From big data to the Grateful Dead: How Royals Matt Quatraro grew into a modern manager

April 26, 2024

In the spring of 1990, when new Royals manager Matt Quatraro was still in high school, he saw the Grateful Dead for the first time. Quatraro was a sophomore at Bethlehem Central near Albany, N.Y., a standout athlete who played baseball, basketball and golf. But he was also something of a music nerd. He played the trumpet. His buddies formed garage rock bands. Every Tuesday, they trudged to the local record store, checking out the new releases and hidden gems. Quatraro came to love the Allman Brothers and the Rolling Stones. He delved into jazz. “I was very eclectic,” he says. But he always had a soft spot for the Dead. So one cold day in March, he took a city bus to the Knickerbocker Arena in downtown Albany, where he stepped out onto “Shakedown Street,” the temporary festival encampment of thousands of Deadheads.

“This sea of humanity,” Quatraro says. “It was like: ‘What am I getting into here?'”

The show in Albany would be immortalized as a live album — “Dozin’ at the Knick” — released in 1996, the same year Quatraro was drafted in the eighth round by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. As he made his way in professional baseball, playing, coaching and managing in the minors, he held onto the memory — and his genuine love for the cookin’ jams of Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and the rest of the gang.

“I’ve actually talked about this with my friends and my wife,” he says. “I’m really surprised it never got more mainstream because those songs — there’s some really catchy lyrics and good harmonies and melodies.”

Major League Baseball is not exactly the province of Deadheads, especially those who have a sincere appreciation for the triple album “Europe ’72.” But the Royals chose Quatraro to be their next manager in part because he’s different from what came before. No, Royals general manager J.J. Picollo was not worried about the “Stealie” skull Quatraro picked out for a profile pic on his rarely used Twitter account. But after a decade of Ned Yost — an irascible professional from the school of Bobby Cox — and three seasons of Mike Matheny — a domineering presence who wore his emotions on his sleeves — the Royals opted for something a little more novel: a quiet, understated, analytical bench coach from the small-market think tank known as the Tampa Bay Rays.

“He definitely thinks differently than people I’ve been around at any point,” Picollo says.

In Kansas City, the hire seemed to suggest something larger about the aims of the Royals franchise. In September, owner John Sherman fired long-time general manager Dayton Moore, elevated Picollo and voiced his intent to be more “data-driven.” When Picollo subsequently dismissed Matheny and hired Quatraro, Sherman stood up before the new manager’s introductory press conference and noted what the hire meant. “Over the last six weeks, we’ve talked a lot about organizational change and development and adapting—process improvement,” Sherman said. “J.J. went right to work.”

J.J. Picollo and Matt Quatraro during Quatraro’s introductory press conference at Kauffman Stadium last fall. (Jay Biggerstaff / USA Today)

Any manager will be as successful as the talent available, and Quatraro is taking the reins of a rebuild that has yet to fully launch, inheriting a young roster with a promising group of position players and a cadre of under-performing starters. But on paper, he could be the ideal fit. Friends describe him as almost aggressively easy-going. Former coaches from decades ago tell stories of receiving monthly texts and emails. And in the days before spring training began, Royals players noticed something interesting. They barely noticed Quatraro was there.

“He’s got his hood on most of the time,” first baseman Vinnie Pasquantino said. “Sometimes he just sneaks up behind you and you have no idea where he’s at.”

Quatraro is a person who collects friends and nurtures relationships. He wants his players to be themselves. He speaks in the parlance of a modern manager, talking about baseball as a game of extreme variance, where decisions are questions of probability, rather than dogma.

“He’s a realist,” said Mitch Lukevics, a long-time Rays farm director.

“His antenna is really geared to bringing in and accepting everything,” said Twins manager Rocco Baldelli, who worked with Quatraro in Tampa.

“He doesn’t forget anyone,” said Tim Parenton, a former college coach.

His approach, friends say, is not all that different than the perfect Grateful Dead jam, a collective of teammates coming together in collaboration, harmonizing and improvising, making beautiful music together.

