In a sense, every manager is year-to-year. Baseball is extremely hard and extraordinarily rich in ways for things to go wrong, and firing a manager when things go wrong is the simplest way for an organization to signal to fans that it is addressing those things. It doesn’t work, really, because managers only do so much, and are generally not the reason why bad baseball teams are bad. If your home had a bunch of highly aggressive opossums in it, making a big disappointed show of taking the “No Hissing Allowed” sign that you bought at HomeGoods out to the curb would not solve it. But it would signal to people standing outside wondering what the deal is with the opossum house 1) that the person living in that home is aware that the opossum situation is not great and 2) that they believed an insufficiently forceful sign was the problem.
Here is a more direct example: The Los Angeles Angels have had four managers over the last five seasons, during which the team has won 77, 73, 73, 63, and 72 games. During the first three of those seasons, the team had Shohei Ohtani on the roster; in none of them was the team meaningfully in the wild card mix in September. GM Perry Minasian has been around for all five of those campaigns, as has Kurt Suzuki, who spent the last two seasons of his 16-year MLB career as the team’s backup catcher before moving into a front-office role as one of Minasian’s special assistants. The Angels have been bad for even longer than that; it has been 11 seasons since they played a postseason game, 16 years since they won one, and a decade since they finished with a winning record. More striking than that is that they have been bad in more or less the same way for more or less that whole time.
