yost until that point. When Yost took over for Jerry Royster the team was in complete dissary. Coming off of their worst season in franchise history (56-106) Yost guided a the newest crop of Brewers youngsters back to respectability. Some might argue that it was the talent (Fielder, Braun, Weeks and others) that would have been good regardless of who was managing them, but from what I noticed Yost was really good at sticking up for his players and never ripped them in public. What happened behind closed doors I'll never know, but he was loyal to his players to a fault. You might argue that he stuck with some players too long (like Suppan and Bill Hall) and he couldn't manage a bullpen to save his life. But I liked Ned Yost as a manager of a team of younger players. But he just wasn't the manager to take the team to the next level, which is why he got fired with 12 games remaining in the 2008 season.
Dale Sveum. He will be remembered by Brewers fans for 2 things - his walkoff homerun on Easter Sunday in 1987 to keep the winning streak alive and for managing the Brewers in the final 12 games of the 2008 season and the 4 games of the NLDS. As anyone in this current generation of Brewers fans will never forget, the Brewers won the NL Wild Card on the final game of the season and made the only playoff appearance in their lifetime (so far). As soon as Sveum took over for the Brewers he shook up the lineup and showed the willingness to play small ball (bunting, using the hit and run, stealing bases, etc.) and not rely on the home run. It also appeared that the players responded better to him because he was a better fit for the team than Yost was at that time. His lack of managerial experience probably prohibited him from getting the full time gig. That job went to Ken Macha. Svuem however stayed with the team as hitting coach, a position that he still retains to this day thanks to a new 2 year deal.
Ken Macha is old. Well uh... why uh... you'll have to talk to Rick on that one. I didn't see that pitch. Probably because you were too busy napping or doing crossword puzzles in the dugout. I hated the Macha signing from the beginning and it is now easy to see that Macha wasn't the right manager for this team. To be fair he wasn't given a whole hell of a lot to work with as far as pitching goes but of the manager's job is to motivate his team and put them in the best position to win, then Macha failed. I'll talk more about Macha in my 2010 season wrap up of the Front Office / Coaching Staff, but I believe one of the main reasons that Ken Macha was hired is because the Milwaukee Brewers were one of the last if not the last team to hire a manager with Playoff experience. Macha had done well with the Oakland A's in 2003-2006, but a lot of that may have had to do with the fact that he had a couple of pitchers that you might recognize - Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito (when he was in his prime as a Cy Young Winner). But the main reason I didn't like Macha was because he was an American League manager. And he managed the Brewers like an American League team.
So what does this all have to do with Ron Roenicke? He is known as being very player friendly and has good relationships with the men on his teams (like Torii Hunter, pictured) which sounds an awful lot like the negatives associated with Ned Yost. He also has had no previous Major League managerial experience, which was the big knock against Dale Sveum. And although in the minors he managed in the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants systems where they play by NL rules, all of his experience in the majors has been as a member of the Angels. An American League manager, which was the big knock on Ken Macha. So if he possesses characteristics of the 3 previous Brewers managers that did not succeed, why the hell would the Brewers feel that he would be a good fit to manger here? I'll tell you why (in my own opinion of course.)1. All of the other available managers were the wrong choice.
Bobby Valentine currently has a cushy job at ESPN as an analyst, and it would take a pretty penny to pry him away from that gig. Word on the street is that he was seeking Joe Girardi type money, who just signed a 3 year extension with the New York Yankees for $3 million dollars a year! That's a hell of a lot of money to pay a coach if you are the Brewers, and let's not even act like Valentine was that good of a coach anyway. His teams hovered right around .500 with the exception of 2 years with the New York Mets, which he led to the NL Pennant in 2000. And he hasn't managed since 2002. If he is that good of a manager, then tell me what he hasn't managed a team in 8 years? He may be a "sexy" name, but he was not the right fit for this market. Bob Melvin. Another manager with prior success that hasn't managed since then. He managed the Arizona Diamondbacks from 2005-2009 and was named manager of the year in 2007 when he led his team to a 90-72 record. That year the D'Backs won the NL West and lost to the Colorado Rockies, who were arguably the hottest team of all time that year (remember how the Rockies won 21 of the last 22 games to make the playoffs?) Melvin was fired in 2009 after the D'Backs got off to a slow start. And he was also reportedly one of the candidates for Brewers manager the year that they hired Yost. I thought he was the favotire for the job because GM Doug Melvin liked him then, and obviously still liked him enough to consider him for the job now. I would have been ok with B Melvin, but I still wouldn't have wanted him. Joey Cora. I'll be honest with you and say I don't know much about him except for the fact that he has been the bench coach under Ozzie Guillen for the Chicago White Sox since 2003. He was the youngest of the group at just 45 years of age and is looked at as one of the up and coming new managers. His named popped up in nearly every managerial search in the MLB lately, and he will no doubt be a good manager some day. I just don't personally care for Guillen so I can't speak highly of anyone working under him. I know that's unfair, but it's my opinion. Write your own blog and rub it in my face.
