New St. Louis Cardinals' Manager Mike Matheny: Guiding Principles Of Faith And Hard Work

Courtesy of St. Louis Post Dispatch, thanks to Dave Witzig:

Early in Mike Matheny's career as the Cardinals' starting catcher, manager Tony La Russa pulled him into his office to ask about meetings Matheny and his teammates had in the back room of the clubhouse.

Matheny explained that they were gathering to pray, to talk about life, to offer spiritual support to each other and to ...

La Russa interjected.

His concern wasn't the topics so much as the message. The manager, as he explained this past weekend, wondered if it was wise for a slice of the team to separate itself like that. He also wanted to know where Matheny stood. La Russa wasn't questioning Matheny's faith so much as asking "whether he believed that faith determined if we won or how he played." Matheny stood behind his convictions. He saw where being a Christian merged with being a competitor.

"If we're supposed to run, we're supposed to run to win. If our job is to compete, there is nothing that we should leave in the tank," Matheny said. "We're held to a high standard, I believe. That's the conversation we had and that's how we ended it. I told him, 'If you see anything contrary to me being the hardest-nosed and hardest-working guy, you need to call me out as a hypocrite.'"

La Russa said he never felt that need.

That conversation still resonates. Matheny called it one of the best talks he ever had with La Russa because it allowed him to defend the strength he draws from faith. La Russa said it was revealing of the man who succeeds him as manager.

This coming weekend, Matheny will open his first spring training as skipper of the Cardinals. It is a job that many who know him, personally and professionally, believe was the inevitable fit, the destination to which his compass always pointed. The son of a construction worker who shared his love for the game, Matheny, 41, grew up in Ohio, grew strong as a catcher at the University of Michigan and grew into a leader as a pro. He won four Gold Gloves in his career, three as a Cardinal, and still holds the record for consecutive games without an error. While baseball is an important part of his life, it is not, as La Russa learned, what defines it.

"It's not any different seeing him catch the last pitch of an important game or picking up a pheasant in the field," said longtime friend and sometime hunting buddy Andy Van Slyke, a former All-Star outfielder. "What he's doing is not who he is. That's just what he's doing at the time, and he's out to do it the best he can. He's not going to be defined by his wins and losses. He's not going to be different at midnight because of a win or loss. He's going to be defined by his character."

Van Slyke said his friend is "courageous."

La Russa called him "conscientious."

Former teammates and current players have described Matheny as "charismatic." General manager John Mozeliak agreed with the term "engaging." Matheny's wife, Kristen, suggested he's "a pleaser, with his feelings on his sleeves." Matheny would like to be known as "passionate."

"Probably, he is all of these things," said Mike's father, Jerry. "I would say that he's someone who has worked hard and worked hard to be someone a parent can be proud of."

laying the foundation

Jerry Matheny, who still lives in the Columbus, Ohio, suburb where his four sons grew up, recalls his third son, Mike, walking into the living room one day when a baseball game was on. The catcher in the game was having trouble throwing the ball to second base, and Jerry suggested that if Mike truly wanted to be a big leaguer the likeliest route was at catcher. They "made a pact" that day, Mike said.

From then on, he would play catcher, and Jerry let all the coaches know.

Mike was 10.

His grandmother still has the photo of him from that first year. Wearing team-issued equipment, Mike has the left shin guard on his right leg, and vice versa.

"But I had my hat on backward," he said, "and I was a catcher."

As a boy in West Virginia, Jerry fell for baseball listening to games with his grandfather. After warming up his arm by bouncing a ball off a wall, he would pay his older brother 50 cents to catch 15 pitches. Jerry left West Virginia for Columbus to attend a tryout with the Pirates and other clubs. He took a construction job while he waited to hear from the teams — and worked for the same company the next 38 years.

"Sunday was his only day that he didn't work, and his body was just beat up and he would throw us batting practice at a local park," Mike recalled. "We'd be chasing the four balls that we had and trying not to lose them."

Jerry sought to instill his farm-bred work ethic in his suburban sons, once employing a mountain of dirt to do so. Disappointed his sons had not gone to the pool as promised and instead collected crawdads at a creek, Jerry had a dump truck twice the size of the family driveway pull up and unload a pile of dirt that was taller than the eaves of the house. He went to the backyard and, using bright orange paint, drew a circle. He instructed his sons to move the whole pile from the front to the back, leaving no trace of top soil on the driveway. It took days to finish.

"We'd been speculating for days what he was going to build in the backyard," Matheny said. "We're all blistered and angry and blaming each other for the crawdads. He comes back and tells us, 'Good job.'"

Jerry then told them to move it all back to the driveway.

Several years later, Jerry saw Mike in the backyard doing a different kind of work. Mike had dismantled part of the family fence to invent a soft-toss machine out of three posts and a mop bucket. Mike would toss a baseball into the bucket, hear it rattle around, cock his bat, and wait for the ball to roll down a 2-by-4 ramp and flip off the lip.