When Quatraro was around 11 years old, Jesse Braverman, the freshman baseball coach at Bethlehem Central, started hosting daily summer pickup games for kids of all ages. Braverman would show up to the field at noon. The kids would split into teams. Quatraro was there every single day, so the pickup games eventually turned into extra batting practice sessions, which resulted in Braverman returning home each week with a collection of bumps, bruises and, at one point, a broken finger. “My wife, even though she didn’t know anything about baseball, she bought me one of those screens,” Braverman says.

Even at that age, Quatraro’s obsession with baseball was evident. He had grown up in Delmar, N.Y., a suburb of Albany. His biological father, John Quatraro, a school music teacher, had died of a heart attack when he was 16 months old, and his mother, Dorann, remarried when he was three years old. His stepfather, George Stagnitta, was an assistant middle school principal with three older sons, so Quatraro gained three older brothers, the next youngest nine years older. Nobody in the family could quite explain why the youngest became so enamored with baseball, but once Braverman placed Quatraro on the ninth-grade team as a seventh grader, everyone figured there might be something to it.

At Bethlehem Central High, a big suburban high school, Quatraro starred on the baseball team, played basketball and golf, and dabbled with the trumpet in the concert band. Once, as Braverman recalls, Quatraro had a potential conflict with a baseball game and band concert, so he wore his uniform underneath his concert clothes and managed to do both.

“He just fit in with a very even demeanor and enthusiasm,” Braverman said. “I mean, everybody liked him. Even kids who didn’t like anybody else liked him.”

Even then, friends say Quatraro was exceedingly mature and reserved. Stagnitta, who Quatraro came to call “dad” (and who died in 2013), had a story he liked to share with friends, in which he detailed the conversations he had with his son after missing one of his games.

How did you do last night?

Good.

Did you get any hits?

Yes.

How many?

Two.

Quatraro earned a baseball scholarship to Old Dominion University and remained unbothered when he played little as a freshman. He eventually was named an All-American, becoming one of just two players in program history to hit .400 for his college career. He was also a regular around the baseball program’s offices, always picking the brains of coaches. “You knew he was going to be a baseball junkie the rest of his life,” said Parenton, an assistant coach then. “Because that’s what he loved to do.” Unsure of the draft and scouting process, Quatraro was late to realize he might have a chance to play professional baseball. But when he hit .416 in 1996 and led the Monarchs to a third straight NCAA tournament appearance, scouts did start to come around. One of them was Paul Faulk with the expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

Faulk saw Quatraro as “a quarterback.” He had strong makeup, a steady demeanor, and some power potential. “He had leadership tools and that’s what turned me on about him,” Faulk said.

In fact, Quatraro reminded Faulk of another college catcher he’d signed just two years earlier, when he was working for the New York Yankees. The catcher, a kid from George Mason who had started his career at NC State, had parents who were school teachers, a similar easy-going mindset and a good-natured demeanor.

His name? J.J. Picollo.

Quatraro spent parts of seven seasons in the minor leagues. He battled injuries. He never quite hit for power. As the competition increased, he realized he needed a Plan B. He thought he might follow his parents into education. He told Braverman he had no regrets. “I gave it everything I had,” he said. Before hanging it up for good, he arranged to play the 2004 season in Italy. But before he could leave, the Rays’ Mitch Lukevics called and asked if he would work with the catchers during spring training. It was supposed to be a couple of weeks. But when the Italy opportunity fell through, Quatraro was already in camp. He spent that season as the hitting coach for the Hudson Valley Renegades, the Rays’ A-ball affiliate.

At some point, Quatraro found himself talking to Cam Bonifay, the Rays’ farm director. “You need to manage,” Bonifay said. So two years later, he took over as the Renegades’ manager. He was 32. To be an A-ball manager, Quatraro says, feels a little like herding cats. You are part therapist, part mentor, part coach, and part middle manager, pulling information from every corner of the organization. You also learn to talk to players.

As Quatraro worked his way through the system, the Rays franchise was changing. The general manager was Andrew Friedman, a former Wall Street analyst. The manager was Joe Maddon. The club was in the beginning years of a rebirth. After the 2007 season, Quatraro took a trip down to the Rays’ academy in the Dominican Republic, where he found himself in the company of Maddon, listening to a story of how Maddon had gone from a free-spirited minor-league manager in the Angels’ system in the 1980s to a big-league skipper. It planted a seed.

