I recently interviewed former National League Manager of the Year Clint Hurdle on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guest today has spent more than 40 years in baseball as a player, coach, manager, and executive, and is a former National League Manager of the Year. Clint Hurdle played for five teams over a 10-year playing career, but is best known for his time managing the Colorado Rockies and Pittsburgh Pirates, where he established himself as one of the best managers in baseball. Clint is the author of the new book, Hurdle-isms. Clint, thank you for joining us.
Clint: Adam, I’m happy to be here. I’m glad we got connected and they’re going to be able to do this. I look forward to sharing with you today.
Adam: Excited to have you on. As a kid, you were a top student and a baseball phenom. Sports Illustrated had you on the cover of their magazine with the title, This Year’s Phenom. You grew up on the Atlantic coast of Florida and you had a lot of opportunities coming out of high school. The University of Miami recruited you to play baseball and football. You got into Harvard and you turned down both to play Major League Baseball. You were drafted ninth overall by the Kansas City Royals. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
Clint: I’ll try and give them the cliff notes here. Raised by two incredible parents that are still with me today. My dad’s 91. We call him Big Clint. He’s 5’9″. My mother’s name’s Louise. She’s 89. My parents instilled in me skill sets that weren’t shared by both, but were strengths of both. And they kind of combined to show us kids the right way to do things. My dad’s work ethic was sharp. He was committed. He was a relationship builder. He was not afraid of hard work. My mother was more academically oriented. She believed in studying. She believed in knowing about history. She believed in reading. She believed in writing. So the combined efforts of both of those helped my two sisters, Bobbie and Robin, and I develop, I think, a pretty good hybrid understanding of you need to pay attention in life. You need to chase your passion in life. If you love something, you’ve got a chance of being real good at it. Don’t waste your time on doing things that you really aren’t interested in to please somebody else. And as I worked through high school, I made good grades, played all three sports all the way up until my junior year in high school. And then I needed to drop basketball just because the time was being consumed for football and baseball. And my mother always stressed the opportunity to do good in school. I graduated second in my class. The one B I made in driver’s ed, that’s a topic for another discussion somewhat later. But I had options coming out of high school, and she encouraged me to have options. She said, son, I want you to follow your dream, and I know your dream’s baseball, but if something would happen, you know, if there was an injury or something like that that would curtail that opportunity, you need to have a plan B. So school was my plan B. I poured into my studies. I did graduate with honors and I had an opportunity. I was offered an academic scholarship to Harvard. I was offered a multiple sport athletic scholarship to Miami. I made all the trips to a lot of colleges, some for football only, some for baseball only. There was three schools that offered me both sports. One of them was the University of Virginia. One of them was the University of Miami and the other one was U.S. City. So whittled it down. I had options. At the end of the day, though, I chased my dream. From the time I was five years old, my dad took me out in the backyard one day and he looked down at me and said, son, he asked me a question that changed the trajectory of my life. He said, do you want to play catch? And my question was like, catch what? He said, we’re going to catch baseball. I love baseball. It’s a sport I want to share with you. Do you have any interest in it? I said, well, yeah, let’s give it a shot. So I grabbed the glove. We played catch. Truth be told, my dad and I still played catch. We played catch last January on his 91st birthday. The 67-year-old kid, the 91-year-old man playing catch. It didn’t look like what it used to, Adam, trust me on that, but we played catch. I’ve been following my passion ever since. This will be my 50th year in baseball. I did take two off a few years ago and plugged back into my home when my kids were in high school, and then I got an opportunity to get back in and I took it.
Adam: Clint, I love it, and you shared so much there, but really the big message, follow your passion. You were fortunate in that you discovered it pretty early playing catch with your dad, which is, for those of us who love baseball, a moment that all of us can connect with, but for others it might take a little bit longer to figure out what it is you’re passionate about, but when you do, you’re gonna know it and follow it.
