McAdam: Former GM Doug Melvin happy to see Ron Roenicke back in manager's seat

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Until Tuesday, Doug Melvin was the only baseball executive to hire Ron Roenicke to manage his major league team. Today, he remains the only one to fire him from that same post.

Still, when the Red Sox and chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom introduced Roenicke as interim manager earlier this week, Melvin couldn't have been happier.

"I'm a big believer in people getting second chances,'' said Melvin, who worked as a general manager for the Texas Rangers and later the Milwaukee Brewers. "Ron's opportunity with us with the Brewers was his first chance. I got let go as the GM in Texas and in my second opportunity, I did some things differently. You learn from your first chance. I'm a big believer in second chances in the business we're in.''

Melvin enthusiastically recommended Roenicke to Bloom when the two spoke last month.



"Ron's a real professional,'' said Melvin. "Ron will handle your day-to-day job description of a manager really well. He's a good person. He's not afraid to approach players. He wants to make sure that the front office and he work in synch with each other; he feels the relationship with the front office is very important. We had a good relationship in that regard. He's a stickler for fundamentals. He expects fundamentals to be done properly in preparing for the season.

"He's a very good listener. He uses his coaches very well and values their opinions. He's been a coach -- he's been a bench coach, a base coach, so he's done all those jobs. I always feel a manager is better prepared when they've done those jobs first. As for as players go, don't take his mild-mannered demeanor as a non-competitor. He's a strong competitor. He gets upset at tough losses, but he also understands the game. If you have a tough loss, he understands there's 161 games to go. But you don't want to get him upset. He takes losses hard, as everyone should.''

Like Roenicke himself, Melvin feared that his former manager might not get another chance. At a time when baseball is turning to younger and inexperienced managers as a rule, Roenicke's age (63) may have taken him out of consideration for some openings.

"It's part of our game today,'' said Melvin. "Those young guys (Alex Cora, Rocco Baldelli, Aaron Boone) have all done good jobs. I thought Ron might have gotten another job by now. I thought it would have happened. Ron's young at heart. I don't think his age should be (a deterrent). He's got so much more experience. It might have crossed his mind, that the page had turned and they go with younger people.''



The game has changed a great deal since 2015, when Roenicke began his fifth and final season in Milwaukee. The influence of analytics has grown, and the dynamic between the front office and the manager has been completely evolved.

"The approach to managing has probably changed,'' acknowledged Melvin. "But Ron's a smart individual who can recognize all of that. He's not going to fight that. He's going to go along and do what he has to do to be successful. I told Chaim my experience as a GM was much different. I never went down to the clubhouse after games. Today, a lot of them do and go down and discuss the game right then.''

Roenicke will have a much different experience dealing with the media in Boston than he did in Milwaukee, where only two reporters cover the Brewers full-time. But Roenicke had his own challenges on the job, having to answer questions about Ryan Braun's PED suspension nearly every day for half a season in 2013.

"That was huge for a market like Milwaukee at the time,'' recalled Melvin. "But the (media scrutiny) will be much different in Boston than what he had in Milwaukee. There aren't any media markets much bigger than Chicago, LA, New York and Boston. The pressures of this difficult season that the Red Sox are going through, he's obviously going to be looked at under a different lens. But I think he'll handle it.''

Above all, Melvin believes Roenicke will succeed because of his ability to build relationships -- with both players and those in Baseball Operations.

"That was one thing that he was really good at,'' said Melvin. "I would question him at times and say, 'Ron, we need to get this guy going, make sure to get on him.' But he loved to build relationships with players and once he built those, he felt he could then bring that player in and reprimand him if he had to.

"But he said he first had to get to know a player, know a player's family. He would say, 'I want to know about his friends.' He was very, very good at that. Some managers don't want to get that close, but Ron was very good at that. He was better at it than I was. As a GM, I knew I might have to make some very difficult decisions at some point and I had a fear of getting too close to a player, because you might have to make a tough call at some point.

"But Ron was very good at relationship-building. And he wasn't afraid that, once he builds that trust, to get on a player when he had to.''

To this day, Melvin and Roenicke maintain a friendship outside the game, speaking on occasion and recommending Western novels to one another.

"We stay in touch,'' said Melvin, who still works as an adviser with the Brewers. "I think there's some mutual respect there.''