They met in 1999 in Charleston, S.C. Charlie Montoyo was the manager of the hometown RiverDogs, a Class A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Samantha Startt was the team’s director of promotions and special events. There was no spark between them. “I had a boyfriend,” she says. Besides, she was wary of the lifestyle that sometimes consumes young men who dedicate their lives to professional baseball.
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He returned to manage in Charleston in 2000. “That year,” she says, “he wore me down.”
After a team meet-and-greet event at a local restaurant, Charlie joined several members of the front-office staff in a corner booth for a drink or two. Samantha was there too. After they chatted for a while, she remembers thinking, “Well, maybe. Maybe.”
It took a while, but gradually, her “maybe” blossomed into certainty, as she recalled on Monday after the Blue Jays introduced her husband as their new manager.
Asked how Charlie wore her down, she mentioned two virtues.
“He’s very quick,” she said. “He doesn’t always come across that way, but he’s very quick-witted. And I’m very dry-humoured. We complement each other very well. There’s a lot of back-and-forth between us. If you’re in our family, you’re not safe. There’s a zinger here and a zinger there.
“And he’s very kind. There’s not a lot of people in this world who are just genuinely kind, but he’s one of them.”
And infinitely patient – 18 years as a minor-league manager in the Rays’ system before they finally gave him a big-league coaching job in 2015. Before that, he’d spent eight seasons as the highly successful manager of the triple-A Durham Bulls.
And never, in all those years, so much as a feeler from a big-league team looking for a manager. Until last Sunday, when Jays’ general manager Ross Atkins called.
Montoyo, 53, says his mantra was simple: Don’t look ahead. Do the job you have as best you can. But one wonders if frustration – and perhaps a sense of urgency – didn’t set in along the way for both him and his wife, especially as big-league clubs started hiring managers who had no experience in the role.
“I haven’t felt urgency, but I’ve felt confused,” Samantha said. “I always thought the way you got a big-league job was that you followed the steps. And that doesn’t seem to be the norm anymore. Maybe I’m just getting older and I wasn’t understanding. And the (first-time managers) they’ve hired are awesome, and they’ve done great things.
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“But that’s a huge leap of faith, to take in someone that’s never managed before. So I was confused why his experience wasn’t translating over into a big-league job. He just had to find the right fit.”
As she spoke, her husband was finishing up a series of TV interviews. He was wearing his new jersey with 25 on the back, the same number they gave him when he spent three weeks with the Expos in 1993. Then the TV lights went off and he turned to chat with the writers who cover the team. By the time that session ended, he had been talking for nearly 90 minutes.
He was hoarse, but still smiling.
The wit and the kindness his wife mentioned were evident. And every now and then, a touch of toughness and resolve too.
In a public-relations sense, it was a good start for the new Blue Jays’ manager.
Toward the end of the season, when it became clear that John Gibbons and the Blue Jays would part ways, and when several other managerial jobs arose, Charlie Montoyo was cheerleading for his fellow Rays’ coaches. He collected the media guides of the teams with vacancies and stuck them in his colleagues’ lockers.
“I was having fun with the coaches, with the Rocco Baldellis and Matt Quatraros and putting the media guide of the Blue Jays in their locker – ‘you better learn it,’” he said with a smile. “But they never put it in my locker. It’s funny how that works. I ended up as the one getting it.”
Baldelli, who was reportedly a candidate for the Jays’ job, got one too, in Minnesota. When that happened, no one was happier than Montoyo, who not only coached alongside Baldelli in Tampa, but managed him in the minors. Montoyo figured the drift toward no-experience managers favoured Baldelli.
“During this year I was telling him, ‘Dude, they’re looking for guys like you. Come on buddy, you got to do it,’ because I love him. And he got one. So I’m really happy for him. And then it happened to me, and it’s awesome. You just never know.”
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Samantha says her husband never lobbied for a big-league manager’s post.
“He’s never been out there pushing, like, ‘I want this job,’” she said. “There’s only 30 jobs. It’s not really something you can really go out and market and push for. It has to come to you.”
It came last week, out of the blue.
Montoyo was the last man the Jays interviewed – called on Sunday, in town for interviews Tuesday and Wednesday, announced on Thursday – which raised the question: Was he the first man offered the job? The rumour mill had not generated his name until the last minute. Other candidates (Baldelli, David Bell) had taken jobs elsewhere.
That sort of context was not about to emerge in Monday’s news conference, and there’s no telling if it even matters. Atkins certainly made a persuasive case for hiring Montoyo, and Montoyo made a terrific first impression when he met the media.
The baseball people Atkins consulted raved about Montoyo’s character. The GM said he’d talked to an active player who knew Montoyo well.
“(The player) said, ‘First and foremost, he is a remarkable human being,’” Atkins recounted. “‘He’s a great father. He’s a great husband. And he gives me a great deal of confidence that the guidance he’s providing me is very good guidance. He does that consistently and I want to get to the field every day to see him.’
“That,” said Atkins, “is leadership in baseball.”
