Hot seat? 6 managers under scrutiny in '24

With the Dodgers and Padres playing the two-game Seoul Series in South Korea on March 20-21, the 2024 MLB regular season will be upon us before we know it. (Full Opening Day action is set for March 28). So today, we continue our weekly series of season previews, breaking down major storylines from the perspective of all six divisions.

Previously: The team in each division with the most at stake in 2024.

Today: The manager in each division with the toughest job.

At some point in your life as a baseball fan, you have -- out of cold logic or, more likely, furious, steam-coming-out-of-your-ears unbridled emotion -- yelled “Fire the manager!” Wanting your manager dismissed is a grand baseball tradition, even for the greatest managers.

One of my favorite pieces of trivia is that before last year, the last Cardinals team to finish in last place in its division was the 1990 Cardinals … which was in fact managed by three future Hall of Famers. (Whitey Herzog, Joe Torre and Red Schoendienst. Torre would be fired five years later and replaced by another future Hall of Fame manager, Tony La Russa.) The skippers who ended the decades of fan torture by winning World Series in Boston and Chicago in 2004 and 2016? Both eventually let go. As longtime big league manager Leo Durocher once said, “If you don't win, you're going to be fired. If you do win, you've only put off the day you're going to be fired.”

This all to say, managing is a tough job, no matter how good you are at it, and falling short of expectations -- even if it’s not the manager’s fault -- is forever a pressure point. So, today in our 2024 MLB Season Preview, we look at the team in each division whose manager has the toughest, most stressful job this year. This doesn’t necessarily mean the manager who will lose the most games; expectations are very different in, say, Washington than they are in Philadelphia. It means the manager with the most on the line, the one with the most eyeballs on them, the one who will consistently be facing the toughest questions in every postgame press conference. If this season doesn’t work out, they could be in trouble. And if it does, they’ll be a hero … for a while, anyway.

AL East: Aaron Boone, Yankees
7th season with NYY (82-80 in 2023)

If Yankees brass were to follow the well-considered advice of your average WFAN caller, Boone wouldn’t have made it this long. It’s also possible that if this weren’t the last year of his current contract -- with a team option for next year -- he might not have. Needless to say, there’s no manager in baseball under more pressure in 2024 than Boone, who became the first Yankee manager to lose 80 games in a season since Buck Showalter’s first season (76-82) way back in 1992 -- the last time the Yankees finished with a losing record.

Fun fact: The last Yankees manager before Showalter to lose 80 games or more and return the next season was Ralph Houk back in 1971. (He was fired two years later.) Boone isn’t personally responsible for keeping his players healthy, which has been the primary problem for a couple of years now, but he has certainly been in for his share of second-guessing in The Bronx as well. The stakes are pretty simple at Yankee Stadium this year: show vast improvement, or changes could well be made. Everything’s on the line for Boone, Brian Cashman and the Yankees this year.

AL Central: A.J. Hinch, Tigers
4th season with DET (78-84 in 2023)

Even allotting for the one-year suspension Hinch served in the wake of the Astros' sign-stealing scheme, that the Tigers were able to hire a World Series-winning manager heading into the 2021 season felt like a little bit of a coup. Detroit had lost 114 games in 2019, the previous full season. A step backward for Hinch felt like a huge step forward for the Tigers. But the Tigers have had losing seasons in all three years of Hinch’s tenure, and a couple of those years, particularly 2022, the Tigers came into the season with high expectations. (They would end up losing 96 games that year.)

The Tigers have been aggressive this offseason, adding Kenta Maeda and Jack Flaherty to their rotation and Mark Canha to their lineup. Optimism is reasonable, considering how much young talent is starting to finally show up on the roster and how winnable this division seems to be. (The Tigers lost 84 games in 2023 and still finished in second place). But if they underachieve again, fingers will inevitably start pointing at Hinch. “The good times are coming for Detroit,” Hinch said when the Tigers hired him. In his fourth season, it’s probably time.

