San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
MELVIN HOPES EXPERIENCE OPENS DOOR TO SUCCESS Game has changed with analytics, but needing relationships with players hasn’t
It begins with a closed door. Someone had shut the door as they left Bob Melvin’s office, and it didn’t feel right to the Padres’ new manager. Never has. Not figuratively, not literally. Not as a player, not as a coach, not as a manager.
So straight away on a rainy December day in which he had just begun explaining he’d rather be doing almost anything besides talking about himself, Melvin came out from behind his desk and walked across the room to open the door.
“I never want the players to see that,” he said. “Not that there are any players here now. It just makes me uncomfortable.”
As he returned to his seat,
“I go in (thinking), ‘How am I going to acclimate to these guys? How am I going to reach these guys? How am I going to make them better?’ ” Bob Melvin • Padres manager, on his approach to a new team
Melvin told a story about one of his first meetings as a coach, while serving as Phil Garner’s bench coach with the Milwaukee Brewers in 1999.
“You go in and shut the door and evaluate the players,” Melvin recalled. “I’m sitting there, the door is making me uncomfortable that it’s closed, because I had just come off the playing field and I know what players think when they see there’s a closed-door meeting.”
Melvin recounted that Garner noticed his agitation and asked if he was uncomfortable. Melvin fibbed “No, no.”
But once he knew he wanted to manage, he also knew he would never have his door closed.
“I don’t want them thinking they can’t come in here or that I’m not available,” Melvin said.
And that says as much as anything about the man who played under the likes of Sparky Anderson and Frank Robinson and has managed the better part of 18 major league seasons and used to play catch in the backyard with his grandfather’s friend, Vince Lombardi, and interned three winters at one of the world’s top stock brokerage firms and is now sitting in the manager’s office inside the home clubhouse at Petco Park.
“An incredible person, a guy who really wants you to do well,” said Yonder Alonso, who played for Melvin in Oakland after being traded there by the Padres before the 2016 season. “Playing for him for a couple years, he was so happy for me. When things weren’t going so well, he would also let you know. If you had reason why you felt you had to play, you could communicate that, and he would tell you his side. You guys can just have a chat about it. At the end of the day, he let you know everything was for the betterment of the team. … The best part about it
was his door was always open.”
Sum of the parts
If it could be reduced to one attractive quality, the Padres hired Melvin because of his experience.
His résumé has been filled out a bit more than Jayce Tingler or Andy Green, the firsttime managers who led the Padres over the previous six seasons.
Melvin has managed three teams and was named Manager of the Year for two of them — one of six men to win the award in each league and one of eight to win the award at least three times.
He played for Anderson, Robinson, Roger Craig, Johnny Oates, Hal Mcrae, Buck Showalter, Butch Hobson and Gene Lamont.
Melvin worked for Josh Byrnes in Arizona before Byrnes became the Padres’ general manager.
Among the players Melvin has managed are Ichiro Suzuki, Edgar Martinez, John Olerud, Randy Johnson, Craig Counsell, Hideki Matsui, Yoenis Cespedes and a utility infielder named Andy Green.
Melvin caught games pitched by Jack Morris, Vida Blue, Mike Mussina, Roger Clemens, Frank Viola and a journeyman named Mark Grant.
The lists could go on and on and on. That would be appropriate, too. Because that’s what it is about with Melvin.
“It’s relationships with people,” he said. “You get experience with your relationships with people.”
Acclimating
When Melvin departed Oakland, he had been with the same team longer than any other current big-league manager. In his 10 full seasons in Oakland, the A’s went to the playoffs six times and finished above .500 seven times. No Oakland manager has more wins than Melvin’s 853 with the club. (Connie Mack, who managed the Philadelphia A’s for a half-century, holds the unbeatable franchise record.)
Melvin almost certainly won’t be in San Diego that long.
“I would not be surprised if this was it, these three years,” he said, referring to the term of his Padres contract. “It’s a pretty consuming job. You put a lot on your families. I’ve been doing it a long time. This is my 41st year in professional baseball. I need the offseason more and more every year.”
Just seven managers among the 30 in the major leagues are older than Melvin, who turned 60 on the day he agreed to join the Padres. Just three — Dusty Baker, Terry Francona and Tony La Russa — got their first big-league managerial jobs before Melvin got his, in 2003 with the Seattle Mariners.
