A home run hire: Matt Quatraro is the next skipper of the Royals
J.J. Picollo gets his manager.
The off day during the World Series is apparently a day to make a major baseball announcement. The Royals used the break between games two and three as an opportunity to inform the baseball world they have hired Tampa Bay Rays bench coach Matt Quatraro to be their next manager.
This is, quite simply, a home run hire for general manager J.J. Picollo and the Royals.
Rewind yourself to earlier this month when I laid out a list of potential candidates for the position. Here’s part of what I wrote about Quatraro:
“Quatraro is a great communicator. That’s something Picollo mentioned a number of times in his press conference last week that was an important quality for the Royals’ next manager to possess. And owner John Sherman is certainly familiar with Quatraro as he was minority owner of the Cleveland franchise from 2016 until he bought the Royals after the end of the 2019 season.
He’s probably my favorite of the bunch and one to definitely keep an eye on.”
From the moment they fired Matheny, Quatraro was on my personal shortlist of “wants” when it came to new managers. He’s young enough that he can relate to the players. With his tutelage under a couple of fantastic major league managers, he has seen firsthand what it takes to become a successful leader. And the organizations he’s worked in are known for their innovation and sustained success.
Quatraro, quite simply, checks all the boxes.
If you were worried that the elevation of Picollo to the general manager’s position would mean the Royals were a “business-as-usual” organization, even the in aftermath of the dismissal of Dayton Moore as club president, it should be obvious now that Picollo intends to do things differently.
This is a hire that Moore never would have made. The last two managers Moore brought into the fold—Ned Yost and Mike Matheny—were managers with extensive track records and quite a bit of baggage. While Yost was able to shed his and go on quite the 18-month heater, Matheny was never able to evolve in the way we were promised. Not that it was a surprise. Hell, if Moore was still around, I’d bet the farm Matheny would be back.
Picollo isn’t afraid to make aggressive moves or take a risk. As if hiring a top managerial candidate is a risk. It’s more that he’s not afraid to cast a wide net and see where his process leads. I have to say, after all these years, this is a refreshing change of pace.
“We are extremely excited to have Matt leading our club and core of talent,” Royals Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations/General Manager J.J. Picollo said in a press release announcing the hire of Quatraro. “Matt has great experiences throughout his career that have prepared him for this. He thoroughly impressed us all during our interview process and is clearly respected across the industry. We are looking forward to working alongside Matt to bring winning baseball to our great fans.”
Quatraro has been with the Tampa organization for 23 of the 27 years he’s spent in professional baseball. He was drafted by the Rays in 1996 and finished his career in Triple-A in 2002.
He joined the Rays as a minor league instructor in 2004. He was manager for short-season Hudson Valley for two years before moving on to Columbus and Bowling Green in the South Atlantic League in 2008 and 2009 respectively. His overall managerial record in the minors was 196-228 over four seasons.
Quatraro pivoted to a minor league hitting coordinator role for Tampa starting in 2010. After four seasons in that position, he moved to Cleveland, joining Terry Francona’s staff as an assistant hitting coach. He returned to Tampa in 2018 as a third base coach before assuming bench coaching duties in 2019.
The Rays have made the postseason in four of Quatraro’s five seasons on the major league staff there. Cleveland made a couple of playoff appearances while he was on Francona’s staff. Both clubs went to the World Series with Quatraro in a coaching role.
So he’s a guy who has paid his dues, worked his way up the ranks and amassed an impressive coaching pedigree working with both Francona and Kevin Cash, two of the more respected managers in the game. If you’re looking for strong managerial bloodlines, Quatraro has it in abundance.
Of course, his time in Cleveland coincided with John Sherman’s time as a minority owner of the club. Here’s what the Royals owner had to say about the hiring of Quatraro:
“J.J. and his staff designed and executed a rigorous process that revealed Matt to be the best leader for our club,” Royals Chairman and CEO John Sherman said. “Matt is widely respected throughout baseball with a proven record and tangible contributions in two organizations that built winning cultures through creativity and innovation. We are thrilled to welcome Matt, his wife Chris, and sons George and Leo to the Kansas City community.”
