Montgomery Biscuits Baseball

MONTGOMERY, Ala.- The Southern League announced today that Biscuits’ manager Billy Gardner Jr. has been selected as the 2012 Manager of the Year.

Gardner, the winningest-manager in franchise-history, guided the Biscuits to their first playoff-berth since 2007 while boasting the best overall record (74-63) in the South Division. The Biscuits, one game out of first-place with six games remaining, rattled of four consecutive-wins to clinch the South Division title on September 1.

Gardner has won the honor 39 seasons after his father won the managerial award in 1973 while at the helm of the Jacksonville Suns. Gardner Jr. and Sr. are the only father-son-duo to be named Manager of the Year in Southern League History.

In six seasons with the Biscuits, Gardner has put together an overall record of 426-407 as the longest tenured manager in the Southern League. He displayed one of his best managerial seasons in 2007 in his first year with Montgomery. The Biscuits stormed into the playoffs with a franchise-record 81 wins while winning the Southern League Championship for the second-consecutive season. The Biscuits were the first team to win consecutive Southern League titles in the past 30 years.

Including the 2012 season, Gardner is nine wins shy of reaching 1,200 in his 18-year career. After his rookie-campaign as a manager in 1995, Gardner has gone on to guide various teams to the playoffs eight times. In his fourth year as a skipper, he won Manager of the Year while leading the Class-A Michigan Battle Cats in the Midwest League. The following season, Gardner led the Low-A August Greenjackets to a South Atlantic League Championship in 1999.

Gardner is the first manager of the Biscuits to earn Manager of the Year. Prior to Gardner’s career in Montgomery, the Biscuits were led by Charlie Montoyo, starting in the inaugural season in 2004 and ending in 2006.