Managing and maneuvering in the major leagues has changed, by Melvin’s math, “180 degrees” in that time. In particular, the way rosters and lineups are built and the interaction between front offices and on-field personnel has shifted.
“If you resist that, you’re not going to have a job,” Melvin said. “Look how many guys my age in baseball don’t have a job anymore. You have to realize why is it going in this direction and look at the teams it’s working for and open your mind up to new ways of doing things. If I’ve done anything, I’ve learned from my experiences … you have to open up your mind to different ways. In any walk of life now, information is accelerating at a pace where you have to realize that.”
His career illustrates that as well as any.
His first managing job was with a veteran team that was essentially plug and play. His most recent job was working for A’s Executive Vice President Billy Beane, whose use of modern metrics to build a low-budget contender with interchangeable parts practically reinvented the game.
“I learned a lot in Oakland,” Melvin said. “And Billy Beane was absolutely fantastic for me. It was a little uncomfortable at first. They look at things completely differently. It’s not the guy, it’s the number — what this guy analytically contributes. That’s how they have to look at things. Going in there, I didn’t know that dynamic. But I realized there’s a lot to it.”
Melvin said Beane led him to water.
“The last thing Billy wants to tell you is how to do it,” Melvin said. “He may make you uncomfortable, but he wants you to come to the conclusion. He wanted it to be my idea at one point in time where this is how you’re going to morph into thinking like this without telling me, ‘This is how you’re going to morph into thinking like this.’ So it was a process to where it’s just instinctive now.”
Melvin wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the idea or benefits of some of the analyticbased philosophies.
Garner, Melvin recalled, was ahead of his time in how he constructed lineups around the ability to get on base. Melvin’s matchupbased managing in 2007, during which he used 146 different lineups, far more than most other teams at the time, helped the Diamondbacks win the National League West that year.
He also sees a line between analytics and his interest in the stock market and an internship at Bear Stearns in the late 1980s (during the winters while he was playing for the San Francisco Giants).
“There is a correlation,” he said. “It allowed me to accept the analytics quicker, probably. I think that’s what makes Billy really good at what he does, too, is being disciplined in the numbers. That’s one of the components between Billy and I, we love the business. We talk stock market a lot of time probably more than baseball. … There is a big correlation (between) brokerage firms and baseball teams, hedge funds, the numbers, placing a value on players.”
Perhaps as significantly, Melvin was in a place to receive Beane’s tutelage after his experience managing the Arizona Diamondbacks. His relationship with Byrnes, who was hired after Melvin’s first season, became tenuous. Melvin was fired a little more than a month into his fifth season (2009) in Arizona.
“I learned,” Melvin said. “I went from a circumstance where I didn’t get along with the general manager. Josh Byrnes wanted to do things a little differently. I’m the incumbent. I’m going to do things my way. You have to get along. Especially nowadays with the impact the front offices have.”
Coming to work with A.J. Preller, the Padres’ president of baseball operations, will be different but the same.
Preller and the front office are certainly involved in roster makeup and provide direction regarding usage. But Preller gives his manager more autonomy than many in making out lineups and executing in-game maneuvers.
“It will be different in that respect,” Melvin said. “But the collaboration will come from my end up as opposed from up to down to me, because I want everyone to be comfortable with what we’re doing. So if they say, ‘The lineup is yours.’ OK, the lineup is mine. But I’m going to tell you beforehand, ‘Here is the lineup and here is why and what are your thoughts?’ They may have something to add.”
Empowering
When a player starts thinking he might want to manage one day — as Melvin did in the early 1990s when Oates suggested that was possibly in his future — he commences honing a plan of what kind of manager he will be.
Melvin credits Craig with teaching him to watch the game as if managing and Robinson for unlocking the leader inside him.
Where Craig called many of the in-game machinations in San Francisco, such as throw-overs and slide steps and even some pitches, Robinson challenged Melvin to do so in Baltimore.
