When the Marlins’s main owner, Bruce Sherman, officially introduced Clayton McCullough as the club’s new manager he said he did not want an 18th leader and that the effort was to preserve the number 17 for many years, evoking a similar phrase as an echo of the past.
In the days when Don Mattingly took over the team, then-President David Sampson said he did not aspire to hire any other pilots and that he hoped the former Yankees captain would be last under his command.
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Later, Sampson and his boss Jeffrey Loria sold the franchise to a group led by Sherman and another ex-captain of the mules, Derek Jeter, kick another deep cycle of rebuilding that saw off a pair of figures who won the Most Valuable Players’s prizes like Giancarlo Stanton and Christian Yelich.
In different times Jeter, Mattingly and the man who came for this one, Skip Schumaker, McCullough arrives at a critical moment from another of those endless reconstruction cycles because baseball operations president Peter Bendix came fully on the payroll and changed until he got tired.
Competing with three powers like Atlanta, New York, and Philadelphia, with large payrolls and stars, seems an almost impossible task for not categorically claiming it is, leaving a slight window open to hope.
Breaking the cycle of losing seasons will be very complicated, although Mattingly and Schumaker did it once, but now the moments of Filis and Bravos, plus the resurgence of New York – with men like Bryce Harper, Ronald Acuna, and Francisco Lindor – show a very uncertain path in the next season.
Still, certain things, however minimal, can help McCullough his undeniable experience with young players in the minor leagues, his internship with a winning ensemble like the Los Angeles Dodgers champions, and his contagious joy contaminated with unwavering faith. However, there is another element that cannot be overlooked.
McCullough was picked directly by Sherman and Bendix, unlike Schumaker, who was in Little Havana before the arrival of the second and whose relationship with Kim Ng, the former who left, was notorious.
Human relationships are very important on any front of life, including baseball, where decisions are increasingly made in offices full of algorithms and equations.
McCullough, while still being a baseball man, full of intuition and critical eye, knows how much this sport has changed. Not for her pleasure Sherman and Bendix praised his leadership and his ability to be part of the team.
Speaking of human relationships, McCullough has always left a trail of a man who knows how to listen to the balls. That quality will have to serve him a lot when building bridges between the head office and the clubhouse, and sending that message that it is possible to compete, even if the stubborn reality indicates the opposite. Hopefully, as Sherman says, the 17th will last a long, long time.
