Kansas City Royals: Mike Matheny should be next Royals manager

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(Original Caption) The Pittsburgh Pirates, 1925 World Champions, headed by Manager Bill McKechnie Photo by George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images) /

Major League Baseball

Way the hell back in 1913, the St. Louis Cardinals manager was a man named Miller Huggins. In five seasons with Huggins at the helm (four of them as player/manager), the Cardinals went 346-415. That’s, um, not good.

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He did better with his next team, the New York Yankees. A dozen years managing the Bronx Bombers vaulted him into the Hall of Fame as Huggins won six pennants and three World Series championships, including back-to-back titles in 1927 and 1928.

Around this time, the Cardinals named Bill McKechnie manager. In St. Louis, he won the pennant in 1928 (before losing to Huggins’ Yankees, lolz), but only lasted another 63 games with the Cardinals.

In 1938, he’d land with the Cincinnati Reds. The following year, he won the pennant again, and in 1940, his Reds won the World Series, McKechnie’s second World Series title (his first coming in 1925 with the Pirates). Like Huggins, he’s enshrined in Cooperstown, but not for what he did in St. Louis.

At the time McKechnie was winning big with the Reds, the St. Louis Browns (now Baltimore Orioles) were being led by Fred Haney. Like every manager before or after him with the Browns (save for Luke Sewell, who won the 1944 AL Pennant with the Browns, due at least partially, and maybe mostly, to the fact that America was involved in World War II and the playing field was inferior), Haney did little.

Fifteen years and two jobs later, Haney landed with the Milwaukee Braves. Under Haney, the Braves went to back-to-back World Series in 1957 and 1958, winning it all in ’57.

Finally, another Hall of Fame manager makes the list: Joe Torre. Torre managed the Cardinals for six seasons, from 1990-1995, but never made the postseason. The Cardinals replaced him with La Russa, who went on to lead the Cardinals to World Series victories in 2006 and 2011. But Torre doubled that with the Yankees, whom he managed from 1996-2007.

In that time, the Yankees won four World Series, one in 1996 and then three in a row from 1998-2000. He added another two pennants in 2001 and 2003. All told, he had a .605 winning percentage in New York compared to .498 in St. Louis.

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