How should teams hire MLB managers?
The final part of our series on Major League managers examines the hiring process to see if there's a better way.
I don’t think it’s an accident that most professional sports have head coaches while baseball has managers.
Unlike other sports, managers aren’t designing schemes, calling plays, or overseeing a specific unit. In most cases, they aren’t running drills or providing daily instruction. The job is less about coaching and more about, well, managing. It’s about managing personalities, information, relationships, and expectations over the course of a long, grueling season.
That doesn’t make the role easier or harder than a head coach’s job. But it does make it different, and harder to evaluate and hire for using traditional screens.
This series stemmed from a few curiosities about managers in Major League Baseball. I wanted to know who teams hire and if any obvious traits or experiences actually predict success. What we’ve learned is that teams hire from a fairly narrow profile, visible qualities don’t tell us much, and teams cycle through managers at an extremely high rate.
While interesting, these findings don’t offer anything definitive. Hiring a manager is always a high-stakes decision that comes with uncertainty and pressure. The data can tell us what hasn’t been especially informative, but it doesn’t suggest what teams should do differently.
From here, we can shift from results to reflection. Let’s take everything we’ve learned and walk through how we might structure a reimagined managerial hiring process.
Experience
Experience is an understandable place to start when hiring a manager. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, resumes aren’t terribly informative. People develop very different skills and capabilities even when they’ve held similar roles for similar lengths of time.
I’m more interested in evidence of leadership than in any particular career path. That could come from managing in the past, leading a department in a front office, or operating in a completely different environment altogether. Baseball is treated as uniquely insular, but the core demands of the managerial role aren’t unique to the sport. In that sense, leadership may be more transferable than we tend to assume. If we believe that, it opens up the range of candidates worth considering.
Skills, Traits, and Ways of Thinking
If experience isn’t particularly predictive — and the job of a baseball manager is fundamentally different from that of a head coach — then hiring decisions need to shift away from background and toward the skills, traits, and ways of thinking that actually drive success in the role.
That sounds straightforward in theory. In practice, it’s more complicated. Traits like communication, curiosity, adaptability, and relationship-building are harder to define and harder to evaluate than years of experience or past titles. Two people can watch the same interview and come away with very different impressions.
I saw this firsthand during a managerial hiring process I was part of. We identified ten characteristics we wanted to evaluate and independently ranked candidates across each dimension. Our lists were kept separate until interviews were complete, specifically to reduce groupthink. When we compared rankings, I was surprised to see significant differences with a colleague I usually aligned with. When we dug in, the discrepancy wasn’t about how we assessed the candidates’ abilities. It was entirely about how important we believed each trait was.
That experience clarified something essential: identifying desirable traits isn’t enough. Hiring requires figuring out how those traits are weighted relative to one another. No candidate is going to be exceptional across every dimension. It’s important that teams are able to compare people with different strengths.
That isn’t to say that teams should design a rigid scoring system and blindly follow it. But it does mean their process should be structured enough to surface these differences early and intentionally, rather than discovering them accidentally at the end.
I would prioritize traits that are hard to teach and costly to miss on such as relationship-building, a willingness to communicate directly, curiosity, and adaptability. Other qualities like critical thinking, in-game decision-making, and comfort with the media matter, but they’re more teachable. A manager who is open and adaptable can make better bullpen decisions over time. It’s far more difficult to make someone trustworthy.
Interview format
Once we establish the leadership traits we want to prioritize, it’s critical to design an interview process that allows those traits to actually surface. That’s easier said than done, as many of the qualities teams care most about are going to be contextual, relational, and highly subjective.
The risk in most interview settings isn’t the questions themselves, but formats that are safe and conventional — and limit what candidates can actually reveal.
With the caveat that I don’t know the rigor or structure of every managerial hiring process league wide — I’ve generally seen baseball operations interns put through more taxing and comprehensive screening than managers. Inertia and pride make it hard to design a process that feels appropriate for well-known and highly accomplished candidates.
