Walk slow, talk slow, think fast: The Rangers Bruce Bochy doesnt miss a thing

June 18, 2024

From the visiting dugout in Oakland, Bruce Bochy watches Josh Jung take his lead at first base. The Rangers lead, 1-0, with none out in the second inning. Ezequiel Duran works the count to 3-2, leaving Bochy with a decision he has faced countless times in more than 4,000 games as a major-league manager:

Do I start the runner?

Marcus Semien, sitting next to Bochy in the Rangers’ dugout, hears his new manager muttering to himself as he stares at Jung, a 25-year-old rookie.

“This lead isn’t big enough,” Bochy says. “Get a bigger lead.”

Shaking his head wearily, Bochy puts on the sign for Jung to run. Jung takes off. Duran swings and misses. Jung is thrown out at second. A strike-’em-out, throw-’em-out double play, just as Bochy feared.

“Man,” Semien recalls. “He knew what was going to happen before it happened.”

Semien viewed the sequence on May 13 as a teaching moment for Jung, the kind of lesson that resonates even more deeply coming from a three-time World Series champion manager, and has helped transform the Rangers into a surprising powerhouse.

Bochy is leading Texas with the same combination of qualities he demonstrated in 12 seasons with the Padres and 13 with the Giants. Interviews with more than a dozen Rangers players, coaches and executives, as well as two of Bochy’s former players who now manage against him in the AL West, the A’s Mark Kotsay and Angels’ Phil Nevin, revealed a manager who is consistent and composed, humorous and humble. And once the game begins, preternaturally savvy.

In January, after spending more than $260 million on four starting pitchers, Rangers general manager Chris Young called Bochy “the biggest free-agent acquisition we’ve made.” Five months later, after watching the Rangers build the second-best record in the majors despite getting only six starts from ace right-hander Jacob deGrom and losing shortstop Corey Seager for more than a month, Young says, “I stand by that 100 percent.”

Rangers pitching coach Mike Maddux jokingly invoking his new boss’ deliberate gait and speaking style, sums up Bochy thusly:

“Walk slow. Talk slow. Think fast.”

Bochy, 68, is the game’s second-oldest manager behind the Astros’ Dusty Baker, and limps due to an old knee injury from his playing days. He sat out three seasons after retiring from the Giants at the end of the 2019 campaign, and returned to a different sport.

Major League Baseball introduced a three-batter minimum for pitchers in 2020, altering perhaps Bochy’s biggest strategic advantage, his bullpen management. This season, the league is playing with a pitch clock for the first time, speeding up play and forcing managers to make quicker decisions.

Spring training, Bochy says, amounted to something of a re-education. The league, allowing pitchers time to build up their arms, did not resume the three-batter minimum in exhibition play until March 14, leaving him just 2 1/2 weeks to become accustomed to the rule. As for the clock, Bochy thrives on the accelerated pace, saying it reminds him of the way the game was played when he broke into the majors as a catcher in 1978.

The action is never too fast for him.

“He doesn’t miss anything,” says Rangers catching coordinator Bobby Wilson, another former major-league catcher.

Some managers take notes during games, keeping track of substitutions, jotting down certain sequences for future reference. Not Bochy. Maddux, a former pitcher who has played for or worked under 24 managers as a player and coach, could not recall another manager who kept everything in his head.

Bochy says he will bring notes from advance meetings into the dugout, but rarely does he write anything down during a game, preferring to avoid distraction. “I’ve seen guys keep score. I don’t understand why you have to keep score, where a guy hit the ball the last time,” Bochy says. “I like to think I can remember that.”

Heaven forbid he get caught with his head down. Bochy is constantly looking into the opposing bullpen to see which relievers are stirring, scanning the opposing dugout to see which hitters are loosening up to pinch-hit. If his first baseman is playing off the line in the late innings of a close game, he will tell an infield coach to move the player over and guard against an extra-base hit.

“He’s always engaged in those types of scenarios,” hitting coach Tim Hyers says. “He knows exactly what he wants the team to be doing for us to win.”

Only nine managers in major-league history have won more often than Bochy, whose career record in the regular season stands at 2,044-2,052.

“He sees the game differently,” Semien says.

