Hot seat season arrived on schedule. The reporting out this morning lays out the MLB managerial changes 2026 could bring, a run of skippers possibly working their last homestand and front office executives waiting on a conversation nobody wants to have. Late September always does this. The standings stop being a question and start being a verdict.
I don't have the full list of names in front of me yet, and I'm not going to guess at who's walking the plank, because that's somebody's job and somebody's family. What I can tell you is what the shape of these decisions usually looks like. It is rarely about tactics. A manager who wins gets called a genius for the same double switch that gets a losing manager called stubborn. What actually moves these calls is the gap between what a roster cost and what it produced, and whether the room still sounds like it's listening.
Which brings you straight to Queens. The Mets are out of October again, and they are out on a payroll that would make a small country blush. That is the loudest version of this story in the sport right now, because when the spending is astronomical and the finish is ordinary, somebody has to stand at a podium and explain the arithmetic. Picking up the pieces for 2027 starts with deciding who gets to hold them.
checked the almanac: the Yankees let Casey Stengel go after the 1960 World Series, ten pennants in twelve years on his ledger, and he said he'd never make the mistake of being seventy again. dry as a bone, and true. winning a lot has never been the same thing as job security in this game.
What comes next is the part I'll be watching. Teams that have already made up their minds tend to go quiet, and the quiet is the tell. The clubs still playing meaningful baseball get to postpone everything, which is its own kind of luck. Atlanta took the opener from the Cubs 6-3 on Tuesday night in Chicago and the two of them go again Wednesday evening at Wrigley, and for one more day nobody in that dugout has to think about résumés.
The firings will come in a cluster, they always do. I'll be watching which front offices get named alongside the managers, because that is when a team is admitting the problem was bigger than the lineup card.
