An all-around star, Red Sox great Ted Williams could hit the long ball (521 career home runs), get on base (2,654 hits), and help his teammates score (1,839 runs batted in). “The Splendid Splinter” is best remembered today for two things: becoming the last guy to hit .400 during the regular season (.406 in 1941) and how his severed head was frozen after his death in 2002. While that’s certainly odd, it at least distracts from some of the less savory aspects of Williams’ life and career, particularly his woeful stint as a Major League Baseball manager.

About a decade into his retirement, Williams signed on to manage the second iteration of the Washington Senators, a perpetually bad team that hadn’t finished higher than sixth place in the American League since the team began play in 1961. Initially, it looked like Williams had the magic touch — his Senators grabbed the new franchise its first winning record (86-76), good enough for a fourth-place finish in 1969. Then Williams started to stink up RFK Stadium. Each season, the Senators finished worse than they did the year before, going from 86 wins to 70 to 63. In 1972, the Senators moved to the Dallas area and became the Texas Rangers, which would’ve been a fine chance to leave Williams behind. But the legend made the move with the team, and coached it to a 54-100 record … after which he was finally let go.

While not a flashy, highly memorable player of the ’80s and ’90s — he certainly wasn’t Springfield Nuclear Power Plant-level like Ken Griffey Jr. or Darryl Strawberry — Alan Trammell’s workman-like approach to the game resulted in more than 2,300 hits, a career .285 average, six All-Star selections, four Gold Gloves, and three Silver Slugger awards. When his Detroit Tigers won it all in 1984, Trammell was named World Series MVP.

The Hall of Famer spent his entire 20-year career with the Tigers, so it was a nice homecoming when the team hired him to be its new manager in 2003. As he’d once helped make history for the Tigers, Trammell did it again, but not in a good way, managing the squad to a 43-119 record. That wasn’t just the worst finish in baseball that year, it was the worst finish by any team since the 1962 New York Mets went 40-120. Amazingly, and perhaps because of deep-seated local affection, the Tigers didn’t fire Trammell. In 2004, his team went 72-90, a dramatic improvement (of course, the only way was up), and in 2005, Trammell’s Tigers finished 71-91, earning Trammell a pink slip.

The Los Angeles Lakers didn’t go to the NBA Finals almost every year in the 1980s on the strength of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar alone. In addition to those showy “Showtime” stars, solid role players got it done, such as Kurt Rambis, a Lakers power forward from 1981 to 1988. While highly recognizable for wearing regular, thick-rimmed glasses during play, Rambis was always more of a “help out” guy than a ball hog.

Rambis did pretty well for himself as an assistant coach. The Lakers employed him in that capacity from 1996 to 2009, during which time they claimed four championship rings. At the end of the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season, Rambis briefly served as interim head coach, racking up a respectable 24-13 record and a playoff appearance, where the Lakers were knocked out in the second round by the San Antonio Spurs. A decade later, Rambis took another head coaching job with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Rambis’ records over two seasons (2009-2011) were an abysmal 15-67 and 17-65. After a period as an “associate head coach” with the New York Knicks, he was named interim head coach in 2015 and earned the team 9 wins and 19 losses. After that, he went back to sitting farther down the bench.

Maury Wills is one of those guys whose career puts him almost in Hall of Fame-worthy territory: a lifetime .281 hitter with more than 2,100 hits, a consistent All-Star selection, and the 1962 National League MVP. The guy could really hit, leading the National League in singles four times, and triples once.

Wills was also foolhardy, which must be why he decided to manage the woeful Seattle Mariners during their early years lost in the wilderness of the American League. In its first three seasons since coming into the league as an expansion team in 1977, Seattle put up a combined record of 187-297, a winning percentage of just .386. The 1980 season was going almost as badly. After manager Darrell Johnson led the team to a not-stellar 39-65, the front office fired him midway through the year and replaced him with Wills, who management hoped could turn the team around with some of his in-the-trenches knowledge. That’s not what happened. As a caretaker in 1980, Wills led the Mariners to 20 wins and 38 losses. Apparently without any prospects, the team kept Wills on into the 1981 season where he barely lasted a month before termination, compiling a 6-18 record. Wills never coached another MLB team.