No Guarantees That Miami Marlins Manager Clayton McCullough Sees The Good New Days

Welcome to May, unofficially known around these parts as Miami Marlins Fire Their Manager Month!

Now to be clear, the goal here is not to suggest current Miami Marlins manager Clayton McCullough is in any real danger of losing his job in 2025. The only expectations upon McCullough coming into this season were show up on time for work and refrain from cancelable social media posts. So far, so good! However, the Pittsburgh Pirates and Colorado Rockies have already fired a manager this season, and they couldn't have expected to do much winning this season either.

Plus, plenty of other seats around the league are getting hot as calendars turn to the summer months. At any rate, all this firing brought to mind the rich history of the Marlins firing a manager before Memorial Day.

On May 29, 2001, the Marlins fired John Boles.

On May 10, 2003, the Marlins fired Jeff Torborg.

On May 17, 2015, the Marlins fired Mike Redmond.

Of the five occasions Miami felt they couldn't wait until the end of the season to make a manager change, three of those moves came in May. As to how fair or worthwhile those moves were...well it's a mixed bag of results.

In the case of Boles (and yes, it was technically the day after Memorial Day), he was essentially fired because a veteran relief pitcher that had just joined the team threw a hissy fit. In the case of Redmond, he was fired because the front office was desperate, and possibly so in love with their past success that this very blogger was able to predict it was coming.

And then there was the time Torborg was fired in a hope to spark some life...and the Marlins won a World Series.

Again, two of those three times the team had very real postseason ambitions, and even Boles' squad was supposed to win more games than they lost. That's not McCullough's situation in 2025, but improvement will be expected in 2026. A nice guy that's a good teacher of the game he never played at the MLB level...there are some strong Boles comps to be drawn.

Additionally, there are numerous examples of major league clubs having one manager take all the blame and build up the team, only to hand over the reins to a more experienced manager with a proven winning pedigree.

Kind of like when the Marlins moved on from Boles the first time...and also won a World Series.

You can see the cause for concern if you're a McCullough truther.

Now you might be saying, but this team is supposed to lose. Probably next year's club too. Those same things could have been said of the Pirates and Rockies though. Granted, the last time those two teams were remotely competitive was 2018. Think how long ago that was for a moment. The MCU was still consistently good. No one's heart had been broken by Rise of Skywalker yet. No one outside of an epidemiology lab had heard of ay kind of Covid. Andrew McCutchen and German Marquez were still playing baseball.

Okay, bad example on the last one.

Point being though, Shelton and Black had technically been given multiple chances to win, even if the front office had done precious little to give them a realistic chance of doing so. Changing out managers is easier, and cheaper, than either admitting a team is trying to lose or owning up to the fact that ownership is too cheap to pay for the high end talent that makes winning games way easier on a manager. This is not just a Marlins thing by any means. Many teams do this, in multiple sports. Sometimes, it even works.

And most of the time that it does work is when front offices finally do try to win, and see a change at manager as the finishing touch.

Which might not bode well for McCullough lasting very long in the role. However, one thing he does have going for him is a seeming awareness on the part of Bruce Sherman that Miami's image had taken a real beating as a result of previous owner Jeffrey Loria constantly rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Loria did fire six managers after all, and saw a seventh resign from the job midseason. Loria had ten different managers in his 15 year tenure, not counting one game fill in Brandon Hyde (probably the next MLB manager to be fired btw). Only two of those former skippers either publicly endorsed Fidel Castro (Ozzie Guillen) or had never managed past the high school level (Dan Jennings). Which means that on the majority of those occasions, the manager probably wasn't the problem.

Sherman rode Don Mattingly into the ground in what I have to imagine was an effort to somewhat change that image. Plus, he had multiple winning seasons with the Dodgers and the 2020 Marlins season under his belt. All of a sudden though, Sherman is on manager number three in 8 years, and doing precious little to help manager number three fend off the cries for manager number four.

Bottom-line, the franchise track record here in Miami is still one of instability.

A little more thought went into the thinking that drove the Marlins to make those other changes, a mix of sound reasons and gross incompetence. Certainly, some of those same reasons factored into the one time it worked out historically well. Those are the brass-tack reasons, though, all of which were made possible by an impatient front office and a disappointing win-loss record.

In terms of losses, the Marlins have one of those ingredients right now. Only time will tell if they have the other.