Bruce Bochy cements legacy with fourth World Series ring

Bruce Bochy was apparently sitting on his couch at home in Nashville last winter when he got a call from Texas Rangers GM Chris Young, asking him if he’d be interested in coming out of retirement to manage a team that hadn’t made the playoffs since 2016 and lost 196 games over the previous two seasons. Less than 12 months later, Bochy was on a stage in Phoenix, Arizona, drinking in the aftermath of a World Series title after those same Rangers defeated the Diamondbacks in five games.

It’s the stuff fairy tales are made of — or it would be, if it weren’t exactly the sort of thing Bochy has made a habit of throughout a managerial career that has now reached some awfully rarefied air. A run-of-the-mill backup catcher over parts of nine seasons as a Major League player, his resume over more than a quarter-century in the dugout now looks like this:

• He’s one of just six managers to win four World Series, joining Casey Stengel (7), Joe McCarthy (7), Connie Mack (5), Walter Alston (4) and Joe Torre (4). Of that group, only Bochy won titles with multiple teams.
• He led the Giants to their only World Series titles in San Francisco.
• Prior to coming to San Francisco, he led the Padres to their first pennant in 1998 (and still just one of two in franchise history).
• He’s now tied with Dusty Baker for fifth on the career postseason wins list, but his postseason winning percentage of .602 is better than everyone but Torre.
• The Rangers’ win over the Astros Game 7 of the ALCS moved Bochy to 6-0 in winner-take-all games, and he’s now won 14 elimination games as a manager.

It’s become fashionable now to downplay the role of a manager in the success or failure of a team, and surely there’s some truth to that — the games are won and lost by the players, and these days front offices have more input on in-game strategy than ever before. But at a certain point, you have to stop believing in coincidences: Bochy’s teams are almost always competitive, and they almost always deliver in the biggest moments.

They also, to a man, have nothing but affection for their leader; just look at the way the Rangers celebrated this win with Bochy in the locker room.

That’s more than your standard player-manager relationship, and its impact is hard to measure in any box score. The Rangers endured more than their fair share of adversity this season. They lost Jacob deGrom for the season after just six starts. Nathan Eovaldi missed most of the second half, then struggled upon his return in September. Max Scherzer missed the last three weeks of the regular season and the first two rounds of the playoffs. Corey Seager played in just 119 games. Texas lost 16 of 20 at one point, and eventually lost the AL West in game 162.

Through all of that, Bochy’s demeanor never wavered. He stayed the course as he always does, and his team clearly followed his lead, hitting the ground running once the postseason started and never looking back. Bochy often gets cast as an old-school personality, and he certainly cuts that figure when you listen to him. But he pushed just about every right button in these playoffs, massaging a pitching staff whose reliable options could be counted on one hand with fingers left over. and many of those moves were decidedly new-school in application, using starters like Dane Dunning and Jon Gray in unconventional roles and landing on a successful late-inning formula with Josh Sborz and Jose Leclerc.

There’s plenty of credit to go around for how these Rangers went from 100-plus losses to a world title in three years’ time, from Young to acquisitions like Seager, Eovaldi and Marcus Semien to young talent like Josh Jung and Evan Carter. But it’s also hard to see that talent coalescing the way it did without Bochy at the controls, his hand as steady as ever. His time in San Diego and San Francisco had already secured his place in baseball history; this fourth championship, however, should make him a legend.