Milwaukee Brewers Fire Manager Ron Roenicke
The Major League Baseball season is only a month old, but the Milwaukee Brewers have fired manager Ron Roenicke after starting the season 7-18, which is the worst record in baseball.
Roenicke seems to be the scapegoat for players as well as problems that he did not even have control over.
Doug Melvin the General Manager and President of the Brewers announced the firing just hours after the Brewers beat the Chicago Cubs on Sunday 5-3.
The Brewers have scheduled a Monday news conference to announce that Craig Counsell will replace Roenicke, according to multiple sources.
Melvin told the media that the decision came quickly. He added that the club played better the past few games, but over the first month and the past 100 games overall it has not been that good.
In just over four seasons, Roenicke compiled a record of 342-331 as the manager of the Brewers. The win on Sunday gave Milwaukee its first two straight wins of this year and the first win of a series. Prior to this year, the most games the Brewers needed to win consecutive games were 18 back in 1972.
Melvin said the team could not wait to see if the season could be turned around after the past three games. He said he and Roenicke were frustrated with how the team had performed and had talked about it.
Roenicke for his part was stunned with the timing of the change. He said he told Melvin that he wished he had been fired last week and not when the team had started to perform well. That he said bothered him.
When he was asked to come to Melvin’s office on Sunday night he figured it would not be good.
During 2011, his first season as a manager in the Majors, Roenicke led Milwaukee to a record of 96-66, the best in the history of the franchise. They lost that year to St. Louis in the National League Championship series.
However, after taking Milwaukee to the NLCS during 2011, the team has missed the postseason since.
Melvin told reporters the team was not throwing in the towel on the season and hopes the change would turn things around.
He said that the way players perform tells the team which direction they need to head and it is the job of management to get the most from the players on the roster day in and day out.
Roenicke played eight seasons in the major hitting .238 with 17 home runs and 113 runs batted in over 527 games. He played with Cincinnati, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, and the Los Angeles Dodgers, before retiring and going into management.
