In fresh start, Royals manager Mike Matheny is a study in purposeful perpetual motion
Here goes the whirlwind that is Mike Matheny, roaming the outfield, bat in hand.
One instant the Royals’ new manager is pointing it up and miming aim at a baseball going overhead; the next he’s bunting down stray fly balls as he moves to mingle among players shagging flies.
Over the course of days, he could be crouching down with catchers he looks like he could still thrive among.
Across the way, he might be talking with the pitchers he’s felt a connection with since he was 10 years old and became enamored of catching on the way to earning four Gold Gloves.
Catching and leadership, he believes, are “synonymous,” starting with the fundamental idea of learning to ask good questions and listen well as he sought to make pitchers “truly trust me.”
Something that seems to be accruing here in any number of ways: For instance, in the seriousness with which prospect Jackson Kowar has taken an emphasis on reducing delivery time to the plate — so much so that it was perhaps at the expense of his mechanics.
“‘I so respect the fact that you’re listening to what we’re saying,’” Matheny recalled telling him last week. “‘But you don’t need to be that quick.’”
Across the Valley of the Sun in Scottsdale against Colorado on Thursday, Matheny is listening in on hitting coach Terry Bradshaw tutoring slugger Ryan O’Hearn between a few off-kilter at-bats and an O’Hearn home run.
And he’s taking notes from the top step of the dugout. And throwing batting practice.
The latter is a habit he developed when he was managing the St. Louis Cardinals from 2012 to mid-2018. He resumed it last year as he roved and audited the KC organization as special adviser for player development, a position that ultimately morphed into manager-in-waiting after Ned Yost retired.
“If they like (his pitching), you just do it,” he said. “I just want to be available for what anybody needs.”
So much so that the other day before playing the Rockies, he went overtime on an interview with The Star, looked at his watch and said, “Oooh, I’ve got to get out there.” Then he ran from his office to the field.
Injection of energy
The perpetual motion and energy, which is relentless but not reckless and delivered with a striking level of engagement, is appreciated in every corner of this clubhouse and even around the broader operation.
“He’s a presence of a man,” versatile star Whit Merrifield said. “When he’s in the room, you know it, he just kind of has that aura about him.”
No doubt that was reinforced the other day when former NHL star Rob Ramage was asked by Matheny to address the team foremost about the dangers of driving while intoxicated. Ramage, who spent part of his career playing for the St. Louis Blues, was the driver in a 2003 car accident that killed former NHL player Keith Magnuson and served time in jail for it.
But the end of his presentation was about something else: a video of then-Brewer Matheny getting hit in the face with a Rich Loiselle fastball in 1998. Dislodged teeth and bleeding notwithstanding, Matheny didn’t so much as fall to the ground, part of why Merrifield recalled Ramage referring to him as a “bad mother(expletive).”
“That’s almost crazy,” said reliever Greg Holland, who played for Matheny in St. Louis. “That’s a different breed.”
Matheny came out of the game. But as a guy who always felt on the verge of being sent down, he pleaded with manager Phil Garner to start him the next day. He figured psychologically that he needed to get right back in. And he thought it would make a statement to that team ... to say nothing of its lasting impact.
“You’re in there,” he remembers Garner telling him.
Battle-tested and intentional
Small wonder the iron-willed Matheny is in there again now after enduring another sort of potentially devastating blow, one of many he suffered in a playing career ended by one final concussion in 2006 … among what he believes were officially diagnosed as more than 30, not even counting episodes like the ball to the face.
It was 18 months, he said, “before he could have a conversation like this,” a time during which he ultimately rested and learned chess and guitar and rededicated himself to Spanish to help trigger parts of the brain.
“I always said they’re going to have to pry the spikes off me,” he said. “They basically did.”
But he wasn’t ready to yield his managing shoes after St. Louis. And if you live in the now and look toward the future, it’s sure hard to see how this isn’t shaping up as a winning proposition.
Yes, the Royals are weeks away from their first game and the dynamics that will be the most telling testimony to how this all goes.
But even as there are plenty of questions to be asked and answered along the way because of how it ended for Matheny in St. Louis, there is also nothing like the precious present, either.
Many players feel a surging energy and urgency and even advocacy from Matheny.
It stems from the brisk tone set by Matheny in traveling to meet so many of them in the offseason, and his message that you can’t win unless you expect to win.
It comes from Matheny arriving with staff to work out every day before players get in and a streamlined workout format that several cited in saying the spring is flying by.
“One of the greatest gifts we can give them is that we will not waste their time,” said Matheny, speaking with the constant eye contact he seems to maintain with everyone he encounters. “There’s a purpose to every single thing we do, or we just don’t do it. If we don’t have a good ‘why,’ then we shouldn’t be doing it at all.”
This is what general manager Dayton Moore means when he says Matheny is engaged and inviting and “very intentional about interacting.” This is what Merrifield is talking about when he says Matheny is “super hands-on … doing all the things you like to see a manager do.”
“Mike’s been incredible,” Merrifield said. “It was really needed.”
