Rockies fire Bud Black after nine seasons as manager
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The Colorado Rockies have announced that manager Bud Black and bench coach Mike Redmond have both been fired. Warren Schaeffer (previously the club's third base coach) will serve as interim manager for the remainder of the season, and hitting coach and ex-manager Clint Hurdle will become Schaeffer's interim bench coach.
«Our play so far this season, especially coming off the last two seasons, has been unacceptable. Our fans deserve better, and we are capable of better,» Rockies owner Dick Monfort said in an official press release. «While we all share responsibility in how this season has played out, these changes are necessary. We will use the remainder of 2025 to improve where we can on the field and to evaluate all areas of our operation so we can properly turn the page into the next chapter of Rockies Baseball. I want to thank Bud Black and Mike Redmond for their contributions to the organization across their eight years here. I appreciate their hard work and dedication and wish them nothing but the best going forward.»
The 2025 campaign was Black's 18th as a big league manager, with nine seasons apiece with the Padres (from 2007-15) and Rockies (2017-today).
Black has winning records in only four of those seasons, as his 1193-1403 career record is broken down as a 649-713 record in San Diego and a 544-690 mark in Colorado.
While the numbers aren't in Black's favor, his overall effectiveness as a manager is still somewhat hard to gauge. The Padres were in a rebuilding phase for portions of Black's tenure, and the Rockies' issues are so myriad that it is hard to single out Black as a particular reason for the club's extreme struggles.
Black's arrival in Denver marked the Rockies' last successful stretch, as the club reached the postseason as a wild card in his first two seasons as the skipper (and Black won NL Manager of the Year honors in 2017).
Since then, however, the Rox have reeled off six straight losing seasons, and the 2025 season already seems like the seventh in that increasingly dismal stretch of baseball.
Colorado is already coming off the two worst seasons in franchise history, after losing 103 games in 2023 and 101 games last year.
Of course, player effort doesn't overcome a marked lack of talent on the roster. Colorado's struggles have been exacerbated by lack of action from the front office, as the Rockies haven't done much to either clearly upgrade the team, or to go in the other direction of blowing things up for a full rebuild.
Monfort has often been accused of being both too optimistic about his team's potential and too insular in his hiring practices, which has left the Rockies seemingly lagging behind the rest of the league not just on the field, but also in terms of analytics, scouting, player development, and other front office practices.
Since Monfort's statement painted 2025 as an evaluation year, it could be that the Rockies' brutal start has finally inspired a broader change of direction at Coors Field.
What this might mean for Schmidt (a longtime staffer who became interim GM in 2021 and then the full-time GM after that season) remains to be seen, or if the Rox will perhaps explore a fire sale at the trade deadline.
Schaeffer has been a member of Colorado's organization dating back to his playing days, as he was a 38th-round draft pick in 2007 and spent his entire six-year playing career in the Rockies' farm system.
After retiring from the field, he turned to coaching and managed three different Rockies affiliates from 2015-22, and Schaeffer then became the big league third base coach prior to the 2023 season.
While first-time MLB managers are rarely stepping into an ideal situation, the 40-year-old Schaeffer faces a tall order in trying to salvage anything from the 2025 Rockies' season.
At this point, perhaps just avoiding a record number of losses would count as a minor triumph, even if another 100-loss season seems inevitable.
Schaeffer will have an experienced voice to help him in Hurdle, who managed the Rockies from 2002-09 and led the franchise to its only World Series appearance in 2007.
Hurdle also managed the Pirates from 2011-19 before retiring, and then returning to baseball in his special assistant role during the 2021-22 offseason.
Redmond and Black were hired in the same offseason, so Redmond had been Black's chief lieutenant throughout the manager's entire tenure in Denver.
A former 13-year veteran of the big leagues, Redmond is perhaps best known for his own former managerial stint with the Marlins over the 2013-15 seasons.
It was almost exactly 10 years ago to the day that Redmond was fired after Miami posted a 155-207 record during his time in the dugout.
SOURCE: MLBTR
| POLL | ||
MAI 11 | 56 ANSWERS Rockies fire Bud Black after nine seasons as manager Is Bud Black done as an MLB manager or will he catch on somewhere else? | ||
| Yes he will get hired elsewhere | 26 | 46.4 % |
| No he is done | 18 | 32.1 % |
| Too early to tell | 12 | 21.4 % |
| List of polls | ||
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