“He said, ‘Let me ask you a question. Aren’t you the quarterback back there? Shouldn’t you be leading the way? Don’t you know the scouting reports? Don’t you know the strengths and weaknesses of your pitchers? Don’t you see the adjustments the hitter is making? Why would I be telling you what to do?’ He completely empowered me. All of a sudden, I turned into that leadership type of guy, which transferred to the clubhouse, which transferred everywhere. Frank Robinson, in that one conversation, had as big an impact on my career as any manager I’ve had because it pushed me to a level I never would have gone on my own.”
Among the things Melvin absorbed from working under Garner in Milwaukee and Detroit was the lesson that a manager must adapt to his team and not the other way around.
Communication and relationship were, from the start, going to be tenets for Melvin. What players now widely laud him for was born of experiences when he was a player.
One of Melvin’s managers, who he insisted not be named, once held him out of games for a long stretch because of a mental mistake the manager thought Melvin had made. The manager also didn’t care to listen to Melvin’s explanation of the play. The experience left the young catcher playing scared.
“Down the road,” Melvin said, “I told myself I can’t do that to a player because I’m not going to get the best out of him.”
That, Melvin assessed, is his main job. The man widely cited by those in and around the game as among the top two or three managers in the majors said he can’t define what makes a good manager other than to get the best out of players in order to get best out of the team.
“I’m not going to come in here and do anything different than I normally do,” Melvin said. “All I know is how I do things. … I go in (thinking), ‘How am I going to acclimate to these guys? How am I going to reach these guys? How am I going to make them better? How am I going to get everybody to pull on the same rope?’ ”
Been there, done that
Melvin was working as a special assistant for the Diamondbacks in 2011 when the A’s called to ask him to manage their team. He replaced the fired Bob Geren on June 9.
“Literally the first game I was in the dugout I didn’t know anybody,” he recalled. “I had to wait until they walked by me to see their name (on the back of their uniform).”
Melvin called his wife that night and said he didn’t foresee it working out with the A’s.
A decade later, he could assess: “What it did is made me comfortable in uncomfortable situations.”
Like right now, as he gets set for his first season managing the Padres and is unable to communicate with his players because of the lockout.
“This isn’t great,” he said. “But I’m not stressed about it. … When you get on the field in a baseball uniform and you have six weeks of spring training, that’s plenty of time. That’s when (players) are most comfortable. That’s when you reach them.”
Many of the things Melvin espouses now and will impart when he is with his team — doing things for the good of the team, maximizing strengths, needing everyone on the roster, etc. — are not all that different than the things said by his predecessor. It’s simply that Melvin has amassed the gravitas to make his mantras stick.
Time and again, his former players have talked about his ability to communicate.
“Everybody in here has to understand and needs to look at walking in (another) guy’s shoes,” Melvin said. “It’s easy to have a reliever come in (and ask), ‘How can you use me there?’ I have to explain, ‘Here’s why: You have to understand you’re not the only guy on this team. I think about you and your situation as much as you do. I’m asking you every now and then to look at my shoes and how I have to deal with the rest of the guys in the bullpen. It’s not just about you. It’s about us. There are going to be some times you’re going to be unhappy with your role. There are going to be some times you’re going to expect to be in a game and you’re not. I will try to communicate that with you all the time before a series or a game. Sometimes it won’t happen that way. Performance matters. I’ll always be straight with you. But if we’re going to win, we all have to be part of this thing, and I have to prepare everybody on our roster to get there.’ ”
The ability to make that sort of conversation land comes largely with having had those conversations before and having them land.
“You learn from your experience,” Melvin said. “When you talk about how I know, I can’t write an algorithm for you, but I can sense how to do things.”
He recalled not giving his coaches enough power or authority early in his career. It’s something he attempts to increase every season.
“I still don’t have it figured out,” he said. “I still have to every year look at things I can be better, how I can empower more people.”
Melvin extended the list to clubhouse staff.
“The more people feel like they can really do their jobs in this clubhouse, the more powerful the whole dynamic becomes,” he said. “I’m learning about how people influence other people. That’s what it comes down to. You see it, you learn from it.”
For that, the door must be open.
“This isn’t great. But I’m not stressed about it. … When you get on the field in a baseball uniform and you have six weeks of spring training, that’s plenty of time. That’s when (players) are most comfortable. That’s when you reach them.” Bob Melvin • On the lockout