Lessons learned, match made
Needed by the Royals: a vital — both in terms of being essential and lively — new voice after the decade under Yost highlighted by back-to-back World Series appearances and triumph in 2015 ended with back-to-back 100-plus-loss seasons.
And needed no less by Matheny: 49 years old and hungry to get at this beautiful grind again after a year of self-evaluation and looking for his “blind spots” in the wake of his firing.
Undoubtedly, Matheny has a different lens on it all now than he did when he was called on to manage the defending World Series-champion Cardinals in 2012 in the looming shadow of the retired Tony La Russa. Following the third-winningest manager in major-league history. With no experience in that role.
“I was drinking from a firehose,” he said, “really not having any idea what the demand was going to be.”
Nevertheless, he seemed to sort it out. The Cardinals played in the World Series in his second season, albeit falling to the Red Sox in six games, and he administered 21 postseason wins his first four seasons.
But the more salient question now is how different his lens, and methods, may be since the last three years in St. Louis. The Cardinals didn’t reach the playoffs and clubhouse strife emerged.
Because this time around, Matheny’s prime directive is development, an area in which he was so criticized in St. Louis as to make him a polarizing candidate for this job. He also took heat for bullpen and clubhouse management and had a number of strained relationships with the media.
This time around, at this moment, anyway, it’s hard to process how that eclipsed winning three National League Central titles and an NL pennant and going 591-474 and never having a losing record. Even when he was fired, the Cardinals were 47-46.
That doesn’t mean some criticisms weren’t legitimate. But let’s look at the right here, right now of that, too.
Appreciated by many
Virtually everywhere the Royals have played this spring in the Cactus League, vice president of communications and broadcasting Mike Swanson said, a former Cardinal has sought out Matheny. One had a golf cart stop so he could greet him. The Padres’ Tommy Pham ran over to Matheny before their game the other week.
Not to mention former Cardinal relievers Trevor Rosenthal and Holland signing with the Royals. Matheny recently lamented perhaps pushing Holland faster than he should have after he’d missed spring training in 2018, saying, “Shame on me, I may have rushed him.”
But Holland feels like he owes Matheny “a bunch of outs” in more ways than one.
“When I was pitching bad, it was one of those things where we had a lot of meetings about what he could do for me,” said Holland, who set the Royals’ record for saves in a season with 47 in 2013 and was a key part of the dominant bullpen that paved the way through the 2014 and 2015 postseasons. “He tried to put me in situations to help me progress. It just didn’t work out the way anybody wanted.”
Which perhaps is an apt way to look at Matheny’s transition from one chapter to the next.
One way or another, something had gone foul in St. Louis, a job Matheny remains so grateful for as to call “a gift.”
But that didn’t make it a disqualifying indictment going forward, either.
“If you don’t win, it’s not Mike Matheny’s fault,” Holland said. “It’s the guys in the clubhouse. I felt responsible, and I know some of the true competitors on that team felt responsible also.
“But you can’t fire everyone. That’s true for all sports. … So it drops on the manager.”
Right place, right time
Speaking of drops on the manager, Matheny swears this is a true story. When he was about to enroll at the University of Michigan in 1988, on the way to becoming the first member of his family to graduate from a four-year school, Toronto picked him in the 31st round of the draft.
By the time he was on campus that fall, the Blue Jays had become more impressed with him and upped the ante to six figures, a whopping sum at the time for that draft stature and a young man from a working-class family — a story in itself for another time.
In his dorm room, he called the Blue Jays and said he had decided to stay at Michigan. They reminded him that under the rules of the time he could change his mind right up until he entered his first class.
As he walked out the door, not yet 18 years old, Matheny felt doubt about making a “big-boy decision” on his own as he had.
Wondering if he was doing the right thing, he was plunked by pigeon waste so squarely as to need to go back to the dorm to clean up.
The young man whose Christian faith already was his guide thought about just what he was supposed to do with this apparent sign.
Something told him he should forge forward with the conviction of his decision, not take this as a moment to reverse it. So on he went to the first-aid class that was part of the curriculum in kinesiology.
At what he calls “the exact moment” he walked in and renounced his ability to go pro at the time, he was smitten by the sight of Kristin Shaiper, a UM field hockey player from St. Louis.
They were married in 1993.
The anecdote seems to stand for a few things, but perhaps none more so than things aren’t always as they might appear.
“I never disregard that things happen for a purpose,” he said, adding that “some of the toughest things I’ve gone through are certainly the things that I’ve grown through the most.”
The idea compelled him to invoke the wisdom of eight friends he considers his personal board of advisors (and declines to identify to preserve their privacy):
“All of them have these stories, ‘I thought my life was tracking and everything I wanted to do was here,’ ” said Matheny, who has moved to Lee’s Summit. “ ‘Little did I know that it was supposed to be there. Until I got there and then was able to see.’ ”
So here he is now, everywhere at once but immersed in each step, too.
From the ones that led him here to the galvanized, purposeful ones he is taking every day toward this next season of his life waiting ahead.
This story was originally published March 8, 2020 at 5:00 AM.