Closer Look at Why Cooper Was Fired

To sum, Cecil Cooper got fired not because he’s the worst MLB manager ever, or because he led a team with high expectations to a 70-80 record. No, he got fired because his veteran team lost confidence in him early on in his tenure, his tactical decisions concerning things like bullpen usage, walking/not walking batters (think Nick Johnson to get to the much less fierce-some Hanley Ramirez), the utilization of the hit and run and stolen base as well as his total lack of communication skills all laid a little bit of dirt on his managerial grave.

More than anything, it was the lack of communication between manager and team that concerned me the most. As a general rule, most managers cannot consistently help their teams win games. Over the course of many seasons, the best managers are those that only cost their team a few wins per season, rather than a handful. Nobody expected a man with no major league managerial experience to take this team to the top.

I’ll concede the fact that Coop was put in an extremely unenviable situation, one where it would have taken a ton of moxy, a great deal of luck and a supremely good media presence to wiggle his way out of an escape smelling like roses. Cecil Cooper may be a good man, an honest man, and a baseball man through and through, but there are qualities that professional coaches need to embody in 2009 in order to be successful, and he just doesn’t have them (or at least never exhibited them).