SportsNovember 30, 2015
The many surprises of St. Louis Cardinals baseball manager Mike Matheny
Southeast Missourian Before Michael Scott Matheny became manager of the St. Louis Cardinals and led the team to three straight NL Central titles; before he won four Gold Gloves as a catcher for the Cardinals and helped the team to a 2004 World Series appearance; before he was drafted by and signed with the Milwaukee Brewers...
Before Michael Scott Matheny became manager of the St. Louis Cardinals and led the team to three straight NL Central titles; before he won four Gold Gloves as a catcher for the Cardinals and helped the team to a 2004 World Series appearance; before he was drafted by and signed with the Milwaukee Brewers; before he received a full-ride scholarship to play baseball at the University of Michigan, where he became a co-captain; and before he was drafted a first time, out of high school, by the Toronto Blue Jays and turned down a contract offer. Before all that, there was a surprising story.
It came when he was a 15-year-old sophomore at Reynoldsburg High School in Reynoldsburg, a town of about 30,000 on the outskirts of Columbus, in central Ohio.
"Actually it's an interesting story," Matheny said in a recent phone interview. "I got cut from the varsity [baseball team] my sophomore year and that just devastated me. But it was one of those great lessons. I thought I had a real chance and ended up not making the team. I went down and played on the JV team and had a great year and I played for a coach at that junior level that was really passionate about the game.
"It's one of those lessons I took about not making a team you think you ought to make. It happens to a lot of guys. I still give my varsity coach trouble."
Matheny values and holds on to lessons as if they were plated in the same gold that covers his four honorary catcher's mitts from Rawlings. Those lessons started early, and he has a vault full of them, stretching back to his first season of T-ball as a 6-year-old. He might not remember his first home run as a youth, but he can recall the post-game routine.
"I remember playing that first year. I was 6 years old," the 45-year-old Cardinals manager said. "We had a really good team that actually won, and we rode around in a parade. I think it was probably the launch for my passion of the game. That one particular coach did a great job, too, in that he did take us for ice cream, the whole team. We went to Dairy Queen after every game. It's amazing little things like that [stick with] those impressionable minds. You can start relating the game with fun and good things instead of constantly pushing hard on young kids who are just trying to figure out whether they like the game or not, because all kids like ice cream."
It was Lesson No. 1 along a trail filled with wise baseball mentors who led him in a direction that ultimately molded him to be a major league player and manager.
His father, Jerry, provided positive encouragement such as setting up lights for Matheny and his three brothers to play Wiffle ball in the backyard after dark -- sometimes to the chagrin of neighbors -- hanging netting in the garage and making workout contraptions.
It was his father, who also once had dreams of pursuing professional baseball and coached his son a couple of years, who noticed talents in a young Matheny and wisely suggested to the 10-year-old to pursue life behind the plate.
Along the way, Matheny serendipitously crossed paths with a number of other backstops who helped shape his career. After becoming a longtime member of Golden's teams, he later had former Detroit Tigers catch Bill Freehan take over the Michigan program when Matheny was a sophomore.
"I definitely never rule out God's hand in all of this," Matheny said. "My whole life, you just see things happen that you know there's a higher being involved in some of the opportunities given to me, and then you have responsibilities to act on, too. There are a lot of kids that have the same coaches basically available to them and they didn't take advantage of people put in their path. My dad obviously was passionate about the game, but he didn't know the position, but he paid close attention, and there was Ron Golden who did know the position, and for a young kid, I started playing for him when I was 10. [It was important] to have that kind of instruction from a guy who played minor league baseball, who really was a good player.
"I was very fortunate to have Bill Freehan, and in the minor league system [former major league catchers] Del Crandall with Milwaukee [and] Dave Ricketts with St. Louis. These were very special people as well as special instructors."
But it all started at home. Matheny notes in his book that his father -- a strong, quiet man -- instilled respect for authority, once noting to a discontent son who complained on the way home from a tournament about riding the bench, "Sometimes life isn't fair, but the coach is always right, even when he's wrong."
Another lesson for the Matheny file.
An athlete for all seasons, he rotated from football to basketball to baseball. He received some football scholarship offers from "smaller" Division I schools his senior year, but he was highly sought after by college baseball teams, as well as the Toronto Blue Jays, who drafted him in the 31st round in 1988 and belatedly threw out second-round money -- nearly $100,000 -- in the days before he attended classes at Michigan.
"I doubt I ever would have made it," Matheny said. "I really do. I was nowhere near ready. ... I needed to go get my education."
His time at Michigan was fruitful. He met his future wife, Kristin, with whom he has five children, in his first class, though the two did not begin to date until two years later.
It was also an opportunity for the savvy Freehan, a former 11-time All-Star, to enter his life. Besides imparting baseball knowledge, Freehan insisted Matheny take Spanish in his elective classes.
"That's something I didn't pay much attention to at the time because I'm still a young player who's hoping to get one day in the minor league system, let alone coaching and managing," Matheny said. "He knew, working in the Detroit Tigers minor league system, how many young Latin players were going to be there and how much of an advantage it was going to be to have a grasp of the Spanish language. I think that was very important not just for my playing career, but also for getting the job that I have right now."
