KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) – When the coronavirus pandemic led to an overhaul of the baseball schedule, Mike Matheny had an strong suspicion he’d be headed back to St. Louis to face his former team in his first season in charge of the Kansas City Royals.
Matheny probably didn’t bet on seeing the Cardinals before the season even began.
Yet the two clubs, separated by about 250 miles of interstate on opposite sides of Missouri, will square off in an exhibition game at Busch Stadium next week. The game on July 22 will cap a three-game exhibition slate for the Royals – they will first play a pair of games against the Houston Astros – before their 60-game regular-season starts July 24 in Cleveland.
“It’s going to be another opponent. It truly is,” said Matheny, who is taking over for the retired Ned Yost after a year spent working as a special adviser to the Royals – a job that came on the heels of a roller-coaster tenure in St. Louis.
Matheny was hired to replace the retiring Tony La Russa not long after the Cardinals beat the Texas Rangers to win the 2011 World Series. The longtime catcher kept the success rolling, too, leading St. Louis to three division titles, three appearances in the NL Championship Series and a trip to the World Series after the 2013 season.
But things began to turn sour when the Cardinals missed the postseason in 2016, and rumblings began of a rift forming between Matheny and his players. It didn’t improve much the following year, and Matheny was fired 93 games into the 2018 season, only to watch his replacement Mike Shildt lead a quick turnaround that nearly ended with a wild-card berth.
Matheny acknowledged spending that season doing some work on himself. He read books about leadership, took classes and basically went back to school on how to effectively lead a group of ballplayers in an effort to learn where he went awry.
The results had been striking before the pandemic brought spring training to a screeching halt. Royals players were effusive in their praise for the way Matheny related to him, and the energy the 49-year-old manager brought to the club resulted in a different feel for a young clubhouse in the early stages of what could be a long and difficult rebuilding process.
“Mike has been amazing,” Royals general manager Dayton Moore said during a recent Zoom interview. “I haven’t heard Mike complain one bit. I’ve tried to get Mike to complain. So from our part, everything has been good.”
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