Why the key to Mike Matheny’s success with the Royals isn’t what happened in St. Louis
The rebranding of Mike Matheny is now public, but the work started two summers ago. He had been fired from a dream job that he and some close to him now say he was not ready for.
His reputation sunk, his firing as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals seen by many fans as both overdue and the reason the team then began playing better. The too-long/didn’t-read version of his reputation: too rigid, unable to manage clubhouse dynamics and behind his peers with strategy and modern analytics.
The Royals made the most open secret in baseball official Thursday by naming Matheny the 17th manager in club history. He had joined the Royals exactly a year earlier as an advisor, a position largely (and accurately, as it turned out) seen as manager-in-waiting.
Baseball is a small world, and that’s only amplified when the team four hours west on I-70 is the one to give Matheny another chance. The perception of Matheny in Kansas City has been, well, colder than the weather this week.
Even for those of us who believe the impact of a big-league manager is vastly overstated, the position is important in managing personalities and the grind of the longest season in professional sports. The manager is a team’s main spokesman to fans. And the decision about who manages is as clear a window as possible into how a team views itself and plans to win.
Here is what we know: Matheny’s Cardinals won a lot of games and made four postseasons with him, but if he repeats the same patterns and mistakes many have accused him of in St. Louis with the Royals, this will end badly.
Here is another thing we know: All of us have the capacity to change, the best lessons come from experience and failure, and a long line of managers from Casey Stengel to Bobby Cox to Joe Torre to Tony LaRussa to (yes) Ned Yost have won World Series after being fired.
Here is what we don’t know: whether Matheny can find the right combination of lessons learned, personal growth, natural strengths and luck to approach that kind of success.
I wouldn’t usually write it like this, but it’s the best way I can think of to make the point. In his introductory news conference Thursday — the one with the Royals logo behind him and TV cameras in front of him — I asked Matheny what he thought led to his firing in St. Louis and how he’d be a different manager now.
He answered, basically, by calling his 6 1/2 years in St. Louis “a great run,” and that “sometimes change happens.”
It was, to say the least, lacking in specifics or accountability.
Then, shortly afterward, Matheny met with a smaller group of writers who cover the team regularly. He mentioned spending the 15 months since his firing in St. Louis trying to figure out “how can I be better than I was?”
I followed up, asking him to be as specific as he could with his answer.
He talked for nearly 7 minutes, and this time he brought both specifics and accountability. He mentioned work on improving his relationships, knowledge of analytics and advanced coaching equipment and regrettable interactions with reporters.
He talked about mistakes in how to earn respect from players while allowing hard lessons to be learned and creating an atmosphere of support while winning. He talked about unintentionally creating tension and a rigid facade and balancing all of that with his natural instinct to defend aggressively.
His words touched on personal insecurities, the struggles in taking a big-league job with no previous professional coaching experience and an uncertainty about how to maintain his edge while projecting a more approachable appearance.
“I feel like I need to lay down on the couch for this,” he said.
And, really, that’s the guy the Royals need to show up.
Not the one in the initial news conference, who talked around questions about what went wrong. They need the one in that room with the writers, who talked openly and honestly about his shortcomings and what he’s done to address them.
Matheny got fired and almost immediately set about preparing for the next opportunity, including with tangible steps like studying how to improve his relationship-building and hiring people to help him with everything from understanding analytics to answering questions from reporters.
The Royals’ ultimate success will be dictated by how good the players are, but Matheny’s role in that will be significant.
His firing in St. Louis and the focus on what went wrong at the end has made it easy to forget he had success there, too. His teams averaged 91 wins in his six full seasons and qualified for a World Series, two National League Championship Series and one NL Division Series. No manager in baseball had ever made the playoffs in each of his first four seasons. It was a good run.
When he was fired, Matheny had managed his team longer than all but six of his peers had managed theirs. Of that group, today only Oakland’s Bob Melvin remains. Six and a half years is a long time.
But it was ugly in the end, with the most common complaint from players being that they didn’t know what it took to be in the lineup the next day. His patience with young players was inconsistent, which is noteworthy now that he joins a franchise that won a World Series after being stubbornly patient with players.
Matheny has obvious strengths. He cares, both about baseball and the people in it. He has natural leadership, and for all the complaints from some young players there are many more who enjoyed playing for him.
His best trait, particularly as it relates to his new job, might be that he has always been driven by personal growth and improvement.
That’s never been more important than right now, with the job for which he spent 6 1/2 years learning in St. Louis and the last 15 months studying in Kansas City. Much of the initial fan reaction is negative, and it’s all warranted if he’s nothing more than the guy the Cardinals fired.
The Royals have lived with Matheny for the last year and believe he’s much more than that. He’s earned the chance to prove them right or wrong.