Clint: I think as I shared with my son along those lines, my son retired from baseball at the age of four. That’s a true story. He was a man of his word. He never went back. And he apologized. And I said, son, that’s the only time you’ll ever need to apologize. And you know what? You don’t even need to apologize now for not loving baseball. I said, I want you to hunt or find something that you love. He goes, well, dad, how do I do that? I said, I don’t know how you do that, but I know there’ll be something that’ll make you want to get out of bed in the morning and go do. And that’s usually a start to finding your passion, something that draws you, something that’s contagious for you. For me, I’d play in the rain. I’d throw against a wall. I didn’t have to have coaches. I didn’t have to have a field. I didn’t bet things and make up things just to practice my home, my craft. And my son went through it and he took up tennis for a while. Then he took up karate for a while. He found his passion as far as a sport came. It was crew. It was rowing a boat. And then not far after that, through COVID, he found his real passion in what he’s doing today. He wanted to be a pastry chef in a bakery. He’s at the Culinary Institute of America now. He’s chasing his passion. He just finished a 10-week program in Aspen, working in a hotel, in the kitchen, frontline, baking, creating, barista, whatever it was. But when my son goes in a kitchen, it’s like when I used to go on a mound and pitch, you know, that you can see the tail wagon behind him. So he’s found his passion. That’s just my encouragement to anybody out there still maybe looking or hoping to 5-1. Just pay attention because sometimes your past is actually gnawing on you and you’re pushing it down or you’re saying, no, not now. Maybe chase it a little bit. You might find it a little bit quicker.
Adam: I love it. And you pursued your passion, you had enormous expectations, top 10 draft pick, cover of Sports Illustrated, your rookie year, and you didn’t meet those expectations. Your playing career wasn’t what others expected of you, wasn’t what you expected of yourself. And right after retiring as a player, you went into coaching. Can you talk about that transition, how you dealt with not having the kind of career that you hoped for as a player and how you were able to pivot to your next career?
Clint: Well, lessons learned. One of the reasons I wrote a book, I wanted to share my experience, strength and hope. I wanted to share lessons learned from failure, maybe from trying to please everybody. Maybe from listening to too many voices. But at the end of the day, I got 10 years of major league time playing, but it wasn’t the way it was drawn up for me initially. Much more was expected. Early on, major league level was the first time I ever experienced failure or less than performance. I may have small periods of it in the minor leagues, but at the end of the year, I made all-star teams. I was all this and all that, but my entire way up. climbing a ladder into pro baseball, and then even in the Miley’s, but the big leagues, much different deal. The best in the world are there, and when you play well at the major leagues, you don’t go up another level. You stay there until you don’t play well, and you figure out how to play well again. My playing well times, they were short, they were inconsistent, and I seemed to heart more on the times I had come up short than the successes I had. One of my encouragements to anybody I work with in the game now is you need to celebrate the little wins. When you do well, there’s a reason for it. Trying to work through that, were you prepared? Were you ready? Did you do the reps? Did you trust your reps in the game? Did you just go out and play and have fun? I would harp on what didn’t go well and start to beat myself up. And then I found a medicinal way to numb the pain was alcohol. For me, as I share in the book, and I’ve shared on just about any podcast I’ve ever been on, I’m a recovering alcoholic today. I have 26 years of sobriety, but I didn’t handle it well. I tried to hide the fact that the failure didn’t bother me. I tried to go be bigger than after the game. And towards the end of my career, I realized things weren’t going to end up the way I had thought they were, but how could they end up in a positive fashion? I learned to play multiple positions. I made three major league clubs as a non-rostered player spring training my last three years. I played with Hall of Famers. You don’t get 10 years in the big leagues by being horrible. But after that, it was towards the end when Davey Johnson asked me to learn how to catch. He was my manager. In the minor leagues in AAA, he later became the Mets big league manager. He asked me to catch like my career. I was like, oh my God, why? He goes, I just think it would add more value to you. And I think it’d give you an opportunity to see the game from a different lens you’ve never seen before. I’d never visioned a game with people out in front of me. You know, you’re always in the outfield or the infield looking in. The catching position opens up a whole new opportunity for vision, for creativity, for understanding. That’s when I started thinking about maybe coaching and eventually an opportunity presented itself to managing the minor leagues. At the age of 30, I stopped planning and decided to go into minor league managing. It was one of the best moves I ever made because it put me in a position to grow, learn, and then become more successful.