AL West: Joe Espada, Astros
1st season as MLB manager

When Dusty Baker decided to retire at the end of the season, there wasn’t a soul in Houston surprised to see Espada take over. He’d been the Astros bench coach since 2018, he is deeply trusted both by Astros brass and the players and he'd barely missed out on jobs with other teams the last few offseasons. He’d essentially been training for the job for years, and he’s clearly qualified and prepared.

But another thing Espada has learned in his years as bench coach is how much different that job is than sitting in the big chair. Espada is now in charge of a team that is considerably older than it was when he arrived in 2018, with a fanbase that has gotten downright used to playing in the ALCS every year, and why wouldn’t they? The Astros have reached seven in a row. That’s a great tradition to have when you walk into your first managerial job. The problem is that if your first team doesn’t reach the ALCS -- which, despite how the Astros have made it seem the last few years, is actually quite hard to do -- everyone’s going to point at you, the new guy. Espada looks, from all accounts, to be ready for the big job. He had better be.

NL East: Dave Martinez, Nationals
7th season with WSH (71-91 in 2023)

I could have gone with Rob Thomson of the Phillies here -- it’s never good when your team lets a 3-2 lead in the NLCS slip away like that -- but Martinez is an intriguing case. Obviously, he has a World Series ring with the franchise, which goes a long way. Then again, it only goes so far, for so long. The time comes for everybody, and while the Nats have certainly had a massive amount of turnover following that Series win -- losing a number of star players in the process -- it should be said that they’ve finished in last place every season since. (They tied the Mets for last in 2020.) You can only finish last so many times before fans start stirring.

Martinez got a two-year contract extension last August, but that felt more like providing some certainty during what was a very uncertain time for the franchise. This is a young team that is building but also spinning its wheels a bit. Is Martinez the guy to navigate the Nats into their next era? At the very least, it might be nice to not finish last for the fifth year in a row.

NL Central: Oliver Marmol, Cardinals
3rd season with STL (71-91 in 2023)

To be as clear as possible: The Cardinals do not want to change their manager. They have done plenty of that over the last few years. This is a franchise that had three full-time managers (Whitey Herzog, Joe Torre and Tony La Russa; again, all Hall of Famers) over a 31-year span from 1980-2011. They’ve had three (Mike Matheny, Mike Shildt and Marmol) since, and, you might have noticed, no World Series titles.

One thing they did have in 2023 was a last-place finish, the first time that has happened since 1990. While it isn’t Marmol’s fault the Cardinals’ pitching imploded, there were many eyebrows raised with how situations with both Tyler O’Neill (since traded) and Willson Contreras were handled. The Cardinals invested heavily in their rotation and bullpen this offseason and have much faith in their young lineup to make big steps forward. They plan on winning this division this year, which happens to be the last year of Marmol’s contract. Few managers had a tougher year in 2023 than Marmol did. Few need a strong start to 2024 more.

NL West: Dave Roberts, Dodgers
9th season with LAD (100-62 in 2023)

OK, OK, so hear me out. I understand your skepticism of this pick. Adding Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow to a team that already had Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman and a bevy of young talent … we should all have such tough jobs! But that’s the thing: The Dodgers have leveled up to the point that anything other than winning the World Series is going to be a massive disappointment. And despite 11 consecutive playoff appearances (eight of which were with Roberts at the helm), the Dodgers, quite famously, only have one World Series title during that stretch, and it was one they won in a shortened season.

Now, I’m on record as saying that that title should count as much as any other -- you can make an argument it was even harder to win that title -- but I’m very much in the minority. Around baseball, and even within the Dodgers, there’s a sense that they have to win a full-season championship to silence any lingering doubters. Obviously the Dodgers feel this way; they just spent wildly to make sure they did so.

So now they have to do so. Betts is signed through 2032, Ohtani through 2033 and Yamamoto through 2035. They’ve got a decade’s worth of chances to win a World Series; they’re not going anywhere. Roberts, though? A guy whose postseason decisions have come under quite a bit of fire in the past? He’s hardly so certain to be around that long. The Dodgers are desperate to win a World Series. Everyone assumes they’re going to win a World Series. The players are openly discussing their plans to win the World Series. So get out there, Dave, and win a World Series. Or else.