If not for the power of targeted internet advertising, I would not have known that Cardinals manager Mike Matheny put out a book last week called The Matheny Manifesto. For the last several days I’ve been bombarded by ads trying to attract the click of my mouse with “a young manager’s old-school views on success in sports and life.” As a Brewers fan, I instinctively rolled my eyes at what appeared to be, at face value, a dreary piece of vapid Cardinals propaganda. Oooh, “old-school views”! That’s something we need more of! Kids don’t respect tradition anymore, and it’s making America soft. I bet Matheny’s the kind of guy who’s going to tell it like it is. FINALLY.
Gag.
My guess is that most Brewers fans viscerally dislike Tony La Russa much more, and some might even have warm feelings for Matheny since he began his career in Milwaukee. Personally, I think of the Cardinals manager similar to the way I think of the President of the United States – whoever holds the position must be a bastard. Surely, a “manifesto” by the current St. Louis skipper couldn’t be anything other than hackneyed “old-school” sentimentality mixed with empty pro-Cardinals hype. I was fully prepared to judge The Matheny Manifesto harshly without inconveniencing myself by reading it.
But there’s already plenty of biased, utterly ignorant sports commentary on the internet. Thanks to the power of Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, I could read some of the Manifesto, and thus upgrade my judgment from “biased, utterly ignorant” to “biased, not entirely ignorant.” It’s a 224-page book, and Amazon gives away about one-third of it for free. I was excited to dive in and have a laugh at Matheny’s (and his ghostwriter’s) lame attempt at positively influencing young athletes and their parents.
After reading almost all of what is available as part of Amazon’s free preview, I was as surprised as anyone to discover…goddammit…The Matheny Manifesto isn’t terrible. Christ.
It’s not that good, mind you. It’s fairly plain, presumably intended for a mass audience – made up substantially of young readers – and the overall tone, pacing, and word choices aren’t exactly colorful. It doesn’t obviously suck, though, which is what I was hoping for.
The first Matheny Manifesto was meant for a much smaller audience: the parents of a youth baseball team Matheny was asked to coach in 2008. To make sure everyone was on the same page, Matheny wrote a short but detailed letter that laid out his expectations, the gist of which was to relax, be supportive, and not behave like the stereotypical nightmare youth sports parents.
A version of the original manifesto is available here. None of it is particularly groundbreaking, but it does have a charming sincerity to it. Anyone who played sports as a kid can appreciate the sentiment of a passage like this:
I believe that a little league parent feels that they must participate with loud cheering and “Come on, let’s go, you can do it”, which just adds more pressure to the kids. I will be putting plenty of pressure on these boys to play the game the right way with class, and respect, and they will put too much pressure on themselves and each other already. You as parents need to be the silent, constant, source of support.
Matheny also helpfully reminds parents that umpires at the little league level are going to blow calls, and they just need to get a grip and accept it. (If only I could so easily accept that MLB umpires blow calls that don’t even affect my children at all.)
Matheny’s book retells the Manifesto origin story in its first chapter, with the next couple of chapters focusing on how too many parents/coaches of young athletes have lost their perspectives. Again, that’s not a particularly novel observation, but Matheny livens it up with a few amusing anecdotes. One story that stands out is about a mother who pesters Matheny about one of his coach’s decisions – even though she had agreed, like all parents, to the original Manifesto that said she’d butt the hell out. Matheny responds by kicking her son off his team. Take that, overbearing shrew mom! The kid ended up on a different team, and presumably went on to have an average-to-above-average childhood. Meanwhile, I’m sure his mom feels awful about her meddling to this day. Priceless.
Like most fans, I’m a sucker for stories that former players tell about their salad days in the big leagues. There weren’t many available in Amazon’s preview, but there was a decent tale about a very green Matheny in the minor leagues catching a more experienced pitcher. The two couldn’t get on the same page, and the pitcher made it obvious through his body language that he was irritated with his catcher. After the game, Matheny’s manager told him he should have challenged his pitcher and not allowed him to embarrass the team with his antics. Matheny left his manager’s office and went to confront the pitcher who happened to be in the bathroom. The image of Matheny “read[ing] him the riot act while he sat there” amuses me.
Decent anecdotes like those help make up for the Manifesto’s obvious weak points, like its affinity for painful cliché, as exemplified by chapter titles “Whatever Happened to the Love of the Game?” and “Nothing Worth Doing Right is Easy.” When the marketing copy emphasizes “old-school advice,” “throwback beliefs,” and “tough-love philosophy,” it’s easy to come away with the impression that the book is little more than witless advice tailored to the substandard reading level of baseball’s best fans.
That’s the impression I came away with at first, but I’m willing to admit when I’m wrong – even though I really didn’t want to be wrong. The Matheny Manifesto isn’t anyone’s idea of great literature, but it’s not nearly as bad as it could be. I can’t think of a higher compliment I could pay to something associated with the Cardinals.
Six-word review of The (partial) Matheny Manifesto: Not a complete waste of time.
(Image: Crown Publishing)
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
