Athletics’ Bob Melvin Is Rooted in Oakland but Was Refined in New York

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Bob Melvin during batting practice at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday.CreditCreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

Oct. 2, 2018

Bob Melvin, the manager of the Oakland Athletics, fretted when it became clear that he would be taking his team across the country for Wednesday night’s American League wild-card playoff against the Yankees. There were logistics to consider, decisions to make and bruised feelings that might need massaging.

Who to start on the mound? How to construct a lineup? Who to leave off the roster?

Those, actually, were straightforward calls. The dicey question for Melvin, with two free nights in Manhattan, was more consequential: Where to have dinner?

There is Per Se for American, Balthazar for French, Blue Ribbon Brasserie for comfort food, Lure Fish Bar for seafood. And he could go on.

“Oooh,” Melvin said, cringing at the question of where he would go for a last meal. “That’s going to be tough because I know some people in New York City, and I can ruffle some feathers.”

Melvin, who has won manager of the year in both leagues, may have done his best work this season. He has lead his team, which began the season with the lowest payroll in baseball and was coming off three consecutive last-place finishes in the American League West, to 97 wins.

In many ways, Melvin, 56, is the embodiment of the Athletics catchphrase: “Rooted in Oakland.” He grew up in Atherton, in the heart of what is now Silicon Valley. He helped Cal to the College World Series, caught for the San Francisco Giants for three seasons and for the last eight years has managed the Athletics.

But if he is anchored in the Bay Area, he is also at home in New York.

Melvin interned at the investment bank Bear Stearns, played briefly for the Yankees, and spent two seasons scouting for the Mets.

“We absolutely love New York City,” said Melvin, who lived in SoHo with his wife, Kelley. “It was the restaurant scene we loved, the walking everywhere that we loved, the different types of people and different types of everything that we fell in love with.”

He is smitten enough with Manhattan that his favorite movies are set in there — “Wall Street” if you ask him, and “The Devil Wears Prada” if you ask his wife.

“He’s lying,” Kelley said. “He’s such a chick flick guy.”

All of this tested Melvin’s commitment to Oakland last November.

Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman, after dismissing Joe Girardi as manager, called Billy Beane, his counterpart with the Athletics, to ask for permission to interview Melvin, who had recently been given a one-year extension through 2019. The Yankees, stacked with a talented roster that reached the brink of the World Series last season, presented an intriguing possibility.

Beane asked Melvin if he wanted to pursue the job.

“Only if I’m not looked at long-term here, then yes, I would want to,” Melvin recalled saying. He then spoke to the Athletics owner John Fisher. “I didn’t get any assurances, but I said, ‘Look, if I’m valued for the long term, this is where I want to be,’ and he intimated that was the case. I’m very happy in Oakland.”

There have been no contract extensions beyond 2019, but Beane and Melvin say it is business for later, after this season.

As the manager’s role, across baseball, has evolved into more of a conduit — between the front office and the players and news media — more of Melvin’s contemporaries are being replaced with younger managers with less experience. The trend has continued in recent weeks with Jeff Banister of Texas, John Gibbons of Toronto, Mike Scioscia of the Los Angeles Angels, and Paul Molitor of Minnesota getting pushed out.

“Baseball has become very top-down,” Beane said of a trend that began with the publication of the book “Moneyball.” “We’re more involved than we’ve ever been, but Bob has been open-minded to the way the game has changed. His first exposure to analytics really was when he came to Oakland.”

It should be little surprise, then, that the A’s on Wednesday night will start a reliever, Liam Hendricks, to pitch one inning before giving way to a parade of pitchers.

Melvin has blended that embrace of data with a low-key approach to managing his players. Several of them, including designated hitter Khris Davis, outfielder Stephen Piscotty and pitcher Brett Anderson, describe a manager who has their back and allows them to be themselves. “He’s not going to babysit us,” Davis said. “He knows we’re grown men and he treats us way. That’s what I appreciate.”

It was much different when Melvin reached the big leagues as a player in 1985 with Detroit Tigers, who were the defending World Series champions — he did not speak to his manager, Sparky Anderson, unless spoken to — and when he got his first managing job, at age 41, with the Seattle Mariners.

“It seems like change is coming quicker and this job, the manager, is not the full-service guy anymore,” Melvin said. “You’re getting a lot of input from front offices, you’re dealing with media more, you’re having to deal with a different type of player now, so, yes, if you’re going to keep this job and have longevity, you need to change along with it.”

That willingness to adapt and embrace new ideas might have roots in the Melvins’ decision to relocate to New York in 2006, the year before he managed Arizona to the National League Championship Series.

They did so they could be near their daughter, Alexi, who enrolled at Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute to study acting after high school. It was in Manhattan where Melvin cultivated his interest in food, eventually investing in a restaurant, The Wolf — a reincarnation of a former Oakland institution The Bay Wolf.

When Melvin was scouting for the Mets he would return to his apartment late and prod Kelley into going out for a late-night dinner. He turned as much to nooks and sandwich shops as he did the Michelin Guide.

“He would go out of his way to find these hidden secrets of New York that nobody knew about,” his wife said. “He loved finding a hole in the wall place, one of these tiny little places that were family-owned with the best food.”

Baseball clubhouses might not be known for sophisticated palates, but Melvin, who moved back to California after his first year with the A’s, at least has a couple people he can share his interest in food with — outfielder Mark Canha and the quality control coach Mark Kotsay.

Kotsay, who showed off two bottles of red wine that he brought to share with Melvin on the cross-country flight on Sunday night, said it would be foolish to not explore what different cities have to offer amid all the traveling in professional baseball.

And why not start with a fine meal?

“There’s an appreciation for people who create food that’s unique or different because they pour their heart into it like we do here, like he does, on a daily basis,” Kotsay said. “When you seek out good food or when you seek out good wine, it’s because you know people are putting their heart and soul into it.”

And so, if the Athletics find a way to stave off the menacing Yankees, it will further affirm their resourcefulness and pluck — and provide for their manager another night in New York to savor.

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