The Battle Between Bob Melvin, A's Owner John Fisher and Market Conditions

In an analysis of managerial salaries and how they are heading down as owners find less and less reason to reward them and more and more reason to transfer that money to general managers, USA Today's Bob Nightengale informs us that Oakland's Bob Melvin, whom you would think is among the poorest compensated in keeping with the Athletics' general policy of penury, is actually in the top ten.
 
Indeed, at $2.5 million per annum, Melvin is the third-highest-paid manager without a World Series title:
 
1T. Mike Scioscia, Los Angeles Angels: $6M
1T. Joe Maddon, Chicago Cubs, $6M
1T. Bruce Bochy, San Francisco Giants: $6M
4T. Terry Francona, Cleveland Indians: $4M
4T. Buck Showalter, Baltimore Orioles: $4M
6. Ned Yost, Kansas City Royals: $3.7M
7. Clint Hurdle, Pittsburgh Pirates: $3M
8. Bob Melvin, Oakland A's: $2.5M
9. Don Mattingly, Miami Marlins: $2.4M
10. John Gibbons, Toronto Blue Jays: $1.7M
 
Of the other nine men here, Showalter, Mattingly and Gibbons haven't reached a World Series. In other words, they've all earned their raises.
 
And while the A's are still neck-deep in a redemptive playoff argument even while going through a new round of disappearing starting pitchers (Sean Manaea and Brett Anderson have been disabled in successive days, reducing their rotation to Mike Fiers, Trevor Cahill, Edwin Jackson and PTBNL-times-two), Melvin's contract beyond next year is a point of occasional media worry. He has maintained Oakland's dignity in the lean years, helped engineer this year of overachievement and in general salvaged the team's reputation in the city at a time when the team needs the city more than ever.
 
But this isn't another making-the-case column; his deeds have more than done that, and if owner John Fisher sees a need to clean out the baseball operations department even at this giddy stage, well, he'll have asked for it.
 
More to the point, there is the matter of how much stability and competence in the face of difficult circumstances gets you these days. 
 
Melvin will finish the seventh full season of his tenure here, repeating a history of managerial stability. The A's have had only five managers in 32 years (going back to the start of the Tony La Russa regime), and only three franchises (Atlanta, Minnesota and San Francisco) have been more reluctant to change managers. In that way, Melvin's retention seems not only prudent but normal, even if he keeps his office thin on homey touches just in case.
 
But if Fisher believes that the salary requirements for managers is correcting downward (and the outside evidence suggests as much), maybe Melvin's situation in Oakland is less solid than events would warrant. Maybe the fight won't be about regime change as much as it is market conditions.
 
Or maybe there won't be a fight at all. Maybe Fisher understands, as Billy Beane seems to, that Melvin is an ideal fit for the job as it morphs through the new baseball to the new Oakland – the Oakland that doesn't have the Raiders or Warriors, the Oakland that will house the as-yet-chimerical new stadium that is supposed to be the long-term security of a franchise that has lived (with only Baseball Ops as the surviving exception) with insecurity as its most constant bedfellow.
 
Maybe, in short, market conditions don't apply here; I mean, market conditions never really have applied here, so why change now when things seem to be going so cheerily?

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