The simple hope of Mike Matheny’s rebirth as a baseball man with the Kansas City Royals
The time is 8:59 a.m. and Mike Matheny is behind his desk, leaned back but not laid back, two books on leadership in front of him loaded with earmarks and scribbles and stuffed with notes. If you dropped a book while escaping a pack of charging elephants, and then let the most obsessive note-taker you know borrow it, your book would look like Matheny’s.
Before we go any further we should mention that this scene is from Feb. 22 at the Royals’ spring training complex in Arizona. This is back when you could fly across the country in a middle seat without a mask to shake a man’s hand.
Nothing is the same now, of course, but the heart of what we’re talking about here — Matheny’s obsessive self-rehabilitation to be better today than yesterday, and to be way better for the Kansas City Royals than he was for the St. Louis Cardinals — shines through with current relevance.
Behind Matheny hang sixteen 8x10s, one for each man who’s been the Royals’ manager before him. His picture hung on the wall for a few hours before he took it down. Said he couldn’t look at himself all spring. The nail remains.
Matheny is up to his wavy brown hair in urgency. The team he now leads lost more than 100 games in each of the last two seasons. The Cardinals fired him two years ago, his reputation as a leader and communicator battered like a piñata. He’s with the Royals now, two wounded reputations tied together, needing each other.
That’s why those books sit on his desk.
Maybe that’s why the picture behind him is gone.
It’s at least part of why he sits here, a changed man already but more to the point a man intent on changing again and again and again for as long as it takes. They called him arrogant and dismissive of reporters in St. Louis? Here he’ll sit for an hour for this column, and then answer follow-up questions.
They said he was a caveman long after baseball’s statistical revolution went mainstream? He took a class on baseball analytics, swallowing his pride and learning with the twenty-somethings trying to break into this business.
They said he doesn’t communicate with players? Well, here comes star catcher Salvador Perez, looking for a meeting that Matheny doesn’t know about. Everyone in this room thinks Perez — his English fluent, his accent heavy — is saying “chief meeting.”
“Chief?” Matheny asks.
“Uh-huh,” Perez says. “Chief meeting, something like that.”
“Con los nuevo grupo o toro meeting?” Matheny says.
Perez doesn’t know — he’s just heard there’s supposed to be some sort of meeting — so now Matheny needs to disappear to find out. He’s back after a few seconds.
“Shift meeting,” he says. “I wasn’t picking that up. I don’t know how to say shift in Spanish, either.”
Matheny first took up Spanish in high school, then dove in more seriously after a college coach told him it would help him communicate with some of his pitchers. Anyway, the meeting. It was a shift meeting. For infielders. Perez didn’t need to go.
Shift. Not chief.
“I’m trying to figure out, is Mahomes here?” jokes Mike Swanson, the Royals’ VP of communications.
That’s one problem solved today. Only infinity left.
‘Stuff like this has molded me”
The distance between the man they talked about in St. Louis and the one behind this desk is distracting. Maybe the descriptions are exaggerated to one extreme. Maybe Matheny is exaggerating himself toward the other.
Or maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle, with Matheny intent on maximizing his second chance at his dream job by inching toward the other side with a life openly dedicated to self-improvement.
His new existence poses at least two fundamental questions — how do you show the world who you are now while searching for who you will be?
And how do you know who you are while devoting yourself to constant change?
Matheny reads books. He listens. He studies motivational speakers. He can tell you a dozen things he’s taken from John Wooden, six more from Bill Walsh, and that even toward the end of his life Michelangelo repeated the latin phrase “ancora imparo” — Still, I am learning.
Matheny flew coast to coast this offseason to meet his new players in person. He wanted to make a good first impression, sure, but more than that he wanted the first conversations between them to be free of baseball and not sparked by a missed grounder or hanging curve.
He wanted to get to know them. As men first, baseball players later. That sounds corny, and the purpose isn’t altruistic. The purpose is at least in part self-interested. The better he knows them as men, the better the baseball will be. The better the baseball, the better he’ll look as a manager.
The better he looks as a manager, the better this self-improvement will work, and the more chances he’ll have ... in baseball and in life.
So, Matheny listened. This team lost 207 games the last two years combined, the worst stretch since the Royals’ rudderless years of the mid 2000s. What he heard — not from every player, but from enough of them — is that they wanted to be challenged. To be pushed. The last few years of losing had begun to feed on itself. They were tired of that and wanted change.
Matheny began recommending books to his teams in St. Louis. He’s deep into motivational stuff. The conversations with his new players brought to mind “Legacy,” a book by John Kerr that dives into the culture and success of New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team as a template for leadership in sports and business.
“I’m not trying to start a book club here,” he said. “That doesn’t interest me. But I am pushing myself. And when I come across some good stuff, maybe it’s 10 percent of the guys in there that it will speak to them. This one in particular, I’ve had a number of those guys say, ‘There’s some pretty cool stuff in there.’ And so those guys, let’s keep feeding them.”
The book is, in some ways, about responsibility. About creating a culture of accountability that lifts everyone. The opening anecdote in the book depicts the All Blacks players, after a monumental win, sweeping the floor of their locker room. Nobody looks out for the All Blacks, the saying goes. The All Blacks look out for themselves.
