Just about a year after the A’s first traded away Kurt Suzuki, they brought him back. They were fighting for an American League West title in August 2013, and their two catchers – Stephen Vogt and Derek Norris – were relatively inexperienced.
Suzuki was there for the final five weeks of the season, but that was enough time for Suzuki to make an indelible impression on Vogt.
“It was my first opportunity to really play in the big leagues and we picked up Kurt late in the season and he just came in with everything he’d accomplished and poured it in to help me learn how to navigate big league games, a big league pitching staff, get through the playoffs,” Vogt said. “Just one of my favorite teammates. It was a short time, but it was unbelievable. I learned a tremendous amount from him that I continued to use for the rest of my playing career.”
Vogt’s perspective on Suzuki is particularly relevant now, because last week the Angels hired the 42-year-old Suzuki to his first managing job, even though he was just three years removed from his playing career and he’d never managed at any level.
Vogt was hired to manage the Cleveland Guardians just one season after he stopped playing, with a year as the Seattle Mariners’ bullpen coach in between. All Vogt has done in his two years in Cleveland is win back-to-back division titles.
Vogt said last week that he believes Suzuki can follow his path as a successful major league manager because of the path they both took.
“Kurt’s in a similar bucket as I was, where we played through the analytical transition, so to speak,” Vogt said. “When we came through the minor leagues and broke into the big leagues, we didn’t have a ton of information. Then as we went through our careers, we got it all thrown at us. We learned how to apply it in our playing careers. I think a lot of that is understanding how to digest all the information and then make it player-facing. Kurt’s going to be outstanding with that. He knows how to relate to guys and get to them to understand what it takes to play 162 games and do it at an elite level.”
Helping to mold the reams of analytical data into something that can be useful for players is just one of the challenges that Suzuki faces with his new job.
He is taking over a team that has gone through its last five managers without any of them producing a winning record. He has inherited a team that went 72-90, finishing near the bottom of MLB in most significant statistical categories.
Suzuki takes over the Angels with just a one-year deal, which he acknowledges means that he needs to show what kind of manager he is right away.
Angels general manager Perry Minasian insisted that he already knows.
“I never thought I’d be comfortable hiring a manager who wasn’t a manager before,” Minasian said. “But this is a different person. It’s a different individual.”
Minasian and Suzuki have been together for six of the last eight years. Suzuki played for the Atlanta Braves in 2018, which was Minasian’s first year as the assistant GM there. Suzuki played for the Angels for Minasian’s first two years in his current job. For the past three, he’s been a special assistant to Minasian.
It’s no surprise that Minasian keeps bringing Suzuki back. That’s been a trend throughout his career, starting with the A’s re-acquiring him a year after they traded him. The Washington Nationals, who first acquired Suzuki from the A’s in 2012, brought him back in 2019, the year they won the World Series.
A’s GM David Forst said Suzuki is the kind of player you want to have around.
“I think he has a chance to be a really good big league manager,” Forst said. “He was always somebody who players gravitated toward in the clubhouse. He’s a guy who’s always positive, optimistic. I think his personality will serve him well under the stress of the position. I think guys will really feed off his energy.”
Besides Vogt, two others with major league managerial experience – Phil Nevin and Mark Kotsay – expressed confidence in Suzuki’s readiness for the job.
Nevin, who managed the Angels in 2022 and 2023, was there for Suzuki’s final year as a player and his first in the front office. Nevin also knew Suzuki long before that because both are products of Cal State Fullerton.
“There’s been a handful of guys that I’ve managed or coached where you go, I think he’s gonna be really good at (managing),” Nevin said. “Not just because they were leaders in the clubhouse. There’s a lot of guys who are leaders that wouldn’t go on to manage a team.”
Nevin said Suzuki showed him his managerial chops by standing beside him and managing along during games when he wasn’t playing in 2022. In 2023, while working in the front office, Suzuki often sat in Nevin’s office before or after games to go over details.
“I think he’s gonna be great,” Nevin said. “He’s good with his teammates. He’s good with the staff members. He respects everybody in that building, which is important. The second you pull into the parking lot, he’s saying hello to the parking attendants, the security, the medical staff, the media. He just respects people. It’s going to make him really good in this position.”
Mark Kotsay, who has been the A’s manager since 2022, was one of Suzuki’s teammates when he first broke into the majors with the A’s in 2007.
“He was a learner,” said Kotsay, who is also a Fullerton product. “He was somebody that wanted the knowledge, to take in everything that we could give him and utilize it for his career, which he did.”
Kotsay said Suzuki had a knack for handling pitching early in his career.
“Pitchers are, I don’t want to say selfish, but they care about what they do in their performance sometimes more than what the results are for the team,” Kotsay said. “That being said, Zuk always was able to communicate with them in a way that brought them back to the team, with a mindset of how do we get through this game. The communication was always solid.
“Even if he was going 0 for 4, you could see the intensity and the relationship with him and the starters and relievers. That’s a separator for a lot of guys.”
Angels pitchers have mostly failed to meet expectations in the past few years. In 2022 – Suzuki’s last year on the field – the Angels ranked ninth in the majors in ERA. That was the season they got the best work out of pitchers like Patrick Sandoval, José Suarez and Reid Detmers. Even Shohei Ohtani was better on the mound in 2022 than he was in either of his other two seasons as a full-time pitcher with the Angels.
Nevin saw how the Angels flourished in 2022 and then suffered without Suzuki and veteran Max Stassi behind the plate in 2023.
Suzuki won’t be able to have the same impact on the pitching staff as a manager, but the Angels are hoping that getting someone with his experience behind the plate can provide some of what they’ve been missing since Mike Scioscia stepped down. (Brad Ausmus, who managed for one year after Scioscia, was also a former catcher.)
Suzuki said he “managed” through games when he was catching.
“You have to think along,” Suzuki said. “Are they going to pinch-hit in two hitters? Are we getting somebody up to get this lefty out? You have to think along those lines. We had guys to do that when I was catching, but I always thought it was cool to be able to think, maybe I can guess what the manager’s thinking. …
“When I played, I feel like it prepared me to be in this role.”