KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Sit down for a chat with new Royals manager Matt Quatraro, as I had the opportunity to do Thursday morning at Kauffman Stadium, and chances are you’ll walk away struck by several impressions.
For me, those include the further sense he’s both unassuming and comfortable in his own skin … and that those traits figure in his apparent perception of the job as a connector and delegator more than someone who must immediately assert authority.
Moreover, I came away thinking of how much he’s a reflection of his upbringing in Selkirk, New York, complete with an urge to nurture but allow space to grow.
As he spoke of his parents as “super steady” and “consistent” but not micromanaging his life, it was easy to picture how he’d apply to this job the notion of their “simple life lessons without telling you what to do or how to do it all the time.”
What also resonated was the self-deprecating way he appreciates every phase of his journey to this first MLB managerial job at age 49 — including how a quirk opened this path when he might well have become a history teacher instead.
If not for a chance to play in Italy falling through after the end of his six-year minor league career in 2003, Quatraro said, he wouldn’t have been in position to take a coaching assistant job for Tampa Bay (that led to everything else) when somebody else suddenly quit.
“I fell in,” said Quatraro, whose parents and wife were teachers. “And who says (a life in baseball) was better or worse, right?”
What also stood out, once more but perhaps still surprisingly to some, was the premium he puts on the human touch and relationships.
That certainly runs counter to any notion that Quatraro being well-versed in analytics, which the Royals have stressed as urgent to further engage now, means he will be in rigid servitude to numbers.
Instead, it’s very much like he put it the day he was introduced last fall as Royals manager:
Data, he said then, “doesn’t make the decisions. It informs the decisions, and it creates more questions that you can ask that help you make better decisions down the road.”
Don’t get him wrong. Quatraro loves numbers and loved math growing up. Until, that is, he hit “something that’s just like a wall” with pre-calculus.
Quatraro and his wife, Christine, with whom he grew up, still laugh about the pre-calc teacher who said, “If you don’t know this by now, you’re dead in the water.”
That was a month into the school year.
“I could not figure it out,” Quatraro said. “I just couldn’t do it.”
For that matter, he struggled with chemistry despite the best efforts of his father, George, a chemist turned chemistry teacher turned school administrator. And when he was in school at Old Dominion trying to choose between political science and history as a major, well …
“Political science had more math than I was interested in,” said Quatraro, who also simply loved studying history.
So maybe it’s a bit of a twist that his healthy relationship with data is part of the reason he was the man for the job, as the Royals seek a jump-start after stalling on a rebuild and losing an average of 98 games over their last four full seasons (not including the pandemic-shortened 2020 season).
But it’s in his view of that realm that everything about his background converges: his low-key way; his trust in those all around him on the flow chart; his wish to teach and provide every tool without jamming them down anyone’s craw.
So the numbers are very interesting, to be sure.
But, he added, “We have resources people that do that. If I tried to get into, like, the coding or the actual math that they do, that would be silly. But I can have a conversation and have someone explain it and understand what I hope I need to understand.”
With a pause, he smiled and added, “But they can easily lose me, too, if they wanted to.”
That’s just a microcosm of Quatraro’s humble broader approach.
As he talks about the time he’s spent with players individually, he speaks of trying “just to get to know people and let them get to know me — more on a personal level than a ‘here’s what I want done’ kind of thing.”
When he speaks of the staff he’s assembled, he notes not just that he feels great about each component, but that he loves the way they are interacting … “and the things they have in mind for spring training.”
Not, you’ll notice, what he has in mind. Like his parents raising him, he doesn’t plan to micromanage.
Instead, it’s all about collaboration.
“Those people manage their areas and implement the things that are important to them in their areas,” he said. “So I’m not going to sit here and call (pitching coach) Brian Sweeney and say, ‘I want everybody to throw their slider like this.’ That’s just not how it works, right?”
Same with hitting: It’s on its own course and “awesome,” he said, that senior director of player development/hitting performance Alec Zumwalt is in the cage coaching major league and minor league hitters every day in keeping with what he’s been doing the last few years.
Don’t mistake any of this for passivity by Quatraro, though he certainly figures to be less intense than predecessor Mike Matheny.
It’s just that Quatraro knows there are some pillars in place — and time enough for him to become more directly involved as all get to know each other better and trust is earned.
“You don’t force it, is my opinion,” he said. “You are who you are.”
In his case, that means what he calls not putting on airs or “faking that stuff,” but rather listening and learning as he assesses what imprint he might put on the culture.
“Who am I to come in and say, ‘Change that. I want this done a different way,’” he said. “Now, once we get going and we have conversations and we know each other and trust each other, … (I might say), ‘Hey, you ever thought about this?’ And they can tell me the same thing. And we make adjustments to improve.”
How that plays out, of course, will be a work in progress.
One that hinges greatly on the continued rise of young stars in the making, an enormous improvement in starting pitching and a flourishing minor league system.
But Quatraro certainly seems an inspired and promising choice for the Royals at this crucial crossroads — someone steeped in both the cutting edge of the game and the traditional who brings a fresh voice to a franchise looking for just that.
