Bond between Cash, Montoyo on display as Rays skip wins Manager of the Year

 

TORONTO – Moments after Kevin Cash was named American League Manager of the Year on Tuesday by one of his mentors, Cleveland’s Terry Francona, and shared his initial reaction, MLB Network host Greg Amsinger let him know one of his former coaches wanted to chime in.

“Yeah, buddy,” said Charlie Montoyo, the Toronto Blue Jays skipper who ended up third in voting by members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. “Congrats. Well-deserved, man. I didn’t want to leave (the show), I said, ‘Please, I’ve got to tell him congrats.’ You deserve it, buddy. Great job. I’m proud of you.”

Beaming as if he’d just won the award himself, Montoyo was genuinely excited for Cash, whom he worked under as a third-base coach from 2015-17 and bench coach in 2018 with the Tampa Bay Rays. That type of selflessness and positivity is a big part of what Montoyo brings to the Blue Jays, an element often lost amid the incessant second-guessing every manager faces.

“It meant a lot that Charlie was on the call, certainly meant a lot that he stayed on after,” Cash said during a conference call. “I’ve been in that position (as a runner-up) the last two years and did not stay on after. And I think it speaks volumes about Charlie the person. And as much as I can’t stand competing against him and the Toronto Blue Jays, No. 1, because he’s one of my closest friends in the game, and Toronto’s good and they’re going to continue to get good, there’s never been a strain on our relationship.”

The enduring bond between them, along with Rocco Baldelli, the Minnesota Twins manager hired away from the Rays a couple days before the Blue Jays picked Montoyo, is a by-product of the culture created in Tampa. The trio still talk via text and phone regularly, a lasting camaraderie the departed coaches are trying

Baldelli guided the Twins to the post-season in each of the past two years, while Montoyo led a club that finished 67-95 in 2019 through the tumult of getting bounced from Toronto because of the pandemic-related border issues and being forced to take refuge in Buffalo.

Adding to the challenge is that he did it with the youngest group of position players in the majors during 2020 at 25.9 years old, according to Baseball Reference.

While he drew criticism for some unorthodox batting order decisions and the club’s two-times-through-the-order cap on its starters, Montoyo also received praise for not letting a difficult situation that could have easily come undone fray.

He received two of the 30 first-place votes and 47 points overall to finish behind Rick Renteria, fired by the Chicago White Sox, who received five first-place votes and 61 points. Both were distant runners-up to Cash, who received 22 first-place votes and 126 points, deserved recognition for a manager whose impressive work all season has been overshadowed by his controversial decision to lift Blake Snell from Game 6 of the World Series.

“I don’t want a decision in Game 6 to take away from what our players accomplished this year,” said Cash, who added that he’s received lots of support from former managers, friends and others around the game since, and accepts the fallout from a difficult call.

“I would do it the same way all over again. I would plead for a different outcome, that’s for sure … That decision was not reflective of my confidence in Blake. It was very reflective of my confidence in Nick (Anderson). That’s how I felt at the moment. The best chance for us to win the game was to get the ball in Nick’s hands and then line up the bullpen – our bullpen was pretty special. And as I’ve said many times, nobody is sicker than me about it.”

Montoyo won’t have similar regrets, even though the Blue Jays flipped the script for their playoff series against the Rays by pushing ace Hyun-Jin Ryu to Game 2 and going with a Matt Shoemaker-Robbie Ray piggyback in the opener. They still lost both games.

The Rays employ such out-of-the-box thinking on the regular and it can’t work without the front office and coaching staff getting buy-in from players. As the Blue Jays transition toward a similar model, Montoyo will be counted on to deliver the same type of outreach he did with Tampa.

“What Charlie means to the Rays organization, you don’t do this for 20 some years and not have just a huge impact. And he’s had that,” said Cash. “He had it on players. He had it on other staff members. And he certainly had it on me, being a young manager, to be able to lean on a guy … to know that his experiences, his knowledge and what he’s gone through was going to help us come up with the best decisions on a nightly basis, or throughout the course of the season.”

While Cash praised Francona, whom he worked under in Cleveland, for being one of his primary influences, the former catcher said the roots of his outlook in coaching began with the Blue Jays, who signed him as an undrafted free agent in 1999. In the minors, he quickly emerged as one of the club’s top catching prospects, but the terrific defender was ultimately undone by an inconsistent bat, finishing with a .526 OPS in 246 big-league games over eight years.

Ernie Whitt, Marty Pevey, Omar Malave, Dennis Holmberg, John Gibbons, Carlos Tasco, Gil Patterson and Jim Hoff were names he rhymed off as key contributors to his development during his time with the Blue Jays.

“For being a not very good player, I certainly got to be around some special coaches in player development,” he said. “All of them were really special at the different points in all of our careers coming up, whether it was through the minor-leagues, getting to the big-leagues, staying in the big-leagues, whatever it was. There are so many people that I’m so grateful for within the Toronto Blue Jays system that are still there or have gone on and done other things. But Toronto was a very special place. I remember when I signed Toronto was kind of the mecca of player development and what they were doing and the amount of prospects they had, and just the talent. But it wasn’t just the players. It was a talented people that work within the organization.”

The Rays can certainly lay claim to being the current player-development mecca, a mantle the Blue Jays are seeking to retake with one of Tampa’s own.