‘I truly love Bob Melvin’: How the A’s skipper’s unique mix of honesty, calm and quirky phobias made him a cornerstone in Oakland (2024)

The longest-tenured manager in baseball gathered his players after the fourth game of the 2021 season. The Oakland Athletics had lost all four. The losses were ugly, all to the team’s primary rival from Houston. So Bob Melvin, the 59-year-old manager, decided to address the group.

He did not breathe fire. He did not issue threats. He tried to put the defeats in context; if this happened in August, he explained, it would just be a lost series. There was no reason to panic, he continued. He believed in his club. He expected the Athletics to start a winning streak in due time.

“And that’s exactly what we did,” outfielder Mark Canha says.

Oakland did not win its fifth game or its sixth. But the team won Game No. 7, and then No. 9, and then No. 10, and then 11 more, and then they looked up at the standings in late April and found themselves in first place. No harm, no foul from the initial skid.

The team meeting was classic Melvin — understated, evenhanded, effective. It might even sound a little boring. It might sound a little obvious. It might sound like the way every manager should handle a losing streak. But then, if every manager could do it like Melvin does, his longevity wouldn’t be so notable.

Next month marks the 10-year anniversary of Melvin’s arrival in Oakland. As the team publicly courts possible new homes, the A’s churn out victories led by a Menlo Park native who grew up watching The Who and The Grateful Dead play Day on The Green concerts at the Oakland Coliseum. Billy Beane hired Melvin as a stopgap. He has become a cornerstone. He won Manager of the Year in 2012 and again in 2018, to join the hardware he received for leading Arizona to October in 2007. He could merit consideration for a fourth award if Oakland holds off Houston for a second consecutive American League West crown.

Melvin draws raves from his bosses, his peers and his players. A series of conversations with current and former Athletics turned into a chorus.

“Bob is my favorite manager I ever played for,” retired reliever Jerry Blevins says.

“I loved him to death,” retired pitcher Brandon McCarthy says.

“Bob, I’ll tell you, he’s the best I ever coached for,” Braves third base coach Ron Washington says.

“I love Bob Melvin,” retired outfielder Jonny Gomes says. “I truly love Bob Melvin.”

The players call Melvin “chill” and “cool” and “stable.” They gush about his forthrightness. “Always,” reliever Yusmeiro Petit says, “he tells you the truth.” They praise him for exuding calm. “You never really saw him go off the deep end,” retired closer Grant Balfour says. They thank him for treating them like adults. “He lets everyone be themselves,” Canha says. They credit him for motivating them. “We all wanted to win for him,” Diamondbacks catcher Stephen Vogt says. “And that’s the highest compliment you can give a manager.”

And they laugh about Melvin’s quirks — the perpetual motion in the dugout, the obsession with hand washing. In between scrubbing his mitts, Melvin maintains cohesion with his front office and dialogue with his roster. In turn, he has negated Beane’s post-Moneyball reputation as an executive with disdain for the managerial chair. Melvin has endured in the role that chewed up Art Howe, Ken Macha and Bob Geren. A championship is the only item missing from his managerial resume. With only four more victories, Melvin will surpass Tony La Russa on the franchise’s all-time list (He will need 2,788 to top the man in first place, Connie Mack.)

The comparison to La Russa presents a contrast. La Russa, the 76-year-old Hall of Famer, recently kindled debate after he called a rookie “clueless” for walloping a 3-0 pitch in a blowout. Melvin can recall the days when the skipper treated the clubhouse like his fiefdom. He debuted in the big leagues on the 1985 Detroit Tigers. Sparky Anderson was a towering figure. Melvin never felt comfortable initiating a conversation with him.

“That’s just the way I looked at things as a young player,” he says. “But that’s the last thing I would want my players to feel like.”

When he became a manager, Melvin decided he never wanted to cast that sort of shadow. So he doesn’t spend much time preaching the values of decades ago. He focuses on keeping pace with the sport’s analytical adjustments. He has accepted the recent changes in the rules of the game and the attitudes of the athletes. He acts as a shield for his team, rather than a sword pointed in its direction. He keeps his office door open to his players. He wants to understand them.

“If you get set in your ways, then you’re going to lose your players,” Melvin says. “Along the way, you have to evolve in the fashion that the game has evolved. Maybe I’ve been good at that. I don’t know.”

He adds, “It’s not their job to acclimate to me. It’s my job to acclimate to them.”

On his first day, Melvin recognized almost no one. “I literally had to watch people walk by me, and hopefully they didn’t have a jacket on, so I knew who it was,” Melvin says. On June 9, 2011, he inherited a team in crisis. Melvin replaced Geren, a longtime staffer and close friend of Beane. The team was not sputtering. The relationship between Geren and the players had soured. Change was required.

