Bochy one of just 6 skippers to guide 4 World Series winners

What makes a great team? Well, having great players helps. But every team needs someone who can bring an entire clubhouse together and keep everything on track through the inevitable ups and downs of a long season. Knowing how to handle more than two dozen personalities is just as important as knowing how to properly utilize a bullpen. A good manager is part tactician, part psychologist, and does whatever possible to put their team in the best position to win.

Rangers skipper Bruce Bochy is one of those managers. Bochy won three World Series titles while managing the Giants, leading San Francisco to victory in 2010, 2012 and 2014. Bochy moved up this list again in 2023, as he managed the Rangers to their first World Series title in franchise history and added a fourth ring to his collection.

Bochy is one of 10 managers who have put their clubs in a position to win time and time again. Here is the list of managers who have won at least three World Series championships.

T-1) Joe McCarthy: 7 titles

Get ready for so many Yankees mentions throughout this article. Before McCarthy led the Yanks to seven championships, he guided the 1928 Cubs to the National League pennant. Four years later, he became the first manager to reach the World Series in each league as the Yankees swept the Cubs in a Fall Classic most remembered for Babe Ruth’s fabled "called shot" in Game 3.

Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio are a few of the legends who played under McCarthy as the Yankees won those seven titles in a 12-year span from 1932-43. Only one of those series went beyond five games. That outlier took place in 1936, when the Yanks bested the New York Giants in six games, outscoring them 43-23 in the process.

T-1) Casey Stengel: 7 titles

Bucky Harris was the Yankees’ manager in 1947 and ‘48, serving as the bridge between McCarthy and Stengel, who took over in 1949. From there, Stengel’s Yankees embarked on the most successful decade-long run for any franchise in MLB history. The Bronx Bombers won it all in each of Stengel’s first five years at the helm. The Yanks then topped 100 wins for the first time under him in 1954 but finished eight games behind Cleveland for the AL pennant.

Following that one-year Fall Classic hiatus, the Yankees reached the next four World Series, all of which went seven games, and featured one series win and one loss each against the Brooklyn Dodgers and Milwaukee Braves. Stengel won his 10th pennant, tying John McGraw for the most by any manager, in 1960, his final season with the game’s winningest franchise.

3) Connie Mack: 5 titles

Baseball has plenty of records that will never be broken, including Cal Ripken Jr.’s 2,632 consecutive games played and Cy Young’s 511 wins as a pitcher. You can put Mack’s longevity in the same category. After managing the Pittsburgh Pirates franchise for three seasons, he helped found the Philadelphia Athletics for the American League in 1901 and spent the next 50 years as their manager. He captured nine pennants and five championships during his time. His first title came in 1910. The last was in 1930. Mack was also a minority owner for the franchise’s 54-year existence in Philadelphia before it moved to Kansas City in 1955.

T-4) Bruce Bochy: 4 titles

Bochy was on the losing side of the 1998 World Series with the Padres, his first as a manager. After 12 seasons in San Diego, he ventured from Southern California to Northern California in 2007 to take over the Giants. He would get three more cracks at a ring over the next eight seasons. He won each time.

The Giants’ 2010 championship was the franchise’s first since relocating from New York in 1958. They raised the Commissioner’s Trophy again in 2012 and 2014. That final title run was highlighted by Madison Bumgarner turning in a postseason for the ages: Six earned runs allowed in 52 2/3 innings, including five shutout innings in relief on two days’ rest to close out Game 7 vs. the Royals.

In his first season with the Rangers, another of Bochy’s clubs booked an unlikely ticket to the World Series with a blowout win against the Astros in Game 7 of the 2023 ALCS. In their first trip to the World Series since 2011, the Rangers ran roughshod over the upstart D-backs, winning their first World Series title in a neat five games.

T-4) Walter Alston: 4 titles

Alston’s 23 seasons as a big league manager all came with the Dodgers, and he is the only person on this list to win the World Series for the same franchise in different cities. He helped bring home the Dodgers’ first title in 1955 as they dethroned the rival Yankees in seven games. When the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in ‘58, Alston came with them and delivered championships in 1959, 1963 and 1965, largely thanks to a pitching staff headed by Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale.

T-4) Joe Torre: 4 titles

Through his first 14 years as an MLB manager, Torre’s clubs had only one playoff berth and zero 90-win seasons. But once he joined the Yankees following the 1995 season, Torre’s 12-year tenure with the Bronx Bombers featured an average of 98 wins per year and a playoff appearance in every season. He capped his first season with the franchise’s first World Series title in 18 years. The Yankees then achieved a three-peat from 1998-2000. That ‘98 club was one of the best in baseball history as it won 125 games (postseason included) and swept the Padres in the Fall Classic.

T-7) Tony La Russa: 3 titles

La Russa reached baseball’s mountaintop with two franchises, the A’s and Cardinals, in very different ways. His Oakland teams from 1988-90 won no fewer than 99 games per season, bashed their way to three consecutive AL pennants and swept the Giants in the 1989 World Series.

His victorious Cardinals clubs in 2006 and 2011 didn’t exceed 90 wins and squeaked into the playoffs by thin margins. The Cardinals’ 83 victories in ‘06 are the fewest by a championship team in a 162-game season. In 2011, La Russa and the Cardinals were down to their last strike -- twice -- against the Rangers in Game 6 but fought back to win one of the most memorable games in postseason history before triumphing in Game 7.

T-7) Sparky Anderson: 3 titles

Anderson was the steward of “The Big Red Machine” beginning in 1970. Cincinnati recorded five division titles, four pennants, three 100-win campaigns and two World Series titles under Anderson. However, he was fired following the 1978 season. He almost immediately latched on with the Tigers, whom he would manage for the next 17 years. His Tigers teams didn’t dominate as often as his storied Reds squads, save for 1984. That year, Detroit won a franchise-record 104 games during the regular season and went 7-1 in the playoffs, culminating with a World Series win over the Padres in five games.

T-7) Miller Huggins: 3 titles

Before McCarthy, Stengel and Torre, it was Huggins leading the Yankees through their first dynasty. Following five nondescript seasons as the Cardinals’ manager, Huggins got the job with New York in 1918. Ruth arrived two years later, and the winning began apace. The franchise captured its first pennant in 1921 and its first championship in ‘23. Then, as the Yankees compiled one of the most famous collections of offensive talent in baseball history, their “Murderer’s Row” of Ruth, Gehrig, Earle Combs, Tony Lazzeri and others won it all in 1927 and 1928.

T-7) John McGraw: 3 titles

McGraw reigned over the New York Giants for 31 years, from 1902-32. He was a player-manager for his first five seasons -- a stretch that included a National League pennant in 1904. Yet the Giants’ owner refused to allow his team to participate in the World Series against the Boston Americans as he considered the emergent American League to be inferior. The Giants won the NL again in 1905, did agree to play against Connie Mack’s Athletics and ultimately prevailed in five games.

Although the Giants claimed 10 pennants from 1904-24, McGraw won just three of those World Series (‘05, 1921, 1922). In 1937, he and Mack became the first managers inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. However, it was a posthumous induction for McGraw, who passed away three years prior.