MELVIN CREATES UNIFIED CULTURE
Manager has way of making everyone feel part of team
When Bob Melvin spoke about Matt Beaty not getting into games during a stretch in April, there was real angst in the manager’s voice.
Beaty wasn’t playing much at the time as the Padres faced a spate of lefthanded starters and circumstances dictated that there weren’t pinch-hitting opportunities in most of those games either.
That is just not how Melvin operates. He would mention Beaty, almost offhandedly, practically every day.
“We’ve got to get him in,” he said multiple times.
This might seem unimportant — or, given Beaty’s lack of production in his first month with the Padres, even strange.
But that’s how it is on Melvin’s teams. If a player is on the team, he plays.
“We want to create a culture here where we use everybody and everybody has a role,” Melvin said recently. “I think our roster at this point right now, everybody has a role and everybody shouldn’t be sitting around for too long.”
Melvin is one of five managers to have used a differ
ent starting lineup for every one of his team’s games this season. That has partially been due to necessity and sometimes to convenience. But it is also always intentional.
“It’s powerful,” Melvin said. “They all pull for each other.”
He has used just the starting nine for an entire game just three times. For comparison, Padres’ opponents have done so 11 times.
It does seem impactful to the players involved.
“I mean, (it’s) the way that he talks and the way that he talks to every single player and tries to make you comfortable, and he tries to put you in good position all the time,” Jose Azocar said Monday.
Azocar, a rookie outfielder, did not start until the season’s 12th game. By that time, he had played in nine games — as a pinchrunner, defensive replacement or pinch-hitter.
“I feel like I’m part of the team right away because he’s been using me like every single game,” Azocar said. “Every single game, I probably go to defense for like two or three innings. I feel like I’m in there, and I try to
help all time when I get the opportunity.”
The data showed that
Melvin used his bench frequently in Oakland. No AL team pinch-hit as much as
the A’s over the past eight seasons. He was managing for one of the most analytically driven teams in the major leagues. It made sense.
Now that he has been deciding the Padres’ lineup and pulling the in-game strings for a bit, it is clear already that it is about more than matchups. He was a bench player. He knows what it was like to play only one day a week, often getting his only at-bats of the week against the opponents’ best starter.
“You try to keep everybody involved,” Melvin said. “It’s more powerful that way.”
Every Padres player knows he has a chance to play. That is, of course, technically true of any team. But it feels real to Padres players this season. Not only has Melvin communicated to them in the broader sense from the start of spring training about how it will take the entire roster to be a winning team for the long haul, but he is virtually constantly on the move talking to players before and during games about how they might be used that day.
“He’s not trying to put you apart and then not care about you,” Azocar said. “No, no. He’s all the time on top of you saying things and letting you know things.”