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Derrington Is Fired as Manager

By STEVE HENSON
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Suns Manager Jim Derrington was fired Saturday night for the team’s poor record, General Manager Mike Begley said.

“We just had to make a change,” Begley said. “We felt we needed to go in another direction.”

The Suns were 12-31 before a 6-5 loss to the Mission Viejo Vigilantes Saturday night at Saddleback College. John Wood, the team’s 37-year-old pitching coach, has replaced Derrington and designated hitter Frank Valdez will become a player-coach.

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A marketing survey conducted during Suns’ games at Oxnard College indicated that more of the team’s fans come from Camarillo than any other city, although four other cities also provide a solid fan base.

Camarillo residents accounted for 21% of those attending home games, the survey revealed. Thousand Oaks and Ventura each accounted for 17%, Oxnard 16% and Simi Valley 14%.

“We wanted to make it a county-wide team and we’ve done that to a good extent,” Begley said.

Begley expressed disappointment, however, that more fans from Oxnard--the team’s home city--didn’t attend games.

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Steve Henson

Steve Henson is a reporter with the Fast Break sports team at the Los Angeles Times. He previously served as an assistant editor and reporter in the Sports department. Henson was a leader in digital-only newsrooms from 2007-19 as a senior editor and columnist at Yahoo Sports and as senior editor at the USA Today Sports Media Group. This is his second stint at The Times, having covered the Dodgers and UCLA as well as doing enterprise, investigative and features writing from 1985-2007. Henson was awarded first place in sports features in 2021 by the L.A. Press Club and has been honored several times by the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) and also by the California News Publishers Assn., the Football Writers Assn. of America and U.S. Basketball Writers Assn.

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