Man, Sherman just seems to get it. Even in a response in a press release. The words I keep coming back to are “creativity” and “innovation.” We’ve gotten to know Sherman a little bit over the last three seasons he’s been the owner. He’s a guy who’s looking for that edge to come through, let’s just say non-traditional avenues. He knows his club has to be on the cutting edge to discover and maintain a competitive edge. In that way, baseball isn’t all that different from his business ventures. Obviously, Sherman has been widely successful in his career. There’s no reason to think his process and thoughtfulness and methods won’t translate from the boardroom to the ball field.
The quote from Picollo in the press release didn’t mention it (which was a bit of a surprise given it was the oft-stated number one attribute the Royals were looking for in their search) but I just can’t stress this enough: Picollo was looking for a guy who could communicate with his roster of young talent. Quatraro has earned raves about that aspect of his time as a hitting coach and bench coach.
SNY, the Mets broadcast partner, had a story last December about Quatraro and how he is ready for a major league managerial job. I ran these quotes from my article on managerial candidates, but they deserve a replay here.
One executive interviewed compared Quatraro to Bob Melvin.
“I know Matt fairly well and I see a lot of similarities with Bob,” the exec said. “They’re both very bright, studious, and they’re both low-key personality-wise but very good communicating and developing relationships with players. The big unknown is always how a guy will handle the stress that comes with managing, especially the first time around.”
Quatraro drew similar praise for his communication skills from Anthony Recker, who knew him from their time in Cleveland.
“He understood how to interact with players, getting to know them on a personal level before suggesting any changes in what they were doing. I thought that was very important. He was a student of who you are first, and not just someone telling you what to do. You learn to trust a guy like that.
“He’s supremely intelligent and he was very observant, very organized. And when he spoke everything was always well thought out. To me, those kind of people tend to be the best leaders.”
Quatraro’s departure from Tampa leaves a void for the Rays, but manager Cash expressed support for his now-former second-hand man.
“I am absolutely thrilled for ‘Q,’” Cash said. “He is more than ready for this opportunity to step into the manager role with Kansas City. He is a stand-up person who was always prepared for the team, and his leadership will definitely be missed.”
Marc Topkin in the Tampa Bay Times notes that Quatraro has been linked to so many openings in the past that his fellow coaches would leave media guides in his locker for teams with openings…so he could study up before an inevitable interview.
Yeah, Quatraro has been the hot managerial candidate for a couple of years now, scoring interviews with at least a half-dozen teams. That’s not a reason to look at him skeptically. Just because a guy doesn’t land a managerial gig doesn’t mean he can’t be a good and effective leader. Different teams look for different attributes at different times. The Royals, a young club (hopefully) on the ascendency, feel Quatraro is the right guy at the right time. The Rangers with some high-dollar free-agent talent went with a proven veteran in Bruce Bochy. Meanwhile, the White Sox will probably be pivoting from Tony LaRussa to Ozzie Guillen. Different organizations do things differently.
Obviously, there’s no guarantee that this hire will be a success. We could be looking back at this a few years from now wondering what in the world were we thinking. (Go ahead and bookmark this for that purpose.) In professional sports, the correct process doesn’t always yield the optimal results. If the worst were to happen, and it turns out Quatraro was a poor fit, I don’t think you would want to fault the process. Coming from a previous leader in the organization who believed that Mike Matheny would be a good manager in Kansas City because “iron sharpens iron” or some such nonsense, it’s refreshing that the current leadership does some serious due diligence, looks outside the organization and comes away with the guy who was probably the best option for them on the open managerial market.
It’s going to be fun to see how Quatraro molds this club. His methods and philosophies. How he incorporates the data and analytics while relating to the game situation. It’s a new day for the Royals. A fresh start they’ve so badly needed after these aimless, rebuilding seasons. There’s a sense of purpose here. A desire to move forward. A statement.
Yes, this is a home run hire.
The trick now is the swing once again for the fences and achieve a similar result with a new pitching coach.
Positive news from the Royals side of the complex. Nice start to November
One of my favorite things about hiring Quatraro (at least from the surface) is his age. He's younger than Matheny, but also not, like, 35 or something. Extended playing career in the minor leagues. More than a decade in coaching. This is the kind of guy to bring on board when your organization truly wants to take the best from scouting AND data to create a good on-field product.