There was little fanfare when Matheny signed with the St. Louis Cardinals on Dec. 15, 1999. He was just hoping to make a team that had finished fourth in the NL Central a year earlier.
By that point he was a journeyman who had been drafted by the Brewers in 1991 and made his Major League debut in 1994, spending the season as a backup. He later moved on to Toronto -- the team that originally drafted him -- as a free agent before the 1999 season, and served as a backup before being released.
The following offseason, he found St. Louis.
"I already had played almost five years in the big leagues, which is longer than the average major league career," Matheny said, "so I was realistic I might not get back to the big leagues, but I found a place where I fit in real well, and they were needing something I brought to the table, and it just worked out.
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"It was just a first-class organization, and I noticed we talked about winning a whole lot more than we did any other place."
It was his first of five seasons under Hall-of-Fame manager Tony La Russa, and the Cardinals made the playoffs in four of those years.
"He just very focused on what our big goal was," Matheny said about La Russa. "It wasn't just to be in the big leagues. We had to figure out a way to win."
Matheny won his first Gold Glove in 2000, throwing out 53 percent of would-be base stealers, and batted a career-high .261.
"Everybody talks about needing a defensive catcher, but when it comes down to it, they typically want more offense," Matheny said. "But it was a very stacked team offensively, and they just needed me to catch. Meanwhile, it gave me some freedom to figure some things out offensively to contribute a little bit."
He added a second Gold glove in 2003 while setting an MLB record for most games played in a season without an error (138) while putting together a streak that is still unmatched -- 252 consecutive errorless games behind the plate.
That streak ended late in 2004, though he earned another Gold Glove.
That campaign also ended with St. Louis' first World Series appearance since 1987, and marked his final season with St. Louis, at least as a player. With a young, emerging catcher by the name of Yadier Molina -- who Matheny helped train -- in the mix, Matheny became a free agent.
"He wasn't much of a surprise," Matheny said. "I knew that was on the way, and the first time I watched him play I could tell he was going to be a special player. None of that surprised me. It was just when he was going to get his opportunity, and after I got hurt in the '04 season and he came up, I knew I was going into free agency and was going to end up costing the team. The dollars and cents play into it. I saw all that coming and figured that was going to happen."
Matheny ultimately signed a three-year contract with the Giants, but played his final game in May of 2006, when he went on the disabled list with a concussion after being struck by a foul tip. His official retirement was announced less than a year later.
"The foul tips weren't really an issue, just the last one," Matheny said. "It was the collisions at the plate that led me to being susceptible to having negative effects from the foul tips. The foul tips themselves were just the icing."
After his retirement, Matheny was approached about coaching one of his son's baseball teams. Before accepting the job, he gathered the parents at his home and read a 2,500-word-plus letter that outlined his expectations for behavior guidelines for parents.
It began with, "I've always said I would coach only a team of orphans. Why? Because the biggest problem in youth sports is the parents."
An outline of an approach shaped by his own coaches, his own parents' attitudes and poor behavior he had observed by parents at events he attended, the letter went viral on the Internet. It later was coined "The Matheny Manifesto," a title he appropriated for the book he later co-authored with Jerry B. Jenkins.
Matheny's chance to put his ideas in practice -- shaped by the philosophies of UCLA coaching legend John Wooden -- came unexpectedly when La Russa decided to go out on top, retiring from managing after leading the Cardinals to a 2011 World Series victory.
"I know Tony and other people had brought [managing] up," Matheny said. "That's something that it seemed like I'd be wired for, but no, I didn't really think about it all that much. I was too busy just trying to see what was in front of me and what the opportunities were going to be."
Matheny -- who had no previous managerial experience -- became a surprise candidate for the job, then a surprise hire. The surprises continued with his quick success. The green skipper guided St. Louis to an 88-74 record and the National League Championship Series appearance in his first season in 2012 -- the team's first season sans Albert Pujols -- then navigated the franchise back to that point in each of the following seasons, becoming just the fifth manager in league history to do that in his first three seasons.
The Cardinals extended Matheny's contract through 2017.
"Mike ... just shows a range of talent because of his personality and how he communicates to other people, not to mention his growth as a strategist on the field and being able to manage games," said Bill DeWitt III, President of the Cardinals. "He's had success. He gets high marks from me and our baseball staff and Mo [General Manager John Mozeliak] and my father [owner William DeWitt Jr.]."
Matheny rewarded the organization with a fourth playoff berth in four years -- the only manager to start his career in that fashion -- posting a career-high 100-62 record in 2015. It was the first time in a decade that St. Louis had won 100 games.
"There's been a lot of roster turnover, and he's been successful throughout that," DeWitt said. "The key to major-league sports is consistent competitiveness. That is the holy grail that we're all chasing, and we've had that now for a stretch from Tony straight through to Mike."
From surprise cut to surprise manager, even Matheny may not know what interesting story is next. But he has faith in the lessons he's collected along the way.
"I was just waiting to see where God was going to lead me next," Matheny said, "and amazingly leading in the direction to manage a big-league baseball team. And that was something I still know was a God thing, regardless of what anybody else would say. It's been a great ride and I've enjoyed every minute of it."
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