“That’s the first time that I remember thinking like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool,'” Quatraro says.

As the Rays became more data-driven and more innovative, more focused on the numbers, Quatraro worked his way up the ladder. He became a minor-league hitting coordinator. He took a job on Terry Francona’s staff in Cleveland. He returned to Tampa Bay as a third-base coach in 2017.

“We had heard so many good things about him, we wanted to get him in the organization,” Francona says. “And then when you get good guys, you know they’re gonna get better jobs and leave.”

Back in Tampa Bay, Quatraro further embraced the analytical side of the game. Members of the staff remark about how often he was planted in front of a computer, poring over video and numbers, a stopwatch in hand. “It was imprinted on his palm,” Baldelli says. The staff under manager Kevin Cash included Baldelli, future Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo, and pitching coach Kyle Snyder. The atmosphere was often one of bickering brothers. They poked fun at fashion choices, bonded over the wins and spent one off-night seeing Dead & Co. in New York. When it became clear that Quatraro had the chops and ambition to manage, Baldelli says fellow coaches would tweak him by tossing media guides of losing clubs into his locker.

Quatraro was reportedly a finalist for the Giants’ managerial job before the 2020 season. The next year, he interviewed with the Mets and A’s. When the Royals reached out in October, asking the Rays for permission to talk, Quatraro had questions: Was ownership on board with Picollo’s vision? What was the plan to build a sustainable winner? Where was the club with R&D and sports science?

Were the Royals looking to the past to rekindle what had worked before? Or did they want to look forward?

When Quatraro sat down for his second interview with the Royals, club officials gave him an assignment. They wanted him to lay out four days of lineup construction against a number of different pitchers while factoring in an off day, a doubleheader and a number of different scenarios. Quatraro said he tried not to overthink the preparation; he wanted to let his typical thought process take over naturally.

When he was a player in the Rays system, baseball had yet to undergo its great statistical revolution. But as Quatraro came of age as a coach and manager, he gravitated to the numbers. Watch enough baseball and you see just how random it can be. To realize you do not have control in every moment, he said, is a path to embracing probabilistic decision-making.

“That acceptance leads itself to the data,” he says.

As Quatraro explained his lineup choices, Royals officials noticed an ease in his delivery. He listened to each question and thought through his answers. He did not want to play nine guys each night. He planned to incorporate the whole roster, to seek out matchups and give guys days off, to think long term instead short term. He told Picollo that there would be some nights where you cannot chase the win. “He thinks about it more long term,” Picollo says.

The more Quatraro spoke, the more club officials recognized they’d found a candidate aligned with their vision goals. And as Quatraro studied the roster, he saw untapped upside. The Royals finished 65-97 last season while their pitching staff finished 27th in the majors. But Quatraro saw position players with tools, led by shortstop Bobby Witt Jr., and young pitchers who were trying to develop in the major leagues.

“You see athleticism,” he says. “From a pitching side, you see stuff, you see velocity, you see breaking balls that are good. You’re just looking for the refinement of that, or the execution to be better — the consistency of the athleticism to play out on the field or slightly better decision-making. But the talent and that stuff stood out. The physical ability is there.”

For Quatraro and the Royals, the real challenge is upcoming. In the months after Quatraro accepted the job, he hired Paul Hoover, another Rays coach, to serve as his bench coach and plucked Brian Sweeney from Cleveland to be the club’s new pitching coach. He set out to build relationships with every player on the roster. He began by calling catcher Salvador Perez, then worked his way across the country, waking up early and mapping it out by time zone. When Quatraro called Pasquantino, he delivered a simple question.

“He pretty much just straight up asked me, ‘Are you gonna be a good player?'” Pasquantino recalls. “And in my mind, I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s the plan.’ And his answer was ‘That’s what we want.'”

More than anyone, Quatraro knows the road to contention will require more than a manager. It will need one dose of collaboration, one dose of creativity, and one dose of culture, a club reinventing itself, searching for perfect harmony, a blend of data and human touch.

To quote the Grateful Dead, “The first days are the hardest days. Don’t you worry anymore.”

(Top photo of Quatraro: Daniel Shirey / MLB Photos via Getty Images)

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