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Speculation: Miami Marlins Manager Mike Redmond Soon To Be Fired?

By Sean Millerick |

History Says Marlins Skipper Could Be Ousted Anytime 

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Once upon a time, there was a baseball team that entered a season with some modest expectations due to an impressive off-season by their standards and a promising home-grown core of remarkable talent.  They flirted with .500 for the first month of the season, before slumping to a 16-22 record after the first couple weeks of May.

As a result, the manager that had inspired so much cautious confidence after a surprisingly successful campaign the previous season was fired.  What followed was a magical wonderland of a season that was worthy of the most fantastical of story books.

The team won a World Championship against a team with three times their payroll, thanks to a fiery but lovable manager old enough to have given Abner Doubleday some advice on what to do with that stick and ball he’d just found. The ownership was awash in warm fuzzy feelings, and felt all the hardships it had endured to that point were at once vindicated.

The magic of sports, and especially baseball, is that stories like the one above allow one to believe in the majesty of the improbable; because it technically did happen before, it can and should happen again.

As the 2015 season approaches its quarter pole, sample sizes are becoming large enough to rationally react to. Twelve years removed from that miraculous title run (the story at the top was about the 2003 World Champion Florida Marlins in case you missed it) the 2015 Miami Marlins once again find themselves offering a lot of reasons for concern in a season that was supposed to be offering fans a far different sensation.

16-22. If the Atlanta Braves can complete the sweep of the embattled Fish Sunday afternoon, Mike Redmond will find himself staring at the business end of the same record that got his former skipper Jeff Torborg fired, thus allowing cigar-puffing Jack McKeon to walk into Marlins and MLB history.

All the evidence since 2003 has shown that this is a franchise immensely proud at the top of its history. Over the years, all talk has always been about recapturing, recreating, or redeveloping the magic of that 2003 run. Tenets of that team have generally been maintained or sought after as the only avenues to success.  In short, you can be certain that Jeffrey Loria and David Samson realize with crystal-clear clarity that little trivia nugget about the team’s current win-loss mark.

At 3-10, I speculated about there being two logical exit ramps on the Mike Redmond expressway. The first was if Miami lost their next series at that point. We all know about the rebound, where the Marlins won four consecutive series to seemingly save their season and certainly the job of their third year skipper.

The problem is the follow-up: four straight whiffs on winning a series, with questions resurfacing about late innings management.

One month later, Redmond rests on the same shaky ground.  With two series and seven games remaining in the home stand after Sunday’s contest, this feels like the time a club would want to make a change.  At home, less distraction, time to adjust, etc.

The second exit was the Torborg record- that 16-22 mark. What Miami did in 2003 was just about record-setting in its awesomeness. Falling too far- if at all- beneath that line struck me as having the potential to set off all kinds of alarms. Well, consider them set.

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While it is true that club actually did drop as low as 19-29, before putting up that best-in-baseball record the rest of the way, shooting for doing that twice would be a risky strategy indeed.  Plus, that initial 10 game stumble was on the ledger of the new manager. Torborg never got the chance to plunge the Marlins ten games under. Smart money says that unless superstar Giancarlo Stanton hurts himself hitting home runs too far this week, Redmond doesn’t either.

If you want further reason to believe his seat is heating up once again, note that one of the few reasonable excuses he had going for him was the loss to injury of two All-Star pitchers.  He gets one back Sunday.

Should Miami blow a game late for Henderson Alvarez, you should expect there to be plenty to talk about next Twitter Tuesday.

Next: Alvarez Back, to Start Sunday

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