Former MLB manager: Bruce Bochy isn’t coming out of retirement to manage the Padres

Ken Rosenthal, Eno Sarris, and Dennis Lin of The Athletic wrote a piece on Friday that discussed some of the inner workings of the San Diego Padres front office. There was a lot of information that was revealed in the article, so I’ll just provide the link to that here (subscription required).

One note that was included in the article was the sense of doubt among people in baseball that Bruce Bochy will come out of retirement to manage the Padres if Jayce Tingler gets fired. The article questioned whether experienced managers like Buck Showalter or Ron Washington would want to manage the team when the general manager is as hands-on as A.J. Preller is.

Another experienced manager who might not want to be San Diego’s next skipper is Bruce Bochy. “There’s no f—-ing way Bochy goes in and deals with all that,” one former manager said. “There’s no way.”

A reason that a former manager would say such a thing is because Bochy is en route to the Hall of Fame so if he were to be a manager again, he’d want full control of the lineup and in-game moves. It doesn’t sound like Tingler had that same control under Preller.

Preller was also described in the article as a micromanager and someone who doesn’t really welcome opinions opposite of his. One of Preller’s former staffers said that “Everyone of us has a blind side, a weakness we don’t see. You’d better get people around you to cover those weaknesses. And what [Preller] is consistently doing is removing the people who tell him he has a weakness and going to people who will not speak back to him about his weaknesses.”

Tingler is seen as one of those people who doesn’t push back against Preller, which was probably one of the reasons why Preller decided to hire him. That decision looks to have backfired, though, and is going to result in another managerial firing.

A veteran manager seems like the only route Preller can take in finding the next manager of the franchise.