Melvin wears roots, Craig's influence on his sleeve
The moment Mike Krukow met Bob Melvin, he could tell he was manager material.
Almost 40 years later, that might be easy to say for the former Giants pitcher turned broadcaster. But it wasn't his instincts that told him that back then, in the spring of 1986, after the club had acquired a hotshot 24-year-old catcher from the Detroit Tigers to pair with their new manager.
It was Roger Craig, who may have been the first to see Melvin had a future in the dugout — if Melvin didn't already know himself.
“Roger was adamant about bringing Bob Melvin over to the organization from Detroit. He loved him,” Krukow recalled. “When I got to know Roger in spring training, he said, this kid, this catcher, you're going to like this guy. He's a cerebral player. That's how he phrased it. He said then, `He's going to manage in the big leagues.'”
Entering his 21st season as a major-league manager, taking the reins of his fifth team, the circumstances that brought the Menlo Park-raised baseball nut back to San Francisco for a second time aren't all that different than what led Craig to seek out Melvin following only 100-loss season in the franchise's history.
With a cast of young players, including Will Clark and eventually Matt Williams, it took only two years for Craig to turn a historically bad team back into the perennial contenders the Giants had been for most of their history. Melvin was in the dugout, soaking it all up as the backup to Bob Brenly.
The lessons learned then and throughout a lifetime in the game, the now-62 Melvin will apply this year, as he seeks to lead the Giants out of a morass of .500 finishes, a situation the Bay Area native, Cal grad and childhood fan seems uniquely suited to understand.
“It's more responsibility that I feel here more so maybe than wherever I've been because of the fact that I grew up here,” Melvin said at his introductory news conference, fumbling the buttons of the creme-colored No. 6 jersey draped over his blue dress shirt. “The expectation is that we're going to win here from day one.”
A two-sport star at Menlo-Atherton, Melvin grew up rooting for the entire spectrum of Bay Area sports teams. He wears his roots on the back of his jersey, where the No. 6 is a nod to the All-Star third baseman of the 1970s A's, Sal Bando, not only a teenage favorite of Melvin's but decades later the executive who gave him his first opportunity off the field, inside the Brewers front office.
At 6-foot-4, Melvin blended in better on the basketball court than he did behind the plate, but he opted to pursue baseball, helping the Golden Bears to a third-place finish in the College World Series as a freshman in 1980 before transferring to a local junior college to hasten his draft eligibility.
The following spring, the Tigers selected him second overall in the secondary phase of the amateur draft. Only a few months later, though, Craig was hired in San Francisco and set his sights on the impressive catcher with local ties and a strong mind for the game, setting in motion Melvin's career in the sport.
“You obviously knew what it meant to him to come back home,” Krukow said of Melvin's arrival in camp in 1986.
Quickly, Craig's influence began to wear off on him.
“Roger was the guy who made me watch the game like a manager,” Melvin said. “He made me watch the game in a different way than I was used to. Because I had to follow along with him, I had to know his signs. Really every pitch, there was that sort of unspoken communication between the manager and the catcher that I had never had before. He forced me to watch a game like a manager does, and to this day I'm forever indebted for that.”
As the second-string catcher, Melvin spent plenty of time in the dugout, where Craig's frequent commentary offered a completely new perspective than that of his first manager in Detroit, Sparky Anderson, who told the rookie not to speak unless spoken to.
Craig engaged his players, believing there should intention behind every action they take on the field. He would explain why he called a pitch out (maybe a nod or a wink from the firstbase coach to the runner), the reaction his pitcher should give to that signal (always shake, because nobody shakes off a pitch out), how to use the game to your advantage (a squeeze bunt while the stadium is still humming after a triple).
“He openly discussed strategy, what he was thinking,” Krukow said. “And Bob Melvin, this was his manager that brought him to the big leagues, right? So in his eyes, Roger Craig was the second coming.
“Mel, I truly believe that he sensed early on that this was going to be an opportunity when he was done playing. He wanted to be that manager. And here was a guy that was managing at a high level. He took all of that in like a toilet. It was just amazing how he would watch and react to Roger Craig.”
It's that feel for the game that some within the organization felt was missing under Gabe Kapler, particularly as last year's club fell apart in the second half.
With their playoff hopes fading amid a month of September that would end with nine wins and twice as many losses, the Giants called a team meeting. But it wasn't Kapler who addressed the club, rather a succession of speeches from Farhan Zaidi, Ron Wotus and a few players.
A week later, they embarked on the final road trip of the season with their playoff fate still in their own hands. Suffering series losses to three divisional opponents — losing three of four to the lastplace Rockies, swept by their wild card competition in Arizona and walked off for their third loss in four games at Dodger Stadium — they returned home effectively, if not mathematically, eliminated, and by the end of the week, Kapler had been ousted.
“The thing that has been on my mind and on the mind of other people in this organization,” Zaidi said, announcing the firing of his hand-picked manager, “as a group and as a team we played our worst baseball when it mattered the most.”