Why the Royals’ pick for their next manager suggests a change in this club’s philosophy
.jpg "Tampa Bay Rays third base coach Matt Quatraro, hired by the Kansas City Royals Sunday as their new manager, becomes the 18th skipper in club history.")
Last month, Royals owner John Sherman walked into a room below the ground floor of Kauffman Stadium to outline a change in leadership of his baseball operations department.
Thirty-nine days later, the fruits of one change has prompted a more notable one. Or at least a more revealing one.
The Royals hired Matt Quatraro as their new manager Sunday, plucking him from the Tampa Bay Rays organization, where he spent the past four years as the big-league bench coach.
Quatraro will be a first-time manager. While we are sure to learn more about his managerial style and philosophy in the days, weeks and ideally years to come, we’ve already become further educated on the effects of that change 39 days earlier.
General manager J.J. Picollo’s first major hire is a statement that he plans to operate the Royals differently than they’ve operated in the past. He did not seek the most familiar or comfortable hire. He did not seek a man with previous managerial experience.
Instead, with this hire, he offered an admission: The Royals need something different. They need fresh ideas. They do not have this thing all figured out.
Quatraro, 48, has been employed by two organizations with more consistent year-to-year success than the Royals, though notably absent the World Series championship that Picollo’s predecessor, Dayton Moore, delivered Kansas City. Quatraro has most recently and importantly worked in Tampa Bay, which is developing into a model of innovation for small-market teams.
His move to Kansas City does not necessarily mean that success will fly the 1,200 miles northwest along with him. But it means some of the ideas behind it will. And it means the Royals are open to those ideas.
They are open to, well, change.
This organization has a recent history of hiring people it knows. Baseball is a world, like many others, in which networking and past relationships matter. The Royals have a history of finding their next managers a few offices down in the same hallway.
This is a move in a contrasting direction.
The Royals and Rays have been polar opposites in several ways. No team is more loyal to the players it drafts than the Royals; no team is more willing to churn its roster than the Rays. Tampa has darn-near perfected its player development, as much as you can use that phrase in sports, and on a coaching level, it has been willing to implement new ideas driven by analytics — such as using an opener (opening a game with a reliever instead of a starting pitcher), or using shifts to the extreme.
The Rays win with younger players, with their own players and with somebody else’s players. They consistently turn some of their talent into trade chips to acquire other talent, moves boosted by what the data tells them.
They are trend-setters because they are risk-takers.
For whatever the Royals have been, for better and then for worse, they have not been that.
That Picollo now finds someone from that organization to be the fit for KC’s next manager proves this organization has done its own adapting. They don’t view this as a square peg in a round hole, and that alone is telling for how they’d like to function.
Look, it can be difficult to sell a major shift in organizational philosophy when you replace one president of baseball operations with the man already considered second in line. Sherman’s decision prompted skepticism, understandably so, that the Royals would actually head in a new direction.
They have now.
This type of hire wouldn’t have happened a year ago. Heck, this job wouldn’t even be open if not for 39 days ago.
Quatraro is a key piece, even if not the most key piece, in an organization that does most things a lot differently. He became the right-hand man of Tampa manager Kevin Cash and is thought to have played a role in the culture of a clubhouse aided by four straight postseason berths and five straight seasons of winning at least 86 games. The Rays were in the World Series three seasons ago.
The Royals have been absent from the postseason since they held a parade in downtown Kansas City in 2015.
There is more work to be done in Kansas City than when Quatraro arrived in Tampa in 2018. And while he will be most recognizable in a dugout, the heavier workload will come elsewhere.
In-game managerial decisions can have overstated long-term consequences, but the implementation of broader strokes, such as analytics-driven philosophies and clubhouse culture, can have a real effect.
Quatraro has not only embraced Picollo’s vision for the Royals manager to be well-connected to other organizational departments, namely the research and development team, but was attracted by it.
The Royals chose Quatraro — they chose change — but he chose them, too.