2. The Brewers are in a semi-rebuilding mode.
This, in my opinion, is the biggest reason they hired Roenicke. Face it, pitching and defense wins and we don't have a lot of pitching. We struck out with a couple of pitching selections in the draft and some of them had their path to the majors delayed either because of injury (Mark Rogers) or personal reasons (Jeremy Jeffress). If even one of those guys were in the rotation and Manny Parra panned out, you'd be looking at a very good rotation with Gallardo, Parra, Wolf, Rogers and Bush/Narveson. With the offense that we have had the last few years, that would have been good enough to succeed in 2009/2010. But that didn't happen, and our pitching prospects are down in single A. And the Brewers are going to trade Prince Fielder. It is going to happen. Whether it is during the Winter or before the July 31st deadline, he will be dealt for pitching prospects. So we are looking at possibly 2-3 seasons before those home grown pitchers mature and make it up here. Hopefully they do it like the Packers and rebuild right before our eyes and still remain competitive, just like they did when they passed the torch from Favre to Rodgers. With a good group of players like Braun, Hart, Lucroy, Escobar, Cain and McGehee, we have the talent to stay competitive while also rebuilding. That is why hiring Roenicke makes sense. He'll be given a little bit of much needed leeway as he gets accustomed to managing while waiting for our pitching prospects to reach the majors. With names like Valentine or Melvin, people will be expecting us to win now, and that simply can not happen until the pitching arrives. The fans may not like the hiring of an unproven manager, but that is exactly the way to go if the Brewers are indeed rebuilding the team and playing for the future. I just hope that the fans go easy on Roenicke and give him a chance before writing him off. It may be a year or two before we understand his coaching philosophy. At this point I'm willing to try anything.
3. Roenicke sounds like the right man for the job.
No former co-worker or employee is going to say bad things about that person unless they have some personal issues with them or do it out of spite. So far there has nothing but glowing praises for Roenicke by players like Torii Hunter, his former boss Mike Scioscia, former Angels bench coach and current Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Madden, former Angels pitching coach and current San Diego Padres manager Bud Black, and even from Brewers broadcaster Brian Anderson, who was the play by play man for the AAA San Antonio Missions in 1997 when Roenicke managed the team. Everything that I have heard says that he is a real stand up guy who is very good at communicating with the players on his team. This may change once he is the manager, because it seems like it is easier for the bench coach to play good cop to the manager's bad cop. The players will often go to a secondary manager on the team because the head manager is often the disciplinarian who makes all of the decisions. You don't want to tell the manager that you are mentally struggling or your right hamstring is a little tight because the manager may take you out of the lineup for a day or two to rest up. And as we've seen before, a starter can lose their job so easily by being out of the lineup and replaced by a younger player. Think of Casey McGehee replacing Bill Hall or Lorenzo Cain replacing Carlos Gomez. But I digress...
The other knock on Roenicke is that he is from the American League (like Ken Macha) and that he will play AL style baseball with a NL team. Not so fast. Yes, the Angels are in the AL, but they do play more aggressive baseball by stealing bases, setting up the hit and run, getting productive outs by sacrificing runners over and generally manufacturing runs. He's going to have his hands full teaching a bunch of free swinging home run hitters to play small ball, but we arguably have one of the fastest teams that we have ever had in franchise history. There's no doubt in my mind that Braun, Hart, Weeks, Escobar, Cain and Gomez each should easily steal more than 10 bases with the majority approaching if not going over the 20 base mark. If he allows his players to be more aggressive on the bases, we won't have to sit back and rely on the long ball to bail us out. And we saw how much our feast or famine offense hasn't worked in the past, so it's time to take a new approach. And what better than a new way of playing baseball with a new philosophy from a new manager to do it.
With all that having been said, I can come up with more reasons why Roenicke is a good hire... but I'm not going to. And least not right now. I've written far too much pertaining to a man that I have never seen manage a game for our team and that I know little to nothing about. Why is why I'm asking you to give this guy a chance before you give up on him and the Brewers. As you can see with the Milwaukee Bucks this year, it takes time for a new philosophy (a defense first mentality) and cohesiveness and teamwork (with new players) to take effect. These kind of things don't happen overnight and it may be until mid-season until we are operating at full speed. Same thing goes for the Brewers. First off Roenicke has to come in and lay down his ideas and managerial style. Then it is up to the players to buy into his style and put it it action. Most people wrote off Rick Petersen after the first few months of the season because our pitching didn't improve, but although it was a small sample size, our pitching staff had the 3rd best ERA in the major leagues in the month of September. This may be just a fluke, but if the players believed and trusted in his approach to pitching and got better as a result of it, aren't you glad that we still have him around? The baseball season is very long, and all that you have to do is stick around .500 for the majority of the season before making a push in the final half. Hopefully we can do that while both the players and Roenicke learn on the job and work together as one.
So it might be a couple of months into the season or even a full year before we can start to examine if Roenicke was a good hire and is a good fit for the team, but all I'm asking is that you give him a chance. If you believe as I do that the Brewers are kind of in a mini rebuilding mode, then you can't expect them to be a playoff team on Opening Day 2011. I appreciate the fact that you have high expectations and that you want your team to win because believe me, there is not too much more that I want in my life than to see the Brewers win the World Series, but you also need to stay ground and be realistic. It's not too hard to balance the two out. I think that is what being a true fan of the team is - you believe that every year your team has a shot and you root for them to win until they are mathematically eliminated but at the same time you are knowledgeable to understand their current situation. With the new focus in the minor leagues of drafting and developing our own pitching (which is something that should have been done years ago) and making adjustments at the major league level, I believe that the team is back on the right track after straying from the course during the "Asleep at the Wheel" years with Grandpa Ken Macha. All that we as Brewers fans did to do is be patient and believe. Why not be optimistic
and hope for the best? What do you have to lose? If the Brewers really are your team, don't you want to see them succeed? I know that you do, so give Ron Roenicke a chance to turn this ball club around. Now all of this once again is in my own opinion, but I believe that he is the right man for the job and we will return to the playoffs within the next 3 years. Because that is what I want. And once again I'm all in on the Brewers. I wouldn't have it any other way.
- pookon -
www.pookon.com
email: pookondotcom@gmail.com
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