Skip Schumaker will not return as Miami’s manager in 2025, reports Jeff Passan of ESPN. His tenure with the Fish concludes after two seasons.
The Marlins announced during Friday night’s win over the Blue Jays that Schumaker would return home to attend to a family health matter. Bench coach Luis Urueta will be the interim manager for the final two games of the season, tweets Isaac Azout of Fish on First. Passan writes that Schumaker informed Miami players that he would not be back next season after tonight’s game.
That couldn’t have come as much of a surprise to anyone on the roster. Schumaker has seemingly been on his way out of South Florida for months. Former general manager Kim Ng hired Schumaker — who’d been the bench coach in St. Louis — to replace Don Mattingly going into the 2023 season. He’d initially signed a two-year deal with a club option for 2025. Once the Marlins and Ng parted ways last offseason, Schumaker reportedly expressed frustrating with the organization’s direction. The Marlins agreed to void the ’25 option year as a result, giving the 44-year-old the opportunity to pursue other opportunities after this season.
The front office overhaul came within weeks of Miami surprisingly punching their ticket to the postseason. The Fish overcame a negative run differential to win 84 games and snag a Wild Card spot in 2023. While they were swept by Philadelphia in the first round, the unexpected postseason berth earned Schumaker the NL’s Manager of the Year award in his debut season. It was the team’s first playoff appearance in a 162-game schedule since their 2003 World Series title.
Owner Bruce Sherman was nevertheless dissatisfied with the organization’s recent misses in the draft and some ill-fated free agent moves (e.g. Avisaíl García, Jean Segura). Sherman tabbed former Rays GM Peter Bendix as president of baseball operations — a move that would’ve effectively relegated Ng to second in the front office hierarchy. After Sherman informed Ng of his plans to hire a baseball ops president, she declined her end of a mutual option and moved on.
Bendix never seemed confident that the Marlins could replicate something approaching last year’s success. The Fish had a quiet winter — their only MLB free agent signing was a $5MM rebound flier on Tim Anderson — and seemed ticketed for another rebuild. A disastrous 0-9 start sealed their fate within the first two weeks of the season. Miami traded Luis Arraez in early May and followed up with a major deadline sell-off involving most of their relievers, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Trevor Rogers, Josh Bell and Bryan De La Cruz. Were it not for a devastating series of rotation injuries, they’d likely have torn things down even further. Jesús Luzardo and Braxton Garrett would have been clear trade candidates if healthy.
Bendix’s skepticism about the short-term outlook has been borne out in this year’s results. The Fish lost 100 games for the fourth time in franchise history. They’ll either finish with the second- or third-worst record in MLB. (They’re one game behind the Rockies at the bottom of the National League.) At the same time, it’s entirely unsurprising that Schumaker preferred not to embark on a multi-year rebuild orchestrated by a new front office months after leading the team to the playoffs.
More to come.