Back in his element as Royals manager, a relaxed Mike Matheny is ready for second chance

The manager of the Kansas City Royals sat behind a small table amused by the relatively small crowd attending his press gathering.

For someone easing his way back into the daily grind of being a major league manager — and someone who hadn’t smiled much in these environments in recent years — he seemed awfully relaxed and content.

Mike Matheny is back in his element, even as the colors around him have changed from red to blue.

“I’ve had a long, long offseason,” Matheny said Tuesday. “It’s not just months. It’s a year and a half. There’s a lot of guys who are still licking wounds after a long season. I’m not one of them. I’m ready to go.”

That offseason began for Matheny when the Cardinals fired him from his first managerial stop on July 14th, 2018. His team won 591 of the 1,065 games he managed in the regular season and won the National League pennant in 2013. After a stretch of diminishing returns and facing the prospect of missing the postseason for a third straight year, the Cardinals felt the need to make their first in-season managerial change since firing Joe Torre 23 years prior.

By that November, Matheny was a special advisor to the Royals. By this November, he was Kansas City’s manager.

“It’s been great, first of all, that Dayton Moore would open up the door early on and I’d be able to get the backstage view of what was going on and to figure out how they think and how they’re developing,” Matheny said. “This has been a system that they had done before, building from 2006 to a championship team in ‘14 and a World Series in ‘15. There’s a process there, but with a different long-term goal of sustained success. So that has to involve young players and evaluating.

“I kind of committed from the first day that I got invited to be a part of the Royals organization I was going to do a whole lot more listening and asking questions than anything else and trying to learn. It was a great learning experience. Now it’s time to kind of take some of those ideas, bounce them off a very smart group of people making decisions from up above, and try to know how to push some of these young players.”

Re-energized for big league baseball

That commitment involved building a relationship with Rusty Kuntz, a long-time Kansas City organizational fixture who will rejoin the club in 2020 as its first base coach. It was Kuntz who helped revitalize Matheny’s energy to be around the game and who demonstrated the value of continual on-the-job learning.

“You have a guy who’s coached at this level for a long time, and I think overall, 40 years plus in this game, and still sits down and will write and keep track of things that he hasn’t seen before,” Matheny said. “That just shows the kind of mentality that I believe needs to be contagious throughout the organization.

“To find somebody that has a willingness to share what he has, and he was going to do it inside the organization, and just to kind of have that conversation early, like, hey, would you ever have a desire to get back on the field? Those are natural conversations you have.”

The path back to the field has led Matheny to identify the areas of his performance which were lacking in his first job and seek out solutions that are intended to demonstrate improved performance. That has included media training. Whether it was the training or the time off, Matheny was undeniably relaxed as he spoke Tuesday.

It’s also included increased instruction in analytics, going so far as to take a class this winter where his own deficiencies were analyzed. Ari Kaplan of Sports Management Worldwide, considered one of the pioneers of the sabermetrics movement, headed up Matheny’s instruction.

“Just getting introduced to more of what is a major part of our game right now, and it’s understanding the information so then we can pass it on,” Matheny said. “That’s the whole purpose. It’s not for a personal collection. It’s how can I take the information and then pass it on to the guys in a way that, one, this is how you’re being evaluated and, two, these are some areas of growth for you. It was a great course.”

Investment in improving

Listening to Matheny discuss Trevor Rosenthal’s future felt familiar; the former Cardinal closer signed a minor-league deal with Kansas City last week. Other discussions required more adjusting.

Hearing Matheny talk about his excitement to manage players like Ryan O’Hearn, Adalberto Mondesi, and Jorge Soler was a bit like watching a familiar movie with a foreign language overdub. The rhythms and the images are familiar. The details require some reframing.

“If you see something today that you realize isn’t working and it’s brought to your attention, that adjustment needs to happen on the fly,” Matheny said. “So to say that there’s this long list of things I wish I would have done, trying to get those done as we went, but there’s always things you need to improve on.

“As soon as I was let go, I started figuring out, ‘hey, this is something I love to do. What are some of the blind spots that I have? What are the things that I need to get better at?’ And then started being proactive in doing those.”

The Royals are providing Matheny with both time and opportunity to show that improvement. If it sinks in, the organization will be dramatically improved for that investment.