If major leaguers share one characteristic, outside of their obvious baseball talent, it’s an ability to see through, for lack of a better term, B.S. Players are naturally skeptical, difficult to impress. So as accomplished as Bochy was when he stood before his new team on the first day of spring training, he still had to win over his audience.

It didn’t take him long.

“I hate to say this, but it was the only manager’s speech that didn’t feel like he was forced to say something,” Rangers first baseman Nathaniel Lowe says. “He genuinely wanted to say something.”

The Rangers were coming off their sixth straight losing season, but Bochy talked only about moving forward. He made it clear: I’m not coming out of retirement to lose. And he added, even more meaningfully: I know this team can win.

“It was really empowering,” pitcher Jon Gray says. “I felt like I was a part of something way bigger than myself.”

Even managers from the lowliest teams spout hope-and-faith mantras in the spring, but Bochy is a likely Hall of Famer who became a major-league manager in 1995, before 10 of his current players were born. He also had studied his new club.

After taking the Rangers’ job last October, Bochy watched a number of the team’s games from last season. He knew the Rangers finished a respectable 12th in the majors in runs. He knew that during the offseason Young built nearly an entire starting rotation — deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi, Andrew Heaney, Martín Pérez — through free agency.

The players, seeing Bochy’s conviction, snapped to attention.

“It’s coming from a guy where it’s not bulls—,” Heaney says. “He’s literally done it. Of all people, he can sit there and say to you, ‘This is how we’re going to do it. This is why this group can do it. And here’s how I know how to do it.’ You’re like, ‘Hell, yeah, who knows better than Boch?’”

For Young, a former major-league pitcher who played for Bochy in 2006, the manager’s final season with the Padres, the talk was even better than he imagined. Bochy spoke directly and made his expectations clear, but with the right blend of humility. To Semien, who had joined the team the previous season, Bochy‘s message boiled down to two words: As one. Catcher Jonah Heim had a similar reaction when Bochy said, “If we’re going to be a championship team, we need to act like it and play like it.” Trite stuff coming from a different manager. Coming from one accomplished as Bochy, the words hit differently.

“When he stood up in front of the group for the first time, there was no question who was driving the bus,” says Wilson, who joined the Rangers’ coaching staff in 2021. “I think that was something our team needed, our organization needed. It was definitely eye-opening. An awakening.”

No one with the Rangers wants to say anything bad about former manager Chris Woodward, whom the team fired in the middle of his fourth season last Aug. 15. But Woodward, 46, was a first-time manager. His inexperience in communication and organization stood out more vividly after the Rangers hired Bochy.

“We love Woody. Woody brings so much energy and has so many great qualities,” says Hyers, who joined Woodward’s staff prior to the 2022 season. “But Boch obviously brings instant respect. You can see in his day-to-day interactions, he has things under control. It doesn’t matter if things go sideways. He’s not going to panic. He’s been there. He has that experience. And I think the players do sense that.”

The Rangers initially replaced Woodward with an interim, Tony Beasley, who returned to his previous role as third base coach under Bochy. Woodward had a rotation that finished 25th in the majors in ERA, as opposed to second, its current ranking. Less experienced players such as Jung, center fielder Leodys Taveras, infielder/outfielder Ezequiel Duran and right-hander Dane Dunning had not yet matured into solid contributors.

Woodward, now a special assistant and roving infield instructor with the Dodgers, says it warms his heart to see such players succeed, and that he harbors no ill will toward the Rangers. Asked, in retrospect, if he might have done things differently, he says, “We always have to reflect and realize that nobody is perfect. I was a first-time manager. If there was anything I felt I maybe could have done different, how would I have known?”

The bottom line was that the Rangers finished last season 68-94, a major-league high nine wins below their expected win-loss record, based on number of runs scored and allowed. Teams often hire managers who are the opposite of the ones they just fired. Young said that was not necessarily his intent in replacing Woodward, but the criteria the GM valued most were two of Bochy’s greatest strengths: presence and credibility.

The timing lined up, too. Managing France in a World Baseball Classic qualifier last September in Regensburg, Germany, Bochy got the itch to get back into a major-league dugout.

“That’s probably when I realized how much I missed it,” Bochy says. “It just felt so natural. It’s what I’ve done all my life, basically. When (Young) called, I’ll be honest. I was excited. He was checking on my appetite. It was there.”