The deal was sealed over a long dinner at the posh Bosk restaurant in the Shangri-La Hotel on University Avenue. Club president Mark Shapiro, Atkins and Montoyo talked baseball and got acquainted. The service was slow. Montoyo was happy about that.
“It was supposed to be an hour dinner,” he said. “It took forever because the waiter took forever. So that worked out for me. Like, I cannot wait to see that waiter so I tip him a little more because it was awesome. I got (to talk to) these guys more and my thought when that dinner was over (was), it would be great to work for these two guys.”
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Montoyo checks plenty of boxes, both for the Jays and Major League Baseball, whose minority hiring program has not exactly been a resounding success.
- Montoyo is a proud native of Puerto Rico. He will converse easily with both English and Latino players.
- He comes from a club regarded as a leader in both the well-established analytics movement and in the application of a collaborative management style. He said his approach will blend old-school and analytics, and repeatedly mentioned consulting with Atkins and Shapiro on big-picture issues.
- He called communication skills his greatest strength.
He also said “finding the right coaching staff” is his top priority, which probably does not bode well for the current coaches who, like Gibbons, have a year left on their contracts. There will be a shakeup. Montoyo wants coaches who can effectively teach young players, whom he will have in abundance.
“Just because you get to the big leagues, player development doesn’t stop,” he said. “Younger guys, you’ve got to keep working just like you did in the minor leagues, and that’s what we’re going to do here.”
1996, his last year as a minor-league infielder, Montoyo wasn’t just a player. The Expos, who had given him a cup of coffee three years earlier – he went 2-for-5 – asked him to go to double-A Harrisburg and act as a mentor for a promising group of prospects, including Latinos Vladimir Guerrero, Jose Vidro and Jolbert Cabrera. Also on that team: future big-leaguers Rondell White, Brad Fullmer and Geoff Blum.
At 30, in the full knowledge that he would not make it back to the big leagues, he became a player-coach. At Harrisburg, he played in 74 games – too many, he said.
“I don’t want to play. I just want to help the kids,” he said.
He has been doing that ever since, and will do so again as the Jays’ skipper. One of his charges, come mid- or late April, will be Vladimir Guerrero Jr., baseball’s top prospect. Montoyo has never seen Vladdy Jr. play. Like Toronto fans – and baseball fans in general – he is looking forward to it.
Montoyo finished his 10-year minor-league career with a slash line of .266/.404/.357. He played every infield position, as well as a handful of games in the outfield.
“My batting stance wasn’t pretty,” he said, recalling that some observers called it a “peek-a-boo” look that made them wonder how he could even see the ball.
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“Hey, but you know what, I hit .400 in the big leagues,” he said with a grin.
And .538 in almost 3,700 games as a minor-league manager. That’s close to 2,000 wins down on the farm since he started in rookie ball in Princeton, W. Va.
Now, suddenly, he is managing in The Show, with a three-year contract and a team entering 2019 with low expectations. A reporter led into a question by observing that the Blue Jays will lose a lot in the next couple of years.
“Really?” he said. “I don’t think that way. We’re going to play to win from the beginning.”
He recalled commiserating with his coaching colleagues in Tampa about the managing the Jays, before he knew he’d get the opportunity.
“We were saying that’s going to be a good job,” he said. “Lot of younger guys. It’s a great spot to teach. It’s an exciting team right here, for me for sure.”
For him, for sure. The trick will be proving that to the fans.
Montoyo has often said that the challenges he has faced in baseball pale in comparison to those endured by his second son. Alex, 11, was born with Ebstein’s anomaly, a heart malformation that so far has required four surgeries, the first when he was five days old.
Alex’s brother, Tyson, who will soon turn 16, inherited his father’s kindness gene, Samantha says. Tyson has been a loving caregiver for his little brother from the beginning.
Alex is functioning well now. But, Samantha says, it’s uncertain whether he will need more surgery.
“We don’t know,” she said. “The last surgery, they said, ‘This will either last or it won’t.’ He’s monitored. He still has some therapies. His teachers are very supportive. Because of his heart condition and his low oxygen, he also has mild cerebral palsy. His hands don’t work very well, so he has a computer and he types everything.
“But he loves baseball. You’ll see him. He will be here, rattling off stats to you and questioning every move his father makes.”
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Tyson’s sporting priority lies in lacrosse, which he’s used to playing at home in Arizona. He figures living in Canada might sharpen his skills.
“He’s excited because there’s so much lacrosse here,” she said. “He’s looking forward to finding a coach and learning a different teaching style, a different method.”
In his list of thank-yous during his introductory comments on Monday, Montoya saved his most important tribute for last as he looked at Samantha sitting in the front row.
“If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be here either,” he said. “I said this story before … I’m glad I went back to Charleston for my second year because that’s where I met her, and she’s been the rock of the family.
“And one beautiful thing about this is that she got to fly first-class (to Toronto) – and she deserves it.”
Samantha Montoyo photo from a 2015 documentary the Rays did on the Montoyo family.
Charlie Montoyo photos by John Lott/the Athletic
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