There’s another theme in the book, too: authenticity. Of knowing who you are, and sticking to it. Matheny has said part of what went wrong at the end in St. Louis is that he presented an unnecessarily rigid front. He wasn’t himself. He wasn’t authentic. He’s asked if, even subconsciously, he chose this book because it speaks to him as he course-corrects from his first managerial job in the majors.
Six seconds of silence hang in the air before he speaks.
“That’s a good question,” he said. “I think I’ve always got to make sure my why’s in the right place. I’m completely human and flawed and I can get off track of where my motive is. But when I get it right, it’s pretty cool.
“It comes down to my why being that impact that I want to make. That it’s not about me. Something like (the book) reinforces it. Stuff like this has molded me.”
‘Make sure that makes it in there, alright?’
Matheny is deeply religious. We don’t usually talk about religion here, or, really, in sports. But the story of Matheny cannot be told without examining his faith. More to the point here, his leadership of the Royals cannot be examined without his Christianity.
Major League Baseball teams are among the world’s most diverse work environments. Bobby Witt Jr. is not yet old enough to legally buy a six-pack; Rusty Kuntz’s playing career was over before Witt Jr.’s father’s began.
The Royals have players from five countries on their roster. Some are Christian, some Catholic, some atheist. Some have families, others girlfriends. Some pray every day, others never have. Talking openly about religion — and particularly using that as part of a leadership strategy — can be like walking through an open field full of land mines.
“I’m with you 100 percent,” Matheny says when that point is raised. “But I don’t really see land mines. If I’m going about this the right way, and you said it, I’ve never, never, and never will — and very few times will I say never — forced what I’ve believed on anybody. And I’m always very sensitive to the fact that we all just have a different story.
“I believe what I’m called to do is, and this sounds jacked up and it won’t look right when you write it, but I’m called to love people. And that’s wherever they are. That word (love) is just a deep and genuine concern. I think it might be the most misunderstood word in the English language ... and we just lost 50 percent of your readership when they see that, right? They just check out, especially when it comes to sports.
“But a deep and genuine concern for these guys? Absolutely I have that.”
Matheny talks often of his why. Faith is everywhere here, and so is his need to live accordingly while resisting the temptation to tell anyone else to do the same.
Religion doesn’t come up often, at least not directly. What happens more is a player might mention a problem. Matheny’s approach and advice will come from a place informed by faith, but except in rare cases that faith must be filtered out in communication. Once a person feels judged based on religion, they’re done.
But Christianity has to be part of how he leads. It has to inform how he communicates. Anything else would be inauthentic, and Matheny now sees inauthenticity as a base problem at the end in St. Louis.
It’s a delicate challenge, then: He believes Christianity makes him better at his job, and he cannot be true to himself without it, but he also knows a job based on communication can be torpedoed if he communicates any of this the wrong way.
“Such a slippery slope,” he said. “I wish it weren’t, and I think it’s our responsibility to live it out to where these guys are truly like, ‘Hey man, I don’t believe anything that guy believes except I know he cares about me.’ That’s where I want to be. That should say everything about me without me ever having to say a word about what I believe.
“Make sure that makes it in there, alright?”
Opportunities, not obstacles
All of that preparation and evaluation, and now Matheny, like all of us, navigates a reality he could not have prepared for. More than any other sport, baseball is about rhythm.
That’s true in the micro — a hitter’s stride, a pitcher’s hip-turn, a shortstop’s approach to the bag on a double play.
That’s true in the macro — six weeks of spring training, then 162 games in 181 days, then the playoffs, then rest, then start the whole thing over again.
Matheny is meticulously organized. He’s patterned his entire adult life on those rhythms, and now those rhythms are blown to bits. His new charge, then is to make the most of that. To see the changes as an opportunity and not an obstacle.
“What the quarantine time allowed for was really time to just get real, and get to know the names of their wives and their kids, and just kind of fast-forward what usually takes a lot of time,” he said of those under and around him in the Royals organization. “Because the conversations were about them as human beings instead of just as athletes.”
That’s a trade-off. He knows his players less well as ballplayers than he would in normal times, and probably less well in general. How could it be any other way? Instead of spending eight to 10 hours at the park every day, plus time with travel, their interactions this offseason were mostly limited to phone calls.
But if Matheny could use that to his advantage — after all, he figures to have more of their attention when everybody is locked inside than he would during batting practice or between pitches — then his grandest calling will be advanced.
He’ll know soon enough. The game’s rhythms are returning, slowly, first with summer training and then — finally — with games that count starting next week.
Matheny’s own rhythms are returning, too, beginning in the morning at home. He’s by himself, reading, praying, thinking. He makes a list of people he needs to connect with that day, with an intentional decision about whether they need to be challenged or encouraged. Post-It notes crowd his desk, reminding him who he’s talked to and about what, a written contract to keep what he says he’s about as close as possible to his actions.
In that way, the questions asked earlier in this story are wrong. Searching for who you will be isn’t a barricade to showing the world who you are. Constant change doesn’t mean you can’t know who you are in a moment.
Actually, maybe the opposite is true. So Matheny pledges to bridge those gaps, to prove to himself and everyone who judged him based on how things ended in St. Louis that self-discovery and vulnerable honesty are the best ways to be a better man.
The Royals are betting on that, too. A man and a franchise who’ve known better times, committed to climbing away from their worst times together.