ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - Hal McRae saw it coming.

He was fired as manager of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays on Monday, one day after the team finished a miserable 55-106 season.

It was the second straight season of 100 or more losses for the Devil Rays, and the worst record for the team since it began play in 1998.

McRae replaced Larry Rothschild on April 18, 2001, and managed the Devil Rays to a 58-90 record over the remainder of the season. McRae had been hired the previous November as bench coach.

"It's not a surprise. ... The only thing I regret is we didn't win more games," McRae said by telephone from his home in Bradenton, adding that it was no consolation that there were stretches when Tampa Bay was more competitive than his two-year record of 113-196 would suggest.

The Devil Rays lost 16 games this season after leading in the eighth or ninth innings, including 10 in which Tampa Bay came within two outs of victory. The Devil Rays had 11 walkoff losses and dropped 39 games in which they had tying or winning run at the plate in the last inning.

"We were competitive, but we lost. The bottom line is that you lost," McRae said.

"And you lost because you weren't good enough to win or you lost because you didn't know how to win. We were in games. We had leads late. But we lost those games, so it goes down as a loss. It doesn't go down as a competitive game or a game you had the lead late. It's not counted that way."

McRae was the third manager fired in two days. The Chicago Cubs got rid of Bruce Kimm on Sunday and Detroit fired Luis Pujols earlier Monday.

The Devil Rays, who have finished last and have lost at least 90 games in all five of their seasons, tied Detroit for the worst record in the majors this year.

McRae accepted a position as an assistant to the general manager. His job as manager was to run through 2003 - under his new post, his contract was extended through 2004.

"I'm not making him a scapegoat," GM Chuck LaMar said. "I'm responsible for the personnel. I think he could've won more games with better talent."

A rough-and-tumble player with Kansas City for most of his playing career, he managed the Royals in 1991-94. He was later the hitting instructor for Cincinnati and Philadelphia before joining the Devil Rays' organization.

From the start, many felt McRae was set up to fail in Tampa Bay because of the club's financial problems and a history of poor personnel decisions by LaMar.

The general manager trimmed the payroll to about $34 million last winter - lowest in the major leagues - and McRae was expected to compete with one of the youngest rosters in baseball in a division dominated by the high-spending New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

LaMar will begin immediately to compile a list of potential replacements, but said it may be three or four weeks before someone is hired. He probably will want to interview candidates from clubs participating in the playoffs.

McRae didn't lobby for his return, but had the support of his players, who insisted the manager wasn't responsible for the poor results.

"We just don't have a very good team. There's nothing he can do about it," outfielder Ben Grieve said last week." You could put any manager in the major leagues on our team and we would have lost 100 games."

LaMar has been the team's general manager since the franchise's inception. While his moves over the past five seasons have made him the target for widespread criticism, he remains under contract for two more years.

He said the decision to replace McRae was made during a meeting with the manager earlier Monday. The fate of McRae's coaching staff will be determined by the new manager.

"On most nights when he took the field, he was outmanned. I'll go on record as saying this organization has never made excuses about payroll, about ownership moves or any of these types of things, especially Chuck LaMar," LaMar said.

"I'm responsible for the personnel on the field, and the personnel right now isn't good enough to win as many games as everybody in this organization would like. It's getting better. We're going to get the job done. But no excuses have ever been made by me or anybody else."