The case for each Manager of the Year Award finalist

It takes sudden success or an utterly dominant season to win a Manager of the Year Award. All six of the candidates up for the 2023 honor fall into either one of those categories.

In the American League, one manager oversaw a dramatic turnaround from last season – and ended up with a World Series ring – while the other two battled it out for AL East supremacy all year.

In the National League, one manager led perhaps the best lineup in recent baseball history and two skippers helped their teams outperform preseason expectations.

Here's a look at the case for each of the six Manager of the Year Award candidates before the winners are announced Tuesday on MLB Network at 6 p.m. ET.

• Past winners of Manager of the Year

AMERICAN LEAGUE

Bruce Bochy, Rangers

Bochy’s return to the dugout in 2023 could not have gone any better.

The Texas Rangers, of course, won the World Series, but this is a regular-season award, and Bochy’s résumé is still as good as anyone’s.

Bochy guided the Rangers to the largest increase in regular-season winning percentage from 2022-23 in the Majors, going from 68 wins to 90. Texas was at or near the top of the American League West all season, missing out on the division crown on the final day of the season through a tiebreaker with the Astros.

Despite a big offseason, which saw the Rangers bring in Jacob deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney, Texas was expected to be on the fringes of the AL playoff race. FanGraphs’ ZiPS and Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA both projected the Rangers to have fewer than 80 wins and be a significant step behind the Astros and Mariners in the division.

The Rangers were injury-riddled all season. Corey Seager missed the first month and a half with a hamstring injury. deGrom’s season ended in June. Eovaldi also missed time. The team also had to integrate three key contributors — Max Scherzer, Jordan Montgomery and Aroldis Chapman – after midseason trades. And yet, the Bochy-led Rangers persevered.

In 26 years as a big league manager, Bochy has one Manager of the Year Award with the 1996 Padres and has finished in the top three in voting five other times. Yet more than a quarter-century into his managerial career, this season just might be his greatest masterpiece yet. -- Dylan Svoboda

Kevin Cash, Rays

Nobody has made a better case for Cash than his boss, Rays president of baseball operations Erik Neander.

“The job that he did, and that our staff did, this year to guide this team to 99 wins -- this is, in my opinion, the best work that they’ve done,” Neander said recently. “And Cash is at the front of that.”

That’s high praise, considering Cash has already earned two AL Manager of the Year Awards during the Rays’ run of six straight winning seasons and five consecutive trips to the postseason.

The argument in Cash’s favor this year is not necessarily based on wins, since Brandon Hyde led the Orioles to an AL East championship over Cash’s Rays. Nor is it about beating preseason expectations, because Hyde and the Rangers’ Bruce Bochy oversaw incredible turnarounds while Tampa Bay was widely expected to contend.

What made Cash’s performance stand out was the way he guided the Rays through an incredible amount of adversity to the AL’s second-best record. They lost All-Star shortstop Wander Franco in early August yet posted the Majors’ third-best record from Aug. 1 through the end of the season.

They had 23 players spend 1,429 days on the injured list, with 16 pitchers being injured at least once, and had to use a total of 58 players, including 10 making their Major League debuts. They lost three-fifths of their starting staff to season-ending injuries. Only five players from the Opening Day roster remained active all season, in fact.

The Rays’ success was a testament to their depth and the players themselves, of course. But Cash provided the steady presence they needed to get through it all. -- Adam Berry

Brandon Hyde, Orioles

"Nobody gave us a chance at the start of this year. Nobody,” Hyde said when toasting his club’s American League East title on Sept. 28. And the 50-year-old Baltimore skipper was right.

Entering the 2023 season, the Orioles were projected to go 80-82 by FanGraphs’ ZiPS system and 74-88 by Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system. Many pundits predicted Baltimore would not reach the postseason, even after it finished 83-79 in 2022.

Instead, the Orioles recorded an AL-high 101 wins to capture their first postseason berth since 2016 and their first AL East championship since '14. They were one of only three MLB teams to reach the century mark in victories, along with the Braves (104-58) and Dodgers (100-62).

Hyde served as a great leader for a resilient Baltimore team that paced MLB with 48 comeback wins, never lost more than four consecutive games and never was swept during the regular season. The Orioles’ streak of 91 consecutive multi-game regular-season series without getting swept (which dates back to May 2022) is the third longest in AL/NL history.

How rare is it for a Baltimore manager to guide the club to a 100-win season? Before Hyde, only one had accomplished the feat: Hall of Famer Earl Weaver, who did so five times. The ’23 O’s 101-61 campaign was the fifth best in team history, dating back to the move to Baltimore in 1954.

