Why Royals manager Mike Matheny remains omnipresent with his players during MLB delay
The last time a Major League Baseball season saw anything remotely akin to this ongoing interruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the wounds were self-inflicted during the 1994 players’ strike.
Royals manager Mike Matheny had just come up to the big leagues for the first time. While the circumstances were different, his experiences as a player in 1994 and 1995 have shaped his handling of the current predicament.
MLB players went their separate ways more than seven weeks ago, finding their best options for sheltering in place while trying to maintain some sort of training regimen.
Matheny, who is in his first year at the helm in Kansas City, has made his presence a constant for Royals players, even as they’ve scattered around the country. Texts, phone calls, Zoom meetings ... players couldn’t avoid their new skipper if they tried.
“Every zoom meeting we have, he sits in on,” Royals pitcher Brad Keller said during a conference call last week. “He just kind of opens up the discussion and then kind of closes every meeting we have. ... He’s just kind of keeping us active, kind of keeping our minds on baseball.”
During his own Zoom call with reporters Wednesday afternoon, Matheny explained how some of the impetus for his omnipresence sprang from the strike year.
Matheny had played in 28 games for the Milwaukee Brewers when the players went on strike. The labor impasse carried over into 1995, and Matheny and his wife, having just welcomed their second child, were largely in the dark about when his career would resume.
“I remember being that guy feeling like I was on the outside, just trying to hear something and reading everything and most of it not even having any validity to it,” Matheny said. “That’s been a big driver for me, to make sure that we’re reaching out to everybody — all the guys that we had through camp — and consistently communicating not with any great plan. Not that we’ve got anything that nobody else in the rest of the world doesn’t have.”
Matheny said Royals officials recently changed a video conference with all KC players to a webinar so that younger players could type in questions and receive answers anonymously. The alteration was made in case any of them were too timid to ask questions publicly, as Matheny did as a rookie.
“I remember being that young guy and feeling just kind of lost, and wondering, ‘Man, they might start spring training without me. I don’t even know if they realize that I’m sitting here with my young family and I don’t have any idea what’s going on,’” Matheny said.
Matheny also said current Royals players are contacted about five times per week by someone on the coaching staff. His message to players is that they’re going to keep those calls coming.
Matheny and his staff believe isolation is a hindrance.
“We want to continue to build relationships through conversations, through texts, through phone calls, through Zoom,” Matheny said.
Restarting spring training
The working assumption is that teams will likely get three weeks — almost like a second spring training — in order to prepare for an abbreviated 2020 season.
The Royals were two weeks shy of their season opener when spring training was stopped. Starting pitchers had built up to throwing about four innings per outing. Relievers hadn’t yet thrown on back-to-back days in the exhibition games.
Position players were still ramping up toward playing every day, but they hadn’t gotten there yet.
“It’s hard at the beginning of spring training when you play every other day — you know, get two at-bats,” Royals outfielder Hunter Dozier said during a recent Zoom call. “So we had like a week and a half left where we were really going to start playing a lot of innings, getting a lot of at-bats.”
How would the Royals approach another “spring training”?
Matheny said he and his coaching staff have a template in place for how they’d approach a 2-3 week period designed to get players ready for some sort of season.
“We have the opportunity to use multiple fields to get guys going,” Matheny said. “I think it’s just going to be enough to get them enough rest. I also believe there’s going to be flexibility when we start. You’re not necessarily going to have to have these guys at 100 pitches. So it’s going to look a little different. Part of our job has been communicating with guys that nothing about this is normal, so let’s be prepared.”
As for his position players, Matheny said pacing will likely be highly individualized depending upon what each player had available to him during his time in isolation.
“We have some guys in some spots where they just can’t get out,” Matheny said. “There’s a lot going on around them in regards to this virus. They’re just really hunkering down. So I think some of them are gonna have to progress at a different pace. But there will be some that I think will jump back in pretty quick and have a pretty good feel.”
