A closer look at Matheny’s hiring, including the Royals’ biggest potential problem
There are legitimate reasons to criticize the Royals’ hiring of Mike Matheny. Those reasons just aren’t the ones being most commonly offered so far.
The worst-case scenario is one that almost nobody is talking about.
Lets begin here: This is, perhaps, the noisiest managerial hire in recent Royals history.
Most of the noise has been negative, and that’s usually the case when teams hire coaches or managers who were fired from their last job. That certainly is how it went when the Royals hired Ned Yost, who will be inducted to the team’s Hall of Fame someday.
But the noise around Matheny is different. With Yost, almost immediately a segment of fans (and most of the baseball world) viewed him as taking a raw deal in Milwaukee, where he was fired with less than two weeks remaining in a pennant race. Doug Melvin, the Brewers GM who acted on owner Mark Attanasio’s demand, has essentially apologized and said he didn’t want to do it.
The Cardinals have expressed no such regrets.
The buzz around Matheny is undoubtedly amplified by the Cardinals-Royals rivalry. The proximity of St. Louis and a lingering little brother mentality in some corners exploits some fan insecurities in Kansas City.
Three main criticisms of Matheny in St. Louis emerged: He was behind his peers with strategy and analytics, he was bad at managing the clubhouse and he struggled to develop young players.
Lets examine them in that order.
Strategy and analytics: Matheny’s teams in St. Louis routinely ranked toward the bottom of the league in intentional walks issued, though he developed a reputation for overusing relievers when they were going well. He used Michael Wacha for the first time in weeks with the season on the line in the 2014 NLCS. That remains perplexing, though Matheny immediately accepted the blame.
The Cardinals’ overall record with Matheny underperformed their Pythag expected record by a total of four games across his six full seasons. He has hired a consultant with the Royals to help him better understand and utilize analytics.
Managing the clubhouse: Most of this revolves around one report by The Athletic that Matheny and Dexter Fowler stopped talking to each other, and another that veteran reliever Bud Norris had been “mercilessly riding” rookie reliever Jordan Hicks. But follow-up reporting by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch refuted the Matheny-Fowler feud and offered context to the Norris-Hicks situation. Virtually all managers deploy veterans to lead different sections of the roster inside the clubhouse.
“We hadn’t put out the fire yet,” Matheny said after his introductory news conference on Thursday. “It was going to get put out.”
Developing young players: This was most clearly articulated by Randal Grichuk after a trade sent him to Toronto.
“There were a lot of times where me and fellow outfielders kind of thought that if we were in the lineup, it was, you gotta get two hits or one hit and a walk to be in there the next day,” he said. “And that wasn’t good for anybody’s confidence of anybody’s state of mind.”
Others who could have similar gripes include Kolten Wong, Tommy Pham, Greg Garcia, Jose Martinez and Matt Adams.
At least two counterpoints need to be considered here. First, Matheny took over a world champion. There is less time for development at that point, and it’s worth noting that other young players found success under Matheny and the team qualified for four consecutive postseasons. No Cardinals manager since 1888 (who could forget Charlie Comiskey?) had done that, and no manager in baseball history did it in his first four seasons.
Second, modern baseball managers are not autonomous. The best ones delegate and seek advice — this was Yost’s most effective evolution — and all work at varying degrees of direction from the front office.
We saw a glimpse of this during Matheny’s Thursday ness conference, actually, after a question to Matheny about his coaching staff in KC. It was the first time Matheny sat back and deferred to Moore.
One of Yost’s defining traits, particularly in the early years, was an unbreakable confidence in young players even (and perhaps particularly) through failure. He was the organization’s leading spokesman for riding those rocky waters, but that philosophy went both deeper and higher than the manager.
That philosophy has only been reinforced since, and most of the front office remains intact here.
In other words, Yost stuck with young players not just because of his personal belief and strengths but also because that was quite literally the job he was hired to do. The same people just hired Matheny.
Which brings us to the worst-case scenario.
Moore and Matheny are almost unrealistically aligned. I started covering the Royals within days of Moore’s hiring in 2006. I’ve talked with him more than I’ve talked to anyone else in Kansas City sports. Heck, I’ve talked with him more than I’ve talked to some friends I’ve known for decades.
I do not know Matheny nearly as well. But I did read his book and there are parts that could have been ghostwritten by Moore. They share similar world views on faith, family, baseball, leadership, relationships, parenting and more. If they grew up together, they would be best friends.
Once Matheny came to the Royals as an adviser last year, a strong partnership with Moore was inevitable.
That could be one of the Royals’ best strengths going forward. It is also a potential problem.
In the past few weeks, as Matheny’s hiring appeared more and more likely, I talked to many around baseball about what it would mean.
The general summary could be paraphrased that Matheny is a good baseball man with deep passion and the chance to be really good if he cleans up some rough edges after being fired from a job he was too young and inexperienced for in the first place.
For the last year, the Royals have lived with Matheny, and they now have an intimate view of his growth and weaknesses and strengths. Again, that can be great.
The potential problem — and this came from that same group of baseball people — is if Moore felt such a deep connection with Matheny that he simply saw what he wanted and ignored all red flags.
Moore is one of baseball’s longest-tenured GMs. He is the single most influential person in the Royals’ push from the bottom of baseball to consecutive pennants and a championship.
The first manager he hired failed. Moore made direct and tangible changes in both the process and priorities of finding a new manager, and the next one he hired was an important part of a World Series win.
Moore gave himself and the organization a virtual safety net in the vetting of Matheny. That they worked on this closely for a year and came out of it convinced Matheny is the right hire is as emphatic an endorsement as possible.
Really, the only logical way this doesn’t work is if Moore and those he hired were so blinded by that connection that they did not see or did not care to see the rest.