The same process I mentioned above utilized a two-hour written portion the candidates would complete in-person the morning of their interview. I thought it was reasonable to supplement the rest of our process with these questions, but when news got out, it was unthinkable to most that we would ask so much of the candidates.
That highlights the importance of ignoring outside noise and pressure to design a process that more closely resembles the job itself. That might include scenario-based discussions that introduce ambiguity, exercises that require candidates to piece together information in real time, or conversations that test how they’d navigate disagreement. It could also include more outside the box things like utilizing group interviews to see how people interact outside a one-on-one setting.
I would think intentionally not only about structure, but also about who is involved in the interview process. This is a major organizational decision to hire a leader who will touch and oversee a lot of people. The decision on who to hire will come down to a small handful of people atop the organization, but that decision should be influenced by a wide range of perspectives. I would minimally consider including all of the following:
Front Office Staff - GM, AGMs, Director of Baseball Operations, Director of R&D, Pro Scouting Director, Advance Scouting staff
Performance Staff - Head ATC, Head S&C Coach, Director of Performance Science, Director of Mental Health & Performance
Player Development Staff - Farm Director, ML Coaches, MiLB Coordinators
Clubhouse and Travel Staff - Clubhouse Manager and Director of Team Travel
Players - 2-5 Major League players, preferably veterans with some influence
Players are the group that I’ve rarely seen included and it’s sort of indefensible to me. A manager needs to be able to establish trust, have difficult conversations, and inspire confidence with people in the clubhouse — why wouldn’t we want to get their feel for those things during the hiring process? And don’t we think involving them — even if we don’t go with their choice — would make immediate buy-in far more likely?
The process wouldn’t be fast or comfortable. And that’s the point. It would utilize a number of tried and tested interview staples — like rubrics, independent scoring, and skill assessments — and include a wide range of people. Our process won’t eliminate risk, but it should increase the likelihood that we’re evaluating things that will predict success.
Supporting the Hire
If we consider experience appropriately, identify and value the traits that matter, and design a thoughtful interview process, we should make a good hire, right? Maybe. Hopefully. But even then, a great deal of uncertainty remains.
That’s where organizations can make a difference. Hiring a manager isn’t just about selection; it’s also about what happens once the decision is made.
What I tend to see is that once a hire is made, organizations offer surprisingly little in the way of structured support. Outside of getting deeply involved in in-game decision-making, many teams largely leave managers to figure out the rest of the job on their own.
It reminds me of Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell’s sentiment on quarterback development. O’Connell said, “I believe that organizations fail young quarterbacks before young quarterbacks fail organizations.” When I look at the turnover in managerial hiring, it’s hard not to see a similar dynamic at play.
Support starts with clarity and autonomy. Managers benefit from explicit expectations around decision-making authority, communication norms, and how disagreements will be handled. General managers and managers are responsible for different things. Those boundaries should be clearly defined and then respected.
Beyond that, support should focus on the parts of the job that are the hardest to develop. Rather than being critical and overly-involved with in-game decisions, organizations can add more value by coaching managers on building relationships, navigating difficult conversations, and dealing with stress. They can hire coaches that complements the manager’s strengths and addresses their weaknesses. They can expose the manager to front office processes since we saw that experience shows some signal as far as who will be successful.
In an ideal world, our new hire would have a meaningful runway to settle in, learn on the job, and find their footing. But we know that decision won’t always be in our control. Finding ways to support our new manager will make it all the more likely that we’re happy with our hire rather than designing a new process for a replacement.
This series began with simple questions: who gets hired to manage Major League teams, and what predicts success once they do? They didn’t lead to perfect answers because there is more than one blueprint for a successful manager.
What we did instead was challenge some conventional assumptions and move toward a different way of thinking about the role. A way that places less emphasis on background and more on how we can evaluate, hire, and support managers over time. Hiring a manager isn’t a single, discrete event. It’s the beginning of a longer commitment that plays a meaningful role in shaping whether the decision ultimately succeeds or fails.