The offseason for the Kansas City Royals officially started on October 5, but the dismissal of Dayton Moore on September 21 was what truly kicked things off. At that time, John Sherman spoke about a different way of doing things for the franchise. He also announced that the move came with JJ Picollo moving to the top of the baseball operations leadership team. That isn’t news at this point, but I want to make sure the beginning of the picture is painted appropriately.

At that moment, the talking started. It’s very easy to talk; it’s easy to say what you think people want to hear. But there were questions that I believe were very fair questions wondering if things would actually be different under Picollo, given his proximity to Moore for essentially the entire time since Moore became the general manager of the club more than 16 years ago. For many reasons, I believed things would be different, but the Royals play in Missouri, and people needed to be shown that.

I think they were pretty quickly when Mike Matheny and Cal Eldred were let go the night of the final game of the season. I’m not convinced that would have happened with Moore in charge. But that was the easy part if we’re being honest. A team that was expected internally to be roughly average was so far away from average that someone had to pay. Multiple people likely had to pay and they ultimately did with the manager and the pitching coach losing their jobs. But the tough decision was who was going to be in their places. We now know one of the two roles, and I personally believe the hire should say enough to answer your questions of whether or not things would be different with Picollo in charge.

I buried the lede in a big way because you all know that Matt Quatraro is the new manager of the Kansas City Royals. He’ll officially be announced on Thursday as the 18th to be in that position. He’s a different hire than we’ve seen before, at least for quite some time. The last hire, Matheny, was brought in as a part of the front office after the Cardinals fired him. He was ultimately named the 17th manager. The hire before him, Ned Yost, was brought in as a part of the front office after the Brewers fired him. He was ultimately named the 16th manager. Before those two was Trey Hillman. I don’t know what to make of that, but he was definitely a hot managerial candidate. I also don’t think he would have been that popular of a candidate today. The information available to everyone is simply quite different.

Quatraro has never worked for the Royals. Who he has worked for after his playing career is the Rays and the Indians/Guardians. When you’re making a list of the most successful lower-revenue clubs over the past 15 years, those are one and two in some order. I think the A’s and Brewers belong in there as well, but Tampa Bay and Cleveland have some special sauce. (Edit: It should absolutely be noted that the Royals are the only one of the bunch to win a World Series, so if they can capture that magic with the magic of Cleveland and Tampa Bay, woo boy.) And Quatraro has been with both of them. He began his big league coaching career as an assistant hitting coach with Cleveland under Terry Francona and then ultimately moved on to be the third base coach in Tampa Bay for a year before becoming the bench coach the last four years under Kevin Cash.

Cash, of course, was a bullpen coach with Cleveland under Francona before he was hired by the Rays. Both Cash and Francona are among the most successful managers in the game. In fact, since Cash was hired by the Rays, he and Francona are two of the three winningest managers in all of baseball. There are some sample size gymnastics there because there aren’t a lot of managers who have been in place since 2015, but there’s a reason both have been in their jobs for so long and Quatraro has had the great opportunity to work under and learn from both of them.

He’s been a part of winning teams in each of the nine seasons he’s been a big league coach. Does that mean he’s instantly going to turn the Royals into a winner? Of course not. The odds are stacked pretty high against him to continue that streak to a tenth season. But he’s been a hot candidate for at least the last couple of managerial hiring cycles and the Royals are the team that has the chance to end up with him. One thing that I keep coming back to is how glowing the reports are about Quatraro. And that’s not just from random coaches or a few players. The comments you hear around the game are basically from everyone. That’s a good sign.

But back to what it means for the Royals and how they’re changing, I think this hire signals something is very different. They easily could have promoted Pedro Grifol to the job. I think Grifol probably would have been an excellent hire. Maybe we’ll find out just how good he is if the White Sox do what I think is the smart move and hire him. I’d bet on Ozzie Guillen there because that’s just the sort of thing they do, but Grifol has a shot there at the last opening in the field. But they could have gone that safe route with him. But they didn’t. I was under the impression from many that Dusty Wathan was the favorite for the job, but I’ve heard from a couple of different people that things just didn’t line up great in the interview.

To me, that’s a good sign. The old Royals would have just gone ahead and hired who they thought they’d want to hire at the start of the cycle. It would be easy to see the Wathan name, and the similarly glowing reports from around the game about Wathan and make that move. And maybe it would work out beautifully, but they have the interview process for a reason and when that process leads them to Quatraro over Wathan, that’s where they headed. Now, as I’ve reported before, the Royals have been described as “enamored” with Quatraro, so it’s not like they completely reversed course, but I just think that’s a good sign that they are going through a different sort of process than we saw for the last couple of hires.

This hire doesn’t mean they’re done, of course. Truthfully, while this is the top man in the dugout, the more important hire is still to come on the pitching side. I continue to hear from a few different people that the Royals are open to a lot of different structures with their coaching for the pitchers. Brian Bannister is a name that hasn’t fallen off the radar for the Royals. The question is if he’s the day-to-day pitching coach in the organization or if he’s someone who is brought in to oversee everything. And if he is brought in, but not as the pitching coach, then who?

I wrote that big list of candidates after Eldred was let go. With Quatraro in the fold, will he look to go to the Rays well? I don’t believe anyone would be too upset by that given their success. But does that mean Winston Doom, who has the greatest name of any candidate? Or is it Jorge Moncada, their minor league pitching coordinator? Or is it someone who is sort of unknown in their organization and deserves a shot? Or maybe he’s had someone in mind from his Guardians days like Joe Torres? My top choice remains Connor McGuiness from the Dodgers, but I imagine we’ll get a fair amount of clarity on that in the next couple of weeks.

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.