Six weeks after his surprising decision to walk away from the final two years and at least $4 million remaining on his contract, former Padres manager Mike Shildt is joining the Baltimore Orioles organization.
According to a report from MASNsports.com, Shildt will work as an upper-level minor league instruction coordinator.
Shildt’s return to his roots in player development is not surprising, though the timing might be. Shildt told the Union-Tribune shortly after announcing his retirement that he hoped to land in player development after some indeterminate time away.
Shildt was 183-141 in two years as the Padres manager, leading the team to back-to-back postseason berths for just the second time in franchise history. The Padres were eliminated in five games by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLDS in 2024, and this year were bounced in three games by the Chicago Cubs in an NL Wild Card Series.
The 57-year-old Shildt’s decision to retire came less than two weeks after the Padres’ season ended. He had two years left on his contract, but he cited a “severe toll” that the job had taken on him both “mentally and physically” as reasons to step away.
“It’s time I take care of myself and exit on my terms,” Shildt said in a letter to the Union-Tribune.
Shildt later revealed he’d received death threats late in the season. He also later said he was “tired of dealing” with the “stress and inability to please everybody” while responding to reporting that his style had worn out many members of the Padres’ coaching and support staffs and others in the organization.
The issues, Shildt said in October, were “eerily similar in the two places I’ve managed.”
The Padres originally hired Shildt as a player development consultant in January 2022 after his sudden dismissal from the manager’s job in St. Louis, where he was 252-199 in four years.
Shildt is one of eight men since 1900 to become a manager without playing professional baseball. His teams have all won at least 90 games in the four full seasons he’s managed. He took over in San Diego in 2024 after Bob Melvin left to manage the San Francisco Giants.
Shildt worked his way to the top job in St. Louis after serving as a scout and then a manager in the system. He was brought on to the big-league staff in 2017 as a third-base coach and eventually replaced Mike Matheny as the interim manager in 2019.
Shildt has longtime ties to the Orioles. The Charlotte, N.C., native spent a chunk of his childhood working for the Baltimore Orioles’ Double-A affiliate. The Charlotte O’s also employed Shildt’s mother, Lib, as an executive assistant to the minor league club’s general manager.
In those years, Shildt rubbed shoulders with the likes of Cal Ripken Jr., Cal Ripken Sr. and Grady Little. He wore jersey No. 8 with the Padres and Cardinals as a tribute to the younger Ripken, baseball’s “Iron Man” and a 2007 inductee into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