Bochy remained connected to the game during his hiatus, continuing with the Giants as a special advisor. He attended spring training, visited minor-league affiliates, watched games, mostly involving the Giants, on TV. Upon joining the Rangers, he needed to familiarize himself with players and opponents he didn’t know, as well as the new rules. But what Young wanted most from him was to instill a winning culture.

When Bochy spoke in his introductory address about the Rangers functioning “as one,” he meant everyone. He welcomes input from his coaches. His coaches relish their opinions being heard. The players notice Bochy also holding the coaches to high standards. “He’s good for the staff, too,” Lowe says. “He’s not afraid to rag on somebody.”

The idea, always, is to get it right.

“When we lose, we try to figure out solutions right away,” Wilson says. “In the past, it was, ‘Oh, we did this good or that good.’ We lose now, and it’s, ‘Something wasn’t good enough, and we need to get better at it.’”

While the line between urgency and panic is thin, Rangers people say Bochy walks it well, making adjustments but also instilling confidence in his players, particularly the younger ones. The biggest lesson the Angels’ Nevin took from Bochy, his manager with the Padres from 1999 to 2005, was how “he touched each guy in the room each day.”

Combine that empathy with consistency, and a certain calmness comes over a club. Players are in tune not only with Bochy’s in-game strategy, but also the routines he establishes, reducing the physical strain on players by ordering a late bus to the field, or canceling batting practice. Again, it sounds simple. But Heaney, a 10-year veteran, says he has never played for a manager who understands the rhythm of a season quite like Bochy.

“That’s something that is hard to explain, but you feel it,” Heaney says. “It puts you a little more at ease.”

Bobby Bandelow was worried. He started with the Rangers in 2018 as an advance scouting intern, worked his way up to junior analyst and this season became the team’s advance scouting coordinator, acting as a liaison between the team’s statistical analysts and major-league staff. There was just one problem: The timing of his promotion coincided with the team’s hiring of Bochy, a manager widely perceived as old-school.

“I definitely had reservations,” said Bandelow, who at 30 is 38 years younger than Bochy. “I thought, ‘All right, this is going to be a little bit of a battle.’”

Young had similar concerns when he flew to Nashville to interview Bochy at his home last October. Yet, before Young even raised the subject of analytics, Bochy said, “Talk to me about your R&D team.” He wanted to dispel any notion that he was opposed to data. It actually was quite the opposite, as Bandelow learned on the very first day of spring training.

“He is completely open-minded,” Bandelow says. “He wants numbers.”

During his time with the Giants, Bochy lovingly referred to the team’s analysts as “propeller heads” even before Farhan Zaidi, an executive known for his proficiency with data, became head of baseball operations. Bochy listened to the analysts. He integrated their input, continuing to play Brandon Belt, for example, when he thought it might be best to do otherwise. But then as now, he made his own decisions.

As Bochy puts it, “You’re crazy not to listen and get all the information you can. I don’t want somebody to have the edge on me.” At the same time, he is mindful of human variables. Whether a pitcher is available. How he might be throwing. “Mike (Maddux) and I use our instincts on how we feel, too,” Bochy says.

At the start of each series, Bandelow meets for about 10 minutes with Bochy and his coaches, giving a 30,000-foot view of the opponent, detailing injuries, usage and potential matchups. He then meets separately with Bochy and Venable, again for about 10 minutes, highlighting specific pockets for relievers and pinch-hit opportunities for hitters. “Boch,” Bandelow might say, “if we can get to this (matchup) in the sixth, we can go to this in the seventh and then finish with Will Smith in the ninth.”

Lowe, the Rangers’ first baseman, says, “I feel like (Bochy) is still a baseball guy over a computer guy.” Bandelow isn’t so sure.

“In my opinion, he follows the scientific method,” Bandelow says. “He starts with a hypothesis. He asks you to find numbers to either validate or debunk his hypothesis. And if it debunks his hypothesis, then he has the ability to rethink. I think that is what sets him apart.

“He has the ability to go above and beyond, go with the foundation of the data, then start layering it with the pitching coach’s (opinion), how the pitcher has done, how has this hitter been doing the last 10 games. But it always starts with an objective foundation. That is one of the biggest misunderstandings with Bochy. I completely misunderstood it from the very beginning.”