Adam: Clint, you shared a lot there that I love and one of the last pieces that you shared about Davey Johnson, legendary manager, asking you at the end of your career to learn a new position and not just any position, but to learn how to catch, which is the hardest position on the field. And you weren’t exactly sure why he was asking you to do it, but you said, yes, I’m going to do it. And that allowed you to really stretch your skill set, expand your perspective, and that was the beginning of a new career for you. It helped you change the way that you thought about things and opened up your mind to coaching and managing. And a lot of people out there love baseball. I love baseball. You love baseball. For those who might not necessarily be baseball fans, what a great example that can be applied in any field. When you have the opportunity to do something that allows you to stretch your skill set, take on something new that allows you to get better, do it. You don’t know where it’s going to take you, but what you do know is that it’s going to help you in some way.
Clint: Adam, I think the key component to all of that. Anybody that’s listening to this podcast has come across a trust issue where you’ve had a coach or a leader or a teacher that you trust and you realize that when you trust somebody, there’s probably nothing you won’t do for them. If you’ve not developed that trust, there’s only so much you will do for them and you won’t go any farther. And actually, nobody that I’ve ever run into, myself included, I’ve never let anybody coach me up until I trust them. A lot of guys would try and coach me up, share this. And I just listened to him talk. It was like Charlie Brown and the school teacher. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. I couldn’t wait for him to finish and just get away from me. I didn’t trust him. But if I trusted him, I’d hang on every word. And with Davey, Davey had earned my trust through the way he had worked with me, other players, our team. And I knew that Davey would not suggest something that he thought wasn’t going to be beneficial. And I think the big coaching moment for me is I’ve carried this throughout. This is my 50th year of baseball. that you’ve got to earn trust first. It’s not like the old days when I was raised, my dad would tell him, you need to trust your teacher, you need to trust your coach. Not many people give you your trust, you’ve got to earn trust. And the quicker you realize that, the quicker you go about building a relationship based on transformational activity rather than transactional activity, where you’re putting that other person that you’re trying to coach up in positions for them to have success, not so much for you to have success, they’ll start feeling it, they’ll start seeing it. And basically, I said yes to David because I trusted him. And it turned out to be absolutely, probably the biggest moment in my baseball career, because it took me in an avenue where I turned out, I mean, it’s 17 years in the big leagues. If I don’t learn how to catch, I can’t look at you and say, oh yeah, I would have got 17 years as a major league manager anyway. No, I doubt it.
Adam: What steps can you take as a leader to build trust?
Clint: You get to know them besides the skills that they bring to the table. We call it collecting coins. Hobbies. Know that there was a one-parent family. He’s got two sisters. One’s musically inclined and one’s autistic. He worked every summer to help make ends meet for his family. Or he had two great parents. Dad was very athletic, but he was overbearing. Or he had two wonderful parents. They’re just good parents. Everything worked. This guy had a really smooth relationship with his folks. He’s got sisters that love him. find out what makes them tick and what they’re passionate about outside the game because you want to be somebody when you walk towards a player or a person you want them to be oh my gosh here comes adam i never know what he’s going to bring to me but i know i’m going to feel better when he’s done talking with me or oh here comes adam oh no i would tell my coaches for years don’t be the unknown because don’t be the guy that’s bringing You know, the kid went four for five and you want to talk about the one at bat he didn’t get a hit. The pitcher threw six innings of two-run baseball, and you’re going to talk about the inning he gave up two runs. You’re not going to talk about the five shutout inning. Bring truth number one, but bring compassion number two, and make sure that you let them know when you actually share your enthusiasm for their success, They can feel that. They can understand that you’re just not wanting them to be good. So you get another contract or you get the focus of being a good coach. I think it’s such a great relationship builder. It’s called Movita. When you can express joy for somebody else’s success. I mean, that’s what’s special. Players feed off, people feed off of it. Husbands and wives feed off of it.
Adam: And Clint, what you’re sharing is not only key to building trust, but key to great leadership. What do you believe are the keys to effective leadership and what can anyone do to become a better leader?
