AMARO ENJOYS LESS-STRESSFUL LIFE
Ex- GM of Phillies settles in as coach with Red Sox
Ruben Amaro wakes up every morning, picks up the newspaper, peruses the Internet and seldom sees his name.
He turns on the radio while driving to work, listens to the latest baseball news and never hears his name.
He pulls into the Boston Red Sox parking lot, walks to the clubhouse and no reporters are waiting. Amaro, who spent 17 years in the Philadelphia Phillies front office — seven as general manager — never imagined anonymity could feel so good. The ridicule and scorn have stopped. The media aren’t calling for his job. The hate mail has ceased. He no longer is buried with paperwork.
Amaro has gone from perhaps baseball’s most important job description — running a front office — to one of its most famously marginal ones: first-base coach.
He’s wearing a uniform for the first time in 18 years — and embracing his new life.
“When I was let go, I started thinking about my options,” says Amaro, who was fired Sept. 10 by the Phillies. “Instead of looking at this like, ‘Oh, this is the end of the world,’ I thought this could create an opportunity for me, which is different.” Uh, real different. Plenty managed first, went to the front office and returned to the dugout. Managers have come straight from the front office. But to go from GM to a big-league first-base coach? Unprecedented.
“One of my biggest fears, I guess, or anxiety, was credibility,” Amaro says. “‘This guy is a GM, but what does he know about coaching? What does he know about outfield play? All of that?’
“But these guys aren’t afraid to throw the Google up there, so I’m sure they know a little bit about me. They know I played parts of years in the outfield, but obviously I have a different type of experience in baseball, broader than most.”
Amaro, 51, was a batboy for the 1980 World Series champion Phillies. His dad played 11 years in the big leagues and was the first-base coach on that 1980 Phillies team. Amaro was a college star at Stanford, got drafted by the Los Angeles Angels and spent parts of eight seasons in the big leagues.
Now, the résumé has another line, leaving young, inquisitive minds in the Red Sox clubhouse asking, “How close did you come to trading for me?”
The Phillies — after reaching the postseason in five consecutive seasons, winning two pennants and a World Series — started eroding after the 2011 season.
They kept trying different products to ward off deterioration, bringing in high-priced starters Roy Oswalt, Cliff Lee and A.J. Burnett; veterans Jim Thome, Michael Young and Juan Pierre; and closer Jonathan Papelbon. The returns diminished.
The Phillies, without a winning season since 2011, faced the reality in 2015 that it was time to rebuild. Ace Cole Hamels was their prized trade chip. The Red Sox — in need of an ace and flush with prospects — were an ideal match.
Amaro let then-Red Sox GM Ben Cherington know what he wanted: outfield prospect Mookie Betts and catching prospect Blake Swihart. Cherington refused. Amaro modified his demand, swapping one of them for pitcher Henry Owens, but no one budged.
The stalemate might have cost both of them their jobs.
The Red Sox sank to last place, hired Dave Dombrowski, and Cherington walked out the door. The Phillies, whose true rebuilding was delayed until Hamels was sent to the Texas Rangers on July 30 in an eight-player deal, hired Andy MacPhail as president June 29 and fired Amaro.
“I didn’t mind the scrutiny,” Amaro said. “But everybody gets to some level of sensitivity, eventually. Listen, I took a lot of heat there at the end.”
Who’d imagine that six weeks later Amaro would be coaching the Red Sox guys he coveted.
“I told them, ‘It wasn’t close. But I’ll tell you guys this: I liked every one of you SOBs. I liked you and you and you.’
“Ben did the right thing by not trading them.”
Amaro traded Hamels, the 2008 World Series MVP, for veteran Matt Harrison and five prospects — catcher Jorge Alfaro, outfielder Nick Williams and pitchers Jake Thompson, Alec Asher and Jerad Eickhoff — and the deal is lauded in Philadelphia.
It’s a nice line item on the résumé, and Amaro, who has a newlywed wife and two daughters back home in Philadelphia, often ponders what comes next — perhaps a managerial opportunity or another chance to run a ballclub.
“It’s a hell of a question, and I hope I do get a chance to cross that bridge,” Amaro said. “I still have a passion to run an organization, and I think it would be extraordinary to get an opportunity to be a manager.”
Phillies Hall of Fame executive Pat Gillick, who helped persuade Amaro to take the Red Sox job, thinks Amaro’s background will only help him become a manager.
“The analytics in the game have changed, but so have the managers,” Gillick said. “There’s a lot of guys with no managerial experience out there. Ruben is a smart guy. He’s bilingual. He coached. He played. He was an assistant GM. A GM. If I was going to look at somebody in the future, I’d sure look at him.”
Dombrowski, who brought Amaro’s name to manager John Farrell’s attention, says the coaching experience will help.
“It would be tough to be a GM and go directly to managing, but being a coach and back on the field, that’s a natural situation,” Dombrowski said. “In a few years, he may have the ability to choose which way he wants to go.”
For now, Amaro is content to wake up each morning with a sore body, an achy arm and a sunburned face. He lost 15 pounds to prepare for the job, spending the winter using a fungo bat and throwing batting practice with his nephew. He’s ambidextrous, so when one arm gets fatigued, he just switches to the other.
He has a month to hone his skills as a first-base coach — learning who can take the extra base and whose arm to test in the outfield — before learning the nuances of Fenway Park. He knows the Red Sox faithful will be closely watching, ready to pounce the moment he makes a mistake.
“Listen, I love the intensity,” he says. “That was the beauty of being in Philadelphia and the beauty now of being in Boston. They want to win. I get it. I’m going to put the same amount of pressure on myself as an instructor and coach just as I did as a GM.”
The way other members of the Boston coaching staff see it, Amaro has an advantage over them when he has that baserunner thrown out at second base.
“Yeah,” Red Sox third-base coach Brian Butterfield said, “he’s used to the scorn.”
You better believe it.