Miami Marlins considered hiring actual managers to replace Mike Redmond

The Miami Marlins have been one of Major League Baseball’s worst teams in the first two months of the 2015 season, and that has led to the firing of third-year manager and unfortunate scapegoat Mike Redmond. After giving Redmond the axe, Jeffrey Loria and Co. pondered who to bring in to fill out lineup cards and continue to lose games in charge of a slacking roster, and for whatever reason they landed on General Manager Dan Jennings, who has absolutely no managerial experience on a baseball field outside of one season at a high school in the 1980s, or something.

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But what makes this circus even more hilarious now is the list of candidates Loria considered before landing on his dopey GM as the “answer.” Per Craig Calcaterra of NBC Sports’ Hardball Talk, Loria considered long-time actual MLB managers Dusty Baker, Ron Washington, and his own former puppet Ozzie Guillen to take the reigns after Redmond’s dismissal. Any one of these potential hires (one of which is still on the club’s payroll, Guillen, who was similarly axed after one season, the doomed 2012 Marlins Park debut campaign) would have made even a smidgen of sense over Jennings.

I mean, observe the managerial résumés for the potential candidates:

Dusty Baker: 20 years, 840-715 (.540), 1 NL Pennant
Ron Washington: 8 years, 664-611 (.521), 2 AL Pennants
Ozzie Guillen: 8 years, 678-617 (.524), 1 World Series Championship
Dan Jennings: 0 years, 0-0 (.000) at any professional level

But #LoriaMagic exists on Twitter as a hash tag for a reason, and his penny-pinching ways continued as he opted not to tack on any more payroll for a manager that would have actually made some logical sense. Nope. Jennings it is, even though he could have brought Guillen back and continued to pay him what he’ll be paying him anyway through this season, which is the final year of the four-year contract he inked with the Marlins prior to 2012.

Of course, this is assuming Guillen would have actually been willing to give Loria a second chance. I’m sure he fully knows what the Marlins owner is capable of, and if he actually gave him a phone call, I wouldn’t blame Ozzie for immediately hanging up the phone or declining the call altogether.

The Marlins are 12 games below .500, half the team is on the disabled list, and as the clichéd dog days of summer draw nearer they don’t have a legitimate manager in the clubhouse. Other teams’ managers are pointing and laughing at the ineptitude that is the Marlins organization, and the team is probably destined for another losing record and bottom-of-the-NL-East finish. I’m not even convinced Dan Jennings will finish the season as the Marlins skipper, but that’s just me, and that gut feeling is completely unsubstantiated. But this is Jeffrey Loria we’re talking about, and he’s been known to make rash decisions on a whim and swap out personnel more frequently than the seasons change.

We’ll see.

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