TINGLER HAS ‘BLAST’ IN HIS FIRST SEASON

But Padres manager knows a lot of work still to be done in future

Jayce Tingler was managing a game in the Dominican Republic on Oct. 23, 2019.

As he recalls it, his Leones del Escogido team was trailing 2-0 in the fourth inning.

“They probably had four or five hoppers that get through the infield,” he said. “We’d made nine outs. We’d lined out four times.”

Frustrated, Tingler retreated to the clubhouse to “get a coffee or maybe just drop some f-bombs.”

Almost immediately upon arriving, he saw Padres Director of Player Development Ryley Westman, who was in the country to see some of the organization’s players. Westman’s shaking hand held a phone, and his face was pale.

Westman, a longtime friend who grew up in the same Missouri town as Tingler, handed him the phone.

“The first thing I thought is something was horribly wrong, there’s been an acci

dent,” Tingler recalled.

It wasn’t a nightmare situation. It was a dream come true. On the line was Padres General Manager A.J. Preller, who called to offer Tingler his first big-league manager job.

“I fell to my knees, blacked out,” Tingler said.

He does remember eventually jumping into the arms of Westman. While Tingler returned to manage the game, Westman called Tingler’s wife and parents.

Amid a whirlwind of emotions over the next 12 to 18 hours, Tingler remembers thinking at one point during the flight to San Diego “how much work needed to be done.”

He could not have fathomed what that would entail over the next year.

“Just being able to handle a lot of adversity or a lot of things you didn’t plan on,” Tingler said this week about what stood out to him when thinking of how he and the Padres navigated this strange coronavirus-altered season. “When you go through the 2020 experience, it’s a lot of things you don’t plan on. It’s a lot of adapting and rolling with punches and adjusting and moving forward I feel like from a challenge standpoint, there were sometimes two or three new challenges a day. As you decompress or take a couple weeks off, you think, ‘You’ll be better going forward.’ ”

Tingler spoke via phone while driving home from a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu class near his home in Smithville, Mo. He had been taking a 4:30 a.m. class near the Peoria Sports Complex during spring training but hadn’t been able to practice his martial art since March due to the pandemic.

He left San Diego sparingly during Major League Baseball’s 3½-month shutdown, and his wife and two young sons spent most of the season in Missouri. So the past couple weeks have been spent catching up, attending soccer games and attempting to cross things of a “honey-do list that is more of a scroll, not a list.”

The time since the Padres were eliminated from the postseason with a threegame sweep by the Dodgers in the National League Division Series has also been a period of reflection.

“I don’t even know how you explain it — the longest short season ever,” Tingler said. “At the end of the day, we made some really nice significant steps forward. That part feels good. At the same time, getting eliminated when we did, I also think it’s fair to say there’s not much time to really rest. We know we’ve got more levels to be attained.

“It was a blast, and that was based on two things. No. 1, the group of players and their cohesiveness and their ability to work and try things and have great attitudes and compete. The same with the staff and the way they worked with the players and developed relationships and the way the org worked … front office and analytics and all those things coming together. That’s what made it dynamic and fun. We know we still can do a lot of things better, but for the first year it was a blast.”

The Padres went 37-23 in the regular season, achieving the highest winning percentage in franchise history. They then won their first playoff series since 1998 before falling to the Dodgers.

Tingler mentioned in his introductory news conference how rare it was for a first-time manager to take over a team considered on the verge of contention. This week, he said the reality truly sank in near the end of the season.

On Sept. 19, it was announced Ron Gardenhire was retiring and the lastplace Tigers would be looking for a new manager. The next day, the Padres clinched their first playoff berth in 14 years.

“I remember thinking, ‘Teams like that, that are rebuilding, that are a couple years away from getting to that goal, that’s normally what a first-year manager’s team looks like for the first couple years,’ ” Tingler said. “I’ve been blessed to have a great organization, a great staff, a great farm system and more importantly a team with (Manny) Machado and (Fernando) Tatis and (Eric) Hosmer and (Trent) Grisham and all the rest. It’s more an attitude of gratitude and thoroughly thankful for the opportunity.”

Jayce Tingler