When it was posted yesterday morning on X.com by Matt Jones out of Kentucky that Craig Stammen was the new manager:
My first reaction was this couldn’t be serious considering we hadn’t heard anything about him being a candidate and Stammen not having any managerial/coaching experience. There had been talk of a fourth mysterious candidate outside of Albert Pujols, Ruben Niebla and Nick Hundley so at that point it didn’t seem that far-fetched if he was the person.
Then the Padres announced it an hour later:
Once the shock wore off and I started reading more coverage of it, I could see why he was the choice. All four candidates that were finalists didn’t have MLB managerial experience (granted Pujols had experience managing in the Dominican Republic league) so any candidate was going to need to learn on the job and have a good experienced staff around him.
And with how highly people speak of Stammen as a leader and people person and how he’s worked in the Padres organization since 2023, I could see AJ wanting someone who knew how the organization worked, its philosophy and how the players are (especially guys like Machado and Tatis who he’s played alongside) to maintain that continuity like they did with Mike Shildt.
Of course, the other side is maybe it’s time to do something different to break up that continuity because depending on how you look at it, it’s either a good or bad thing how the Padres have been lately. Good that since 2020 the Padres have had more success than any other time in franchise history (four playoff trips in six years) but bad in that it still hasn’t resulted in winning the World Series.
I don’t have as much of an uproar about it as other people since it wasn’t like we were realistically choosing him over Bruce Bochy (which would have been great as previously mentioned) so anyone was going to be new in this role. And superstars like Pujols generally haven’t translated well into managerial/front office roles since it’s hard for them to relate and understand the mindset of all players on the roster, since they can’t understand the difficulties that journeyman players have.
So that’s generally why you see a lot of managers being players who were role/bench guys become managers and head coaches. While pitchers haven’t really been managers before and he has no experience, that to me is the unconventional part of this hire, which I don’t mind as much to try something different. So I see it as combination of both something to be stable and unconventional which is on brand for AJ Preller.
There’s been plenty of guys with limited or no experience coaching and managing like Steve Kerr and JJ Redick in the NBA and Aaron Boone and Mike Matheny in MLB. Of course, there have been plenty of other spectacular failures with new guys, just look at Andy Green and Jayce Tingler that AJ hired. So it’s a crapshoot regardless of which way it goes but I’m open to seeing how it plays out with Craig Stammen before bashing the move already like others are doing.
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