Wild Card baseball is here!

The baseball managerial firings have begun. So far:

The San Francisco Giants let go of Bob Melvin (three-time Manager of the Year). This is mildly surprising since they picked up his 2026 option back in July. But apparently, he didn’t win enough games after that, so Buster Posey decided to move on. The early rumors have Posey looking in the direction of some classic old timers — I’ve heard the names of Dusty Baker and Bruce Bochy bandied about — and, well, um, that’s a plan, I guess.

The Minnesota Twins fired Rocco Baldelli (one-time Manager of the Year). This is probably not surprising; the Twins were a big disappointment in 2025. Was this Baldelli’s fault or the fault of ownership/management that spent no money and seemed to have no plan? Irrelevant! It’s always the manager’s fault. I suspect Baldelli will get another chance, probably sooner rather than later.

The Texas Rangers and future Hall of Famer Bruce Bochy (one-time Manager of the Year) split ways after three mostly successful seasons — hey, pennants fly forever. The Rangers already have Skip Schumaker (one-time Manager of the Year) in the organization, so you would suspect they have a tidy succession plan.

Kevin Stefanski has now been head coach of the Cleveland Browns for six seasons — well, this is his sixth season. That makes him the longest tenured Cleveland Browns coach since … well, why don’t you take a guess? You probably know instinctively that none of the 11 other guys who have taken the job since the Browns came back to Cleveland in 1999 made it to Season 6. 

And before they left Cleveland in the first place? Bill Belichick lasted five seasons. Bud Carson lasted two. Marty Schottenheimer made it through four and a half.

So you have to go all the way back to Sam Rutigliano — Happy Sam made it through six and a half seasons before the team gave up on him. Sam was fun! Until he wasn’t! 

KevStef has never been fun, but that isn’t his raison d'être. No, his mission was and is to bring back some respectability to a team that had lost all of it, and when you think about this team’s ownership and management, you’d have to say that he’s been reasonably successful in doing so. He’s calm. He’s steady. He calls reporters by their first names. He generally hires competent assistant coaches. You get the sense that Stefanski would be the friend you would call if you found a life copperhead snake in your basement. 

“I’m on it,” he’d say, and you’d breathe easier knowing he was indeed on it.

Thing is, Stefanski has now been coaching this team for so long that, during games, I hear his voice in my head. For example, the Lions thrashed the Browns 34-10 on Sunday. Methuselah, um, I mean Joe Flacco, threw two interceptions and also fumbled. The Browns’ special teams gave up a punt return for a touchdown and also missed a field goal. 

And with each mistake, I heard the Stefanski platitudes in my mind.

“It’s frustrating,” Stefanski’s voice in my brain said. “You can’t turn the ball over three times and expect to beat a good team on the road.”

“It’s frustrating, Mary Kay,” real Stef said in the postgame press conference, “because we know you can’t do those things and expect to win on the road.”

“We all have to do better,” Stefanski’s voice in my brain said. “We have to play better. We have to coach better. That includes everyone.”

“We all share in those things,” real Stef said. “We all own it, and we all have to be better.”

“I have to coach better,” Stefanski’s voice in my brain said.

“I have to get those things fixed,” real Stef said.

“I’m not going to talk about specifics when it comes to the quarterback or any individual player,” Stefanski’s voice in my head said. “We have to play as one. We all have to do better.”

“I understand the question,” real Stef said. “But that’s not our focus. … To be successful on offense, we have to play as one. We had too many, uh, things that caused us to, uh, not have success.”

“I appreciate the question,” Stefanski’s voice in my head said, “but I’m not going to talk about game plans.”

“We had a plan,” real Stef said. “We have to do better.”

And so on. 

We have often laughed here about the banality of Kevin Stefanski’s press conferences, but the act really grows stale now. You can’t just keep telling that same joke about airplane food forever. At some point, you have to freshen things up. How long can you say, “We have to coach better” before people finally wonder: “Wait, are you CAPABLE of coaching better?”

But then, I suspect Stefanski’s not saying any of that because he believes it. He’s saying that to take the fall for this organization’s massive failings. The Browns’ problem isn’t that they’re not coaching well enough. The Browns’ problem is that they don’t have a quarterback, and they don’t have playmakers, and they don’t have depth, and they have no space under the salary cap to get any of those things. They’re talking now about starting rookie Dillon Gabriel on Sunday in London against the Vikings. Hey, you hope for the best, but is it realistic to think that changes things?

No, it’s not. Nobody wants to hear this, but his team continues (and will continue) to pay the price for one titanic and unforgivable blunder. They had a quarterback — he’s playing Pro Bowl-level football in Tampa now. They had the draft picks to add depth and find playmakers — they threw those draft picks away. They had plenty of salary cap space money that they decided to give to He Who Shall Not Be Named.

Apparently, nothing will ever happen to the owner or executives who made that titanic and unforgivable blunder. But our guy Stefanski has to stand in front of the media weekly after embarrassing losses and take all the blame for this team’s incompetence. That will help him keep his job for a while longer. But not forever.