Bandelow estimates that 60 to 70 percent of Bochy’s bullpen decisions, “definitely more than you would think,” are driven by left-right splits. He says Bochy is constantly testing, trying to figure out which relievers he can use in leverage situations. And he has developed his own theory for why Bochy is so successful.

“I understand now why he is who he is,” Bandelow says. “It’s because of his ability to always want to learn.”

During spring training, Gray tweaked his back and needed to be scratched from a start. When Bochy ambled into the training room to check on him, Gray said his back was just a little tight.

“Well,” Bochy deadpanned, “welcome to my life.”

As a group, the Rangers find Bochy to be very funny. Virtually every player and coach has a story, or multiple stories, about a moment when their new manager delivered a sharp one-liner.

“His sense of humor is extremely dry. It kind of comes out of nowhere,” Heaney says. “You’ll sort of look over and say, ‘Did he say that?’”

Recently, Bochy told Lowe about an “issue” with his golf game, saying his drive was flying 290 feet down the fairway and fading about 5 feet and he didn’t know how to fix it. Lowe found it hilarious. All golfers should have such problems.

Earlier this season, during a rare time when the Rangers were not hitting well, Bochy called over Hyers in front of the other coaches.

“Man, I’m looking for a really good hitting coach,” Bochy said. “Have you seen one lately?”

No coach, though, is subject to more of Bochy’s barbs than Wilson. The two will go back and forth about their respective golf games and which one is spending more time in the team cafeteria. When a Rangers hitter took a poor swing earlier this season, Bochy asked Wilson, “Bobby, what are you doing hitting up there?”

“There is a lot of banter that goes on,” Wilson says, laughing. “He jokes with you, messes with you, and that makes you feel comfortable when situations do come up and you can have a serious conversation.”

By first pitch, the fun is over. Bochy’s level of engagement is obvious to his players and coaches, right down to his occasional chirping at umpires. And the team is responding in kind.

The Rangers are averaging a league-best 6.25 runs per game. The next closest team, the Tampa Bay Rays, are at 5.75. The Texas rotation and defense are also among the league’s best. The bullpen remains a work in progress; closer Will Smith, 11-for-12 in save opportunities, is the only reliever with a set role. But Bochy isn’t afraid to experiment while seeking the right combinations. Nor is he worried about providing soft landings. Even with rookies, Bochy wants to know right away: Is a pitcher up for the challenge? Can he be trusted to help the team win now?

Grant Anderson made his major-league debut against the Tigers with the tying run on second, and went on to pitch 2 2/3 scoreless innings. Bochy’s choice of Cody Bradford to debut in a start at home against the Braves was another reflection of the manager’s self-assurance and long-term vision. Bradford, the team’s 30th-ranked prospect according to MLBPipeline.com, turned in a rocky performance. But his temporary insertion into the rotation gave the starters an extra day’s rest.

Bochy says of the bullpen, “it’s been a little bumpy down there, been a process.” Young, though, fully intends to acquire a reliever or two before the trade deadline. And Bochy’s track record suggests that by season’s end, he will have the whole thing sorted out.

“What I want us to become as an organization is a group that overachieves every year,” Young says. “If we’re picked to win 90 games, we win 95. If we’re picked to win 85, we win 90. That’s what the best organizations in sports do. And I think it takes leadership like Boch’s to achieve that.”

The Rangers see it. Their opponents do, too. To the A’s Kotsay and Angels’ Nevin, it’s both eerie and comforting to see their former manager back in his element. Bochy mentored Kotsay when he interviewed for managerial jobs, advised him during his first season with the A’s, continues to serve, Kotsay says, as a “great influence in my life.”

Nevin feels likewise. The first time he managed against Bochy, he kept looking into the opposing dugout, tickled by the sight of his former manager. On May 31, Nevin’s son Tyler, a Tigers infielder, had two hits against the Rangers, and also found himself staring at Bochy, whom he first knew as a child.

Maddux, too, is well aware of his new boss’ history. In his first stint as Rangers pitching coach, Maddux competed against Bochy’s Giants in the 2010 World Series, when the manager won the first of his three titles. Now that the two are working together, Maddux has developed an even greater appreciation for his old foe.

“Walks real slow. Talks real slow,” Maddux says, chuckling as he amplifies his initial assessment.

“Thinks real fast.”

(Top Image: John Bradford / The Athletic; Bailey Orr / Texas Rangers via Getty Images; Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)

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