This is how he got his first allowance.

Jerry created a chart for Mike to log his batting practice. Mike took 1,000 swings before school and 1,000 swings after school. If he completed a week, he'd get a few dollars.

"He wanted to work," Jerry said. "I wanted to help him do it."

Some of the money Mike made probably went to the PVC pipe he used to improve his soft-toss machine. He also stuck an eye bolt through a baseball and fastened it to a dowel to create a mallet that would help him break in his catcher's glove. He and his dad popped the top off an aluminum bat and filled it with sand so that for some of those 1,000 swings, Matheny would have a weighted bat to improve his strength. All the invention and initiative and intense work and investment paid off with a scholarship to Michigan.

After his high school graduation, Toronto selected Mike in the 31st round of the 1988 draft. They negotiated on a bonus until the day classes started at Michigan.

Mike declined the last offer.

That's how he met his wife.

arriving in st. louis

Back then baseball's rule was the moment a drafted player set foot in his first university class he was no longer eligible to sign. Mike Matheny walked away from the Blue Jays and into his first class, first aid. That's where he saw Kristen Shaiper.

Kristen, a St. Louis native who played field hockey at Michigan, agreed to a date when they were juniors. They were engaged on New Year's Eve when at the stroke of midnight, 1992, Mike presented her with a glass that had an engagement ring at the bottom of the bubbly. They settled in St. Louis, and eventually his major-league career caught up with them. Released in 1998 after being a regular for Milwaukee, Mike played with Toronto in 1999. Released by the Blue Jays, he signed with the Cardinals for 2000.

Anxious about the opportunity to play in his wife's hometown, Matheny had an awful start to spring training. He bounced throws to second base. He was lost at the plate. He was lackluster behind it.
"I was terrible at everything," he said. "There was nothing there for them to see to keep me, but the one thing I was doing was working my butt off. The production wasn't matching the work. Then things changed."

A visit from Kristen to Jupiter, Fla., helped Matheny relax, La Russa said. Kristen said Mike "was pressing too hard ... to the point it was detrimental."

Sitting in his new office at Busch Stadium last week, Matheny described how during his career he felt that if eight other catchers were coming to major-league spring training, 'six had better tools than me." His tool was effort. He knew that if all of them could haul the dirt to the backyard, so to speak, he'd be the only one ready for the return trip. Freed from his trepidations, Matheny won the starting job in 2000. He claimed his first Gold Glove that season. And, La Russa pointed out, he was the backstop for a team that ignited this era of success for the club.

"That was a pivotal point in my career," Matheny said. "After that it was really that my career started."

It was also where his next career came into view.

At least, for Mozeliak.

The Cardinals' future general manager and their future manager struck a connection during early-morning workouts in Jupiter. Mozeliak, a rising member of the front office, and Matheny would talk about their reading lists, their views of players, philosophy of game strategy. Matheny returned to the Cardinals after concussions forced an early retirement from the San Francisco Giants. As a guest instructor and adviser at spring training, Matheny found Mozeliak, now GM, still in the workout room early.

Mozeliak used these conversations to find out what pushed Matheny, to learn his personality, to understand his faith and measure his future.

"If he's showing little or no interest in the topics (at that time) he would have never gotten the opportunity to interview," Mozeliak said. "Yet, you could tell that he was someone who at some point was ready for something bigger and better. I was always trying to look (at) what he was trying to do or be. Whenever I was around him, I tried to focus on what was motivating him to be great.
"I think I found out," Mozeliak concluded. "I made him the manager."

'the greatest gift'

Last Thursday night, Mike Matheny sat with the oldest of his five children as Tate celebrated his 18th birthday. A ballplayer like his dad, Tate has committed to Missouri State and might get drafted this summer.

The occasion of his oldest turning 18 opened the way for a deeper conversation. Matheny told his son that "the greatest gift" he had was his faith. No matter what he pursued — baseball, college, business — faith gave him "guidance and direction." As he explained to his son how he found strength as a young adult, Mike was reminded of another conversation he had —the one with La Russa. The same message he was trying to impart on his son he had once asserted to his manager.

Within his spirituality, Matheny found accountability.

Even when nobody is watching — like, for example, his dad not being there to count all 1,000 swings — his faith is. Whether it's talking to his manager, connecting with his son, or finding his way in a new job, Matheny called it "cowardly" in any instance to soften the role faith plays in his motivation, in his identity. Matheny will have a reminder staring at him all season. He's ordered a large decal to place on the wall opposite his desk at Busch.

It's a quote from Shakespeare: To thine own self be true.

"Part of that comes from my faith, part of that comes within the style that I need to do my job," Matheny said. "I don't want to cower at somebody's misinterpretation of what I'm about. ... I'm supposed to be doing it — and I'm going to throw this word out there — with excellence. There's no excuse for me to give anything less than all I've got in everything I do. That's scriptural.

"For me, that's the foundation of who I am."