It’s been a remarkable turnaround for the Orioles, who had been rebuilding since Hyde was hired prior to the 2019 season. They became the first team in AL/NL history to go from 110-plus losses (52-110 in ’21) to 100-plus wins in a three-season span. -- Jake Rill

NATIONAL LEAGUE

Craig Counsell, Brewers

Not since Joe Girardi in 2006 has a Manager of the Year Award winner been on the move, but Counsell has a case. Before moving to the Cubs in a stunner, Counsell, 53, ended the season as the NL’s longest-tenured manager with his hometown Brewers, having led the team to its fifth postseason appearance and third division title in the past six seasons.

During his eight full seasons as manager, including rebuilding years in 2016 and ’17, the only NL clubs with better regular-season winning percentages were the Dodgers and Braves. Yet he’s never won a Manager of the Year Award. He was runner-up in 2018 and ’21, when, like this year, the Brewers won the NL Central.

Counsell never had the highest payroll, but his teams almost always beat projections, whether from FanGraphs, which runs tens of thousands of computer simulations based on projected statistics and strength of schedule to predict a club’s win-loss record, or by Pythagorean record, which projects a record based on run differential.

By FanGraphs’ version, only twice in Counsell’s eight full seasons as manager did the Brewers underperform. The first was in 2020, when everything was skewed by the shortened schedule. The other was 2022, when the Brewers wilted after the Josh Hader trade. In three other seasons, Counsell’s club outplayed the projection by double-digit wins.

This year, the Brewers reached their projected win total (86) with 10 regular-season games to go and finished plus-six wins over FanGraphs’ projection. -- Adam McCalvy

Skip Schumaker, Marlins

It's one thing to promise to build a winning culture and another to follow through.

First-time manager Schumaker inherited a 93-loss ballclub and boldly stated the Marlins would compete despite being in a division with the 101-win Braves, 101-win Mets and NL champion Phillies.

After shocking the baseball world by going 14 games over .500 at the All-Star break, Miami lost a season-high eight games to open the second half. The Marlins dropped below .500 on Aug. 30, then captured series victories over the postseason-bound Dodgers, Phillies, Brewers and Braves. They dealt with key injuries, in particular to Sandy Alcantara and Eury Pérez, down the stretch.

Miami still wound up reaching the postseason in a full season for the first time in 20 years and secured the NL's fifth seed. The Marlins became the first team since the 2009 Twins to sit below .500 that late in a season and make the postseason in a 162-game slate.

While it's difficult to quantify a manager's impact, Schumaker pushed the right buttons. Miami reversed its one-run fortune from an MLB-worst 41 losses in 2022 to an MLB-best win percentage (.717) in '23. Schumaker's decision-making was magnified due to those close games, in large part because of NL's lowest-scoring lineup.

He played matchups and monitored his young rotation's workload. And the Marlins in turn embodied their skipper’s scrappiness with comeback wins in 48.8 percent of their victories. -- Christina De Nicola

Brian Snitker, Braves

Max Fried finished second in balloting for the 2022 NL Cy Young Award and Kyle Wright was MLB’s only 20-game winner in 2022. Despite this duo combining for just 21 starts in 2023, the Braves won 104 games and sat in first place in the NL East at the end of every day beyond April 2. Closer Raisel Iglesias, veteran catcher Travis d’Arnaud and reigning NL Rookie of the Year Michael Harris II also missed all or most of April.

Snitker’s even-keeled approach helped the Braves persevere and march toward a sixth consecutive division title in convincing fashion. Atlanta tallied an MLB-best 104 wins with the help of an incredible offense that matched an MLB single-season season home run record and produced a .501 slugging percentage, a mark never previously reached by an AL/NL club. The offense took off in the middle of June, when Snitker moved Matt Olson from the second spot to the middle of the lineup.

Olson hit .324 with 36 homers, 94 RBIs and a 1.113 OPS in the 94 games played after the switch was made on June 15. The Braves scored 592 runs during this span. The Dodgers ranked second with 530 runs over the 94 games they played going back to the day of the switch.

Even with two of his top starters out, Snitker had the pleasure of telling Spencer Strider and Bryce Elder they had both earned their first All-Star selections. Strider lived up to the expectations he created during his great rookie season. Elder began this year as Triple-A Gwinnett’s Opening Day starter and then benefited from the confidence Snitker gave him after he came up during April’s first week to fill a rotation void. -- Mark Bowman