Milwaukee Brewers Fire Ron Roenicke, Hire Craig Counsell

Photo © Mike McGinnis/Getty Images.

After starting the season a league’s worst 7-18, the Milwaukee Brewers have decided to fire Ron Roenicke. The decision was finalized by GM Doug Melvin, following the team’s 5-3 victory over the Chicago Cubs.

As for why did they do this following a two-game winning streak? “This came together fairly quick,” Melvin told reporters. “You can look at the two or three games and say we played better, but we looked at it how we performed over the entire month [of April] and how we performed over the course of the last 100 games.”

“I told him, ‘I wish he would have fired me a week ago, instead of right when the team started playing well,'” Roenicke said to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “That bothered me.”

In his first year with the Brewers, the manager posted a franchise best 96-66 record with the team, making it as far as the NLCS before losing to the St. Louis Cardinals. But since the 2011 campaign, the Brewers have had three disappointing seasons in a row, posting a combined record of 239-247 and failing to make the playoffs.

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To be fair, Roenicke did have to deal with the media circus following the Ryan Braun saga, which resulted in the star player being suspended for the final 65 games of the 2013 season. But that can only excuse so much, as Roenicke failed to regain any of the success seen during the team’s 2011 campaign. For instance, they were in first place for majority of 2014, yet collapsed at the end of the season with an 11-25 closing record.

So even though the Brewers finally improved over the last few games, Doug Melvin obviously felt it was time for a fresh start. And the GM has already picked his replacement, longtime journeyman Craig Counsell.

Now even though the two-time World Series winner has virtually zero managerial experience, he served as a special assistant to Melvin in 2012, which makes this hire the least bit surprising. On top of this, he spent his last six years in the MLB with the Brewers, meaning he knows the organization fairly well.

He already won his first game last night against the Los Angeles Dodgers, but only time will tell if this was a good move.

As for Roenicke, he finishes his tenure with an all-time coaching record of 342-331.