Clint: Number one, you’ve got to understand what leadership is, and it’s going to put you in a position to be very lonely. When I try to identify leaders, when I was walking into leadership, I would wait for a situation to happen and I’d watch who’d move first or who would talk first. You have never heard the term a flock of leaders. There goes a flock of leaders. Usually something happens and boom, somebody makes a move and then people follow. And when that guy continues to make or she makes good moves, more people follow. I do think it’s this relationship building, number one. You’ve got to show them that you care about them. You earn their trust, number one. You show them that you care about them holistically, number two. And then you wait for that coaching opportunity where you can show them you can make them better as a person or as a player. You can coach them up when the opportunity arises. And I also think there’s two kinds of people in this world. Those that are humble and those that aren’t. Really good leaders maintain humility. Really good leaders share the success. They understand there’s a lot of fingerprints on success. really good leaders. I think when things are going well, they become a window where everybody can look through them and see the coaches or the team players. They see everybody else. When things don’t go well, they become a mirror and they take all the distractions upon themselves. That’s one of the things I signed up for as a major league manager. When anything went wrong, whether I was in charge of it or I had a mandate, but it’s not me. I’m the manager of the team. I’ve got to stand there and I’ve got to be the lightning rod for it. Because I think good leadership also is eliminating distractions for the people that work with you and for you.
Adam: Why do you believe humility is so important to effective leadership?
Clint: Would you prefer a leader that shares the success? that pours into you or is aware of your hard days, not so much all your good days, or do you want somebody that’s just blowing their own horn all the time? One of the things in leadership, when I listen to leaders talk, I listen to how many times they say the word I versus we.
Adam: I love it. Over the course of your time in baseball, you took over teams that were struggling, and when you took them over, you transformed them into winning teams, the Rockies, the Pirates. What were the keys to building winning teams and building winning cultures, and what differentiates a losing team and a losing culture from a winning team and a winning culture?
Clint: Well, first and foremost, it’s people that are sincerely committed to performing whatever roles asked of them to perform for the betterment of the team. There’s a team first mentality. It’s all in the mentality. And a lot of people are all in until it affects them personally, and then they’re all out. I do think that Medita, that word, having expressive joy for someone else’s success is real. The smallest package in the world is a man wrapped up in himself. And when you can get outside that, when you can actually embrace and appreciate the talents of somebody else, your teammates, listen to your coaches, what they can provide, play the role that you’re asked to play, I think it becomes much easier for you to put forth your best effort because truthfully, external rewards don’t create lasting motivation. Real drive comes from within. It’s your want to. Your coaches can help you with a how-to. But it’s you wanting to be the best player you can be on that team. And I think it’s also important from a leadership standpoint, you give players freedom to play. You give coaches freedom to coach. Autonomy is key. Nobody wants to be micromanaged. And I think this is one of the biggest faults in leadership when there is a bad culture. In high-level leadership, people micromanage. It’s hard to play looking over your shoulder. It’s hard to coach when you’re worried what they’re thinking about on the third floor. It’s hard to perform if you’re worried what’s going to be written in the paper tomorrow. You’ve got to find the freedom and the space to go play. Trust your reps. Trust your practice. I also believe mastery can fuel it because you want to be a master craftsman at what you do. Which means you’re willing to work at it, you’re willing to practice, you’re willing to listen, you’re willing to explore different ways of doing it. You’re just not stubborn and you’re a one-trick pony and this is the way I’ve always done it. This is how I’m going to continue to do it. Well, that works for a while, but that’s got a short shelf life because as we said, we get into major leagues, it’s a global game now. It’s not your neighborhood, it’s not your community, it’s not your state. There’s a lot of good players up there and you got to find different ways. I think connecting your work to a bigger purpose, There’s a lot of reasons people play professional sports. Sometimes it’s the lifestyle. Sometimes it’s the blame. Sometimes it’s the fake testosterone they get from it. But your purpose and you’re connecting your work to your purpose. I wanted to be in a World Series championship team. Yes, I wanted to be in the big leagues. That was a part of it. But I wanted to play in the World Series championship. I always gravitated to those guys on the field, jumping up and down late. I’ve never experienced that. I’ve been to three World Series. But that was my purpose in doing whatever I could do to promote, you know, cohesion on the team, communication on the team, symmetry on the team, because there was a bigger task involved. I wanted to play in a World Series championship. And then I think there’s support. I used to share with my coaches, I’d hear a term every once in a while, well, how do you handle this? Or how do you handle that? I’d go, I get it, let’s step back. You handle animals, you don’t handle people. You support people. You coach people. So I think those would be a few of the tips that I would share with people on trying to develop good, positive leadership versus some of the pitfalls. If you don’t have those things, you’ve got a chance of not having good, positive leadership.
