Giants manager Bruce Bochy announced Monday that he will retire after the 2019 season. It's definitely going to be weird seeing someone other than Bochy in the Giants' dugout. Simply not having him as a big-league manager will be different. He's managed the Giants for the past 12 seasons and before that he had a 12-year run with the Padres. The last season he wasn't managing a ballclub was the strike-shortened season of 1994.
It won't be long after his retirement that Bochy is up for the Hall of Fame via a veteran's committee vote and he'll surely get in with ease.
With 1,926 career wins, Bochy ranks 11th on the all-time list. He trails 10 Hall of Famers and has more wins than Hall of Famers Casey Stengel, Tommy Lasorda, Earl Weaver and Miller Huggins, among others.
The regular season success is obviously part of the equation, but Bochy's postseason work is what makes him such a no-brainer Hall of Famer. He won the 1998 pennant with the Padres. Speaking of that franchise, the Padres have been around since 1969. They have only made the playoffs five times. Four of those came on Bochy's watch.
Stop to think about that one for a second. In 37 seasons when Bochy wasn't the manager, the Padres made the playoffs one time. In Bochy's 12 seasons, the Padres made the playoffs four times.
Of course, then there is Bochy's run with the Giants that includes World Series championships in 2010, 2012 and 2014. Before that run, the Giants hadn't won a World Series in San Francisco.
The only managers to win more than Bochy's three rings are Joe McCarthy, Stengel, Connie Mack, Joe Torre and Walter Alston.
Those World Series-winning Giants teams obviously were good, but they didn't really have dominant regular seasons and ran up against several teams with more overall talent. Lots of different players stepped up with huge postseason performances, but Bochy also had a knack for pulling the right levers and putting his players in a position to succeed.
The resume isn't yet complete, of course. Bochy has one more year and if he wins at least 74 games, he'll hit 2,000 wins for his career. That's not necessarily an important milestone, but it's noteworthy.
Regardless, Bochy will take his rightful place in the Hall of Fame in the coming years thanks to his excellent 25-year managerial career.
