Image via Nashville Sounds
It remains to be seen when baseball’s 2021 minor league season will start and what the schedule will look like, but once players report to camp many of the faces they’ll see will look extremely familiar.
When the Brewers announced their minor league coaching staffs last week it included all four managers from the organization’s top affiliates returning for 2021. That’s hardly a surprise: The last time the Brewers changed a manager on a full-season team was five years ago. At the Brewers’ top affiliate, the backdrop will change again but the manager will not: 2021 will be former MLB catcher Rick Sweet’s 31st season as a minor league manager and his seventh leading the Brewers’ AAA club. Sweet has been managing minor league teams for so long that eight of the franchises he once led either no longer exist or are no longer affiliated clubs: the Bellingham Mariners, Wausau Timbers, Osceola Astros, Columbus Mudcats, Tucson Toros, Ottawa Lynx, Portland Beavers and Colorado Springs Sky Sox.
Sweet is no stranger to changing addresses, but this will be his fourth time doing it with the Brewers organization: He took over as their AAA manager before the franchise’s last season in Nashville in 2014, then spent five seasons in Colorado Springs before relocating to San Antonio in 2019 and now back to Nashville. His teams have posted winning records in four of his six seasons with the Brewers.
Winning Records
The “newest” full season manager in the Brewers organization is at AA Biloxi, where Mike Guerrero starts his fifth season at the helm. Guerrero has 14 seasons of minor league managerial experience, all with the Brewers, and his only break was to take another job within the organization: He served as a coach at the MLB level in 2014 and 2015.
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Like Sweet, Guerrero has been doing this long enough to have an extensive managerial record in places that no longer host MiLB teams: From 2006-11 Guerrero managed in West Virginia (where the Power were eliminated from affiliated ball in this winter’s purge), Brevard County and Huntsville. The Biloxi Shuckers have posted a winning record in each of Guerrero’s four seasons and played in the Southern League championship series in 2018 and 2019.
Meanwhile, the Brewers’ “new” manager at the High-A level isn’t new to the organization, either. The Wisconsin Timber Rattlers are moving from the Low-A to High-A designation this winter as part of the restructuring of the minor leagues but retain manager and former Brewers infielder Matt Erickson, who has been leading that club since 2011. Erickson, an Appleton native, is the winningest and longest-tenured manager in the Fox Cities’ seven decades hosting professional baseball. He’s often tabbed to help out at the big league level in spring training and following the end of the minor league season in September, and even played a few innings in the outfield during the Brewers’ Summer Camp intrasquad games in 2020. His Timber Rattlers won the Midwest League championship in 2012.
Finally, former MLB catcher and longtime Brewers minor league manager Joe Ayrault also returns for 2021 with the Carolina Mudcats. Ayrault has been the Brewers’ manager at the High-A level for the last eight seasons, leading the club’s final five years in Brevard County before moving to Carolina in 2017. Including three seasons in the Reds organization, Ayrault had managed 1509 games across eleven seasons at that level. This year the challenge changes a bit for Ayrault, as he and his staff will manage a low-A team for the first time and have the responsibility of getting players acclimated in their first taste of full-season baseball.
In recent years trends have shifted across the game relating to organizational progression: For much of the game’s history having managed in the minors was a pre-requisite to taking that position at the MLB level, with some organizations looking for aspiring managers to have at least 1000 games of experience before considering them for their MLB job. That’s no longer the case; it’s become increasingly common for teams to hire first-time managers without minor league experience, and sometimes without coaching experience at all.
While managing in the minors is no longer the only path to managing in the majors, it remains a critically important role in player development. Once the minor league season gets underway the Brewers’ top managers will have a wealth of experience to share: Combined, they’ve managed 8910 professional games across every level of the sport.