Adam: The key theme, the importance of empowering your coaches, empowering your players. Who are some of the coaches or players that stood out to you as examples of how to lead? Who made the biggest impact to you?
Clint: Going back, I followed a player growing up that I got to meet later on. And some people say, you know, be careful of meeting your heroes. Sometimes it doesn’t end up very well. Al Kaline was my hero growing up. Born in Michigan, I followed Al Kaline my entire childhood. I got to meet Al Kaline many years later, my rookie year. Al Kaline was everything I could have ever hoped he’d been. He was compassionate. He was empathetic. He was a fierce competitor. He was a student of the game. He was humble. So the player that I looked up to were Al Kaline, Brooks Robbins. Brooks was the same. He was a giver. Everybody remembers the series against the Reds, the World Series, the defensive plays. He was a good ball player. He got things done. From a standpoint, once I started going up, I had some minor league managers. Gary Blaylock, my first manager, taught me things. John Sullivan taught me things. But as I moved up, Don Baylor was critical in my development as a major league coach. Daryl Johnson, who was a former big league manager, spent many years with me in the Mets minor league system, growing me up as a manager. There’s many fingerprints on success. And I had two general managers that both that I worked for, Dan O’Dowd in Colorado and Neil Huntington in Pittsburgh. Both gave me space and freedom to manage. We shared thoughts. Sometimes we’d wrestle with ideas. Sometimes we would have arguments. But when the door opened and we both walked out, we were arm in arm, locked in a mission for the organization and what was best. Jeff Bannister was a huge addition to my coaching staff. I learned a ton from Jeff in Pittsburgh. And there was guys that I learned from in Colorado as well. Rick Matthews, who’s still working in the Rockies, Meyer League system with me, was a fantastic teacher. I learned about infield play from Gene Glenn. My God, Jamie Cork was my bench coach. I was fortunate to be around a lot of good people. I think I’ve hired some good people, or my general manager and I got together, we hired some good people. But players that I learned from the most that some of the relationships I still have in play today, Todd Helton, Michael Young, Clint Barbas, Andrew McCutcheon, Josh Harrison, Brad Hopp, Aaron Cook. I mean, these are guys that are still in my life today. Jordy Mercer that we still share stories with. Because they spoke the truth to me as well. Russell Martin and AJ Burnett were probably two polarizing guys I had in Pittsburgh that made me a better manager through some confrontation, through some questioning of things we were doing. Because if somebody asks you a question and you can’t explain it, quickly and efficiently, with clarity, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And these guys wanted to know the why a lot, which was always a wonderful question to ask, because you had to think through your answer, because you didn’t want three more whys coming after the first time you answered the question. Kind of like if you have kids, Adam, I don’t know if you have any kids, but, you know, they’ll ask you a question, and you’ll tell them, they go, well, so why? Why? Why? You didn’t get to the root of it for them, so you got to keep firing back information. I had players that sharpened me just because they wanted to know and they wanted to know why, they wanted to know my real thoughts. Was I authoring this or was this coming from some other place? Was it directed from somebody else or was this what I thought was actually best for the ball club?
Adam: Did you ever have any players who were real problems in the clubhouse and if so, how did you deal with that?
Clint: Well, yes, absolutely. When you talk about the number of men and women that are in a major league clubhouse in today’s game, it could be 50, 65. It wasn’t that many my last year managing, but there’s a lot of people in your clubhouse. And to think that you’re going to go from February until the end of September and not have issues? Because life’s going on for each and every one of these people. It could be illness. It could be sickness. It could be divorce. It could be a car wreck. I mean, there’s so many things that go on in lives. But yeah, situations happen. People’s egos get fueled, or they get greedy, or they get jealous. So I always try to put together a leadership group of players that I could spend time with. Maybe they could extinguish something in the clubhouse. I’d give them first authority. opportunity to say, hey, here’s what I’m seeing. Is it fact or fiction? They go, no, it’s going on. So-and-so, he’s having problems. He’s just a disturbance. Others become a distraction. Okay, is it something you think you can handle? They might say, yeah, here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s what I do. They go, no, Skip, this one’s on you. We’re just staying away from him. Then you call a player in and you speak truth to him. We