Bob Brenly has sometimes wondered if the sparkle from the ring he won for managing the Arizona Diamondbacks to the 2001 World Series title has faded into irrelevance.
Seven of baseball’s 30 teams have managerial openings. Four teams changed managers in the 2010 season — a nearly 40 percent turnover within a calendar year. While the recycled likes of Buck Showalter and Jim Riggleman were hired for a fourth time each, Brenly has had one interview, with Milwaukee, since 2006. He doesn’t expect any more after turning down what he viewed as a courtesy invitation from General Manager Jim Hendry to apply for the Cubs’ job.
“I didn’t feel I was a serious candidate,” Brenly said, “and I think Mike Quade deserves a full shot to see what he can do.”
Quade, the Cubs’ interim manager, had a 24-13 record after taking over for Lou Piniella in August. Looming over the Cubs’ search is the presence of Ryne Sandberg, who burnished his Hall of Fame playing credentials by spending four years managing in the Cubs’ farm system. Ryno believes he’s ready for Wrigley Field, and it will be hard to tell him no.
Brenly has (and does) a great job as the Cubs’ television analyst, having completed six seasons with Len Kasper, his partner in the booth. It wasn’t easy following Steve Stone, the highly popular baseball savant whose stormy departure from the Cubs in 2004 was an affront to the team’s fans. But Brenly has won over the most disgruntled of them with wit, candor and a first-rate baseball mind. He would have been viewed as a credible candidate to succeed Piniella if he chose to pursue the job.
“It just didn’t feel right,” he said. “Jim understood. We’re still friends.”
Brenly hasn’t worked in a major league dugout since July 2004, when he was fired 33 months after the Diamondbacks’ high-wire victory over the Yankees in the 2001 World Series. After seven wildly fluctuating games, the series ended with Mariano Rivera, the Yankees bullpen chieftain, suffering the only postseason loss of his career. Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson won four games in the series. Brenly enhanced the 43 wins he got from them in the regular season with deft handling of his 25-man roster.
“I told the team in spring training that we’d play our bench guys enough to keep them sharp and our regulars fresh,” he said. “Everybody bought into it, and we didn’t wear down at the end of the season.”
Yet the imposing presence of the two pitching giants overshadowed Brenly’s adroit lineup maneuvers.
“I think there’s a perception among general managers that I had Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson at their peak, that anybody could have won with them and I was just a push-button manager,” Brenly said. “But there’s a lot involved with managing two divas, believe me, and they only pitched two games out of every five. Somehow we were able to win a lot of those games they didn’t pitch.”
The Diamondbacks won another National League West title in 2002 and finished third in ’03. A disastrous trade for Richie Sexson before the ’04 season was Brenly’s undoing. Arizona sent a six-man package of players and prospects to Milwaukee for Sexson, a 29-year-old slugger who hit nine homers in his first 23 games, then tore up his shoulder and missed the rest of the season. The Diamondbacks were struggling with a 29-50 record when Brenly was let go.
“In hindsight, I wish I’d spoken up more to oppose the Sexson deal,” he said. “It destroyed our depth, which had been the key to our success. And we overvalued our replacement players.”
Being fired is rarely a career-ender for a manager — it has happened to five of the eight skippers in this year’s postseason, and each of the other three is working his first job. But Brenly waits.
Only four active managers have a higher winning percentage than his .536 mark. He’s ahead of such dugout geniuses as Tony La Russa (.535), Piniella (.517) and Jim Leyland (.496), who have been at it a lot longer, and have managed far better than the nondescript Ned Yost (.477) and Manny Acta (.385), each of whom got a second chance.
Brenly is a proud guy, and the competitor in him would like to expunge the memory of the bad ending in Arizona. But at 56, he’s realistic enough to understand it might not happen, and secure enough with who he is to be O.K. with it.
“I’ve always been a firm believer in staying in your lane,” Brenly said. “If you’re hired to do a job, do it to the very best of your ability, and if everybody does that we’ll be fine. I’m very fortunate to have the job I have. Wrigley Field might be the best baseball atmosphere there is.”
The view from the dugout can seem enticing at times, but Brenly sounds as if he can live without it.
“It’s a lot less stressful sitting up in the booth talking about what might have happened rather than being accountable for what did happen,” he said. “It sounds trite, but I know what we did in 2001, and nobody can take that away from me.”