Melvin was living in New York and scouting for the Mets when Beane called. He had already gotten fired twice from managing gigs. He understood a third opportunity was precious. Beane talked to him twice over the phone and offered the job. “In full disclosure, it was kind of a hasty process,” general manager David Forst says.

A difference was notable at the outset. “He immediately stabilized a lot of things in our clubhouse,” Forst says. “A lot of issues that we were having with media, issues that players were having with the staff. He has this experience and this credibility that it immediately felt like, ‘Yeah, this is perfect.’”

Melvin prized transparency. He informed hitters when they would be in the lineup. He told pitchers how they would be used. If their roles changed, he explained why. He cut back on rules. “(Geren) controlled a lot of things and wanted to have his finger on everything,” McCarthy says. “Whereas once that turned and Melvin came in, it was like, ‘No, you guys do your thing. You’re professionals.’”

During that year, reliever Jerry Blevins rode the shuttle between Oakland and Triple-A Sacramento because he still had minor-league options. Melvin shot straight with Blevins. “Really nothing that you do is going to make you stay here,” Melvin said. “If somebody needs to go down, it’s going to be you. That’s the way it’s going to be.” Melvin presented Blevins with a choice: Sulk in the minors, or embrace the role.

“It’s that honesty, that approach of treating you like a human being and a grown man and a professional, that I appreciate,” Blevins says. He adds, “There’s no bullsh*t about what he’s telling you.”

Beane and Forst rarely present Melvin with a push-button club. The lineup often includes platoons. Melvin heads off confusion by laying out the philosophy at the outset of each season. Says Vogt, “He would always say, ‘I don’t expect you to love it. But I expect you to understand it, and pull for the guy behind you.’”

In September 2012, as Oakland pushed toward an unlikely division title, McCarthy suffered a fractured skull when struck by a line drive. Melvin sat with McCarthy’s wife, Amanda, at the hospital as her husband underwent surgery. Melvin did not say much. His presence still helped. “She was like, ‘He was just fantastic. He made me feel better about things,’” McCarthy says.

Soon after Dan Otero got called up in 2013, the bullpen phone rang for him. Otero started throwing. The phone rang again. Melvin had changed his mind. Otero sat down. “I thought nothing of it,” Otero says. “As a reliever, that’s what you’re supposed to do.” A day later, Melvin found Otero during batting practice. After some chit-chat, the manager apologized for the pump fake.

“I was like, ‘Uhh … you don’t need to do that,’” Otero says. “That’s always resonated with me almost a decade later. Because he went out of his way to talk with a guy who didn’t have a lot of big-league time and explain to him why he did what he did.”

In December 2014, Oakland acquired Canha through the Rule 5 draft. That same day, Canha got a call from his new manager. Melvin wanted to welcome a fellow Cal Golden Bear. “I thought that was really cool,” he says. Canha had not spent much time in big-league camp before Oakland. “I was so absorbed in my own thing that I didn’t really care who the manager was,” he says. It was only years later, after more than a half a decade, he understood why Melvin has lasted so long.

“I really appreciate Bob in a whole different light now, just hearing stories of what other places are like,” Canha says. “I’m very grateful that I came up in this environment.”

For ballplayers, the dual olive branches of transparency and trust carry weight. Cliff Pennington did not like it when Melvin told him he would lose at-bats. But he appreciated that the message wasn’t sugar-coated or soft-pedaled.

“You’d be super surprised at how difficult that can actually be,” Pennington says.

When Chris Bassitt raged against his usage earlier in his career, Melvin maintained dialogue with the pitcher and helped him convert that frustration into better performance. “To say I’m blessed to have him is a drastic understatement,” Bassitt says.

To Washington, the manager of the Texas Rangers from 2007 to 2014 and a coach on Melvin’s staff in 2015 and 2016, the grace Melvin shows in those interactions cascades across the roster.

“One thing he does, he’s upfront about it,” Washington says. “When you’re upfront about it, you keep calm. That’s why the teams that he has always end up playing well. Because he stays calm.”

At times, Forst says, members of the front office chuckle about Melvin’s durability. It was not long ago that Oakland was considered a place that did not value managers. Melvin has found a way to persist by keeping his door open.

“Whether it was Art or Macha or Geren before him, there were always guys complaining about their roles,” Forst says. “You hear these things. They complain to the media. They complain to other players. It’s never happened under Bob.

“And we had some bad teams. We had some guys who had reasons to be unhappy. It just doesn’t happen.”

Stephen Vogt does not wear batting gloves. He also plays catcher. This combination does not lend itself to clean hands. After celebrating his first win as a catcher with Oakland in 2013, Vogt crossed paths with his manager in the traditional postgame handshake line. Vogt held out a hand caked in dirt and sweat and pine tar. Melvin could not hide his repulsion.

“Hey, we don’t have to shake hands,” Vogt said.

“I’ll shake anyone’s hand, if it means we won a major-league baseball game,” Melvin said.

He waited a beat. “That being said, your hands are disgusting.”

The phobias and superstitions of Melvin are bountiful. Forst describes the habits as “everything from parking in a certain spot in the lot to carrying a certain number of candies in his back pocket to certain games.” The broadcaster Jon Sciambi recounted for NBC Sports Bay Area last fall the elaborate ritual Melvin undertook with candy: A piece in the first inning, third inning, fifth inning, seventh inning and ninth inning — so long as the candy in the ninth was green. Vogt noticed Melvin was rarely stationary during games.

“He’s always moving around the dugout to find some good juju,” Vogt says.

Otero noted a variety of wardrobe changes. “After a loss, he never wore the same thing,” Otero says.

On the concept of germs, there is universal agreement: Melvin loathes them. A baseball clubhouse is not an easy place for a neat freak. Melvin often eschews handshakes for fist bumps. He is “more of a knuckles guy,” Rays pitcher Rich Hill says.

“It’s pretty apparent, with the amount of hand sanitizer he uses,” infielder Jed Lowrie says, “that he has a little bit of germaphobia.”

Heading into 2012, the Coliseum underwent an upgrade. Melvin insists it was not all his doing. Nick Paparesta, the team’s trainer, also contributed to the decision, because “Nick knew how I was,” Melvin says. So the Athletics embarked on the season with a Purell dispenser on the ready in the dugout.

“That was like Mission No. 1,” Pennington says. “We don’t need to learn how to hit better, or pitch better, or play better defense. We have to make sure we can wash our hands.”

The hand sanitizer made Melvin fodder for wisecracks. “He just fully kept his distance from me,” Gomes says. “Because he knew I’d like do a snot rocket in front of him.”

It also demonstrated where Melvin’s allegiances lay. He recalled when Yoenis Céspedes uncorked a throw into the dugout. The baseball ricocheted off Melvin’s hand sanitizer.

“I was more worried about the Purell dispenser than I was about maybe a run scoring at the time,” he says.

Melvin grins at stories like this. He knows his players think he is crazy about cleanliness. He is willing to play it up for their amusem*nt.

Little could top the treatment he received during his first spring as a manager. The Mariners hired Melvin after two years as Diamondbacks bench coach. At some point during Melvin’s Arizona tenure, Luis Gonzalez learned “Mel was deathly scared of clowns,” explains former manager Bob Brenly. When the Mariners hosted the Diamondbacks in the spring, Gonzalez hired clowns to dance atop the dugout in between innings and spook his former coach.

“Mel took it in a good-natured way,” Brenly says. “It was just one of his many quirks that people loved about him.”

(Melvin, it should be noted, was not exactly innocent. He knew Brenly harbored a foot phobia. “I think sandals should be outlawed,” Brenly says. In the winter after Melvin left Arizona, he gave regular gifts to his former boss. “He would send me about a picture a week of his feet,” Brenly says. “Either sitting out by the pool or putting his sanitary socks on.”)

Melvin had met Brenly in Giants camp in the spring of 1986. The arrival of Melvin, a young catcher, did not please Brenly, the starting backstop. “It rubbed me the wrong way,’ Brenly says. “Who is this kid, this snot-nosed kid coming in here, trying to steal my job?” Melvin defused any tension by telling Brenly they were both there to help the team. They might compete for playing time. But that competition should serve the greater good of winning. Brenly soon found a lifelong friend.

During their playing days, Brenly noticed something about Melvin. A lot of guys cracked beers and hung out after games. Not Melvin. He bolted after he had showered. Melvin knew so much about the game, Brenly thought. Couldn’t he share some knowledge with the others late into the night? It was only later that Brenly understood why.

“In hindsight, I don’t know if there was a major value in hanging around, drinking beers and talking about the game that night,” Brenly says. “Why not let it go and focus on the next day?”

Or why not let the first six games go and focus on the rest of the season? There was a time during that skid when Lowrie and a few Athletics were talking in the clubhouse after a game. Melvin saw them as he walked through the room. He asked how they were feeling. The players were trying to put the losing in perspective, Lowrie recalled. The manager offered himself as a resource.

“Well,” Melvin said, “your perspective is right here.”

His door, they knew, would always be open.

(Top photo: Michael Zagaris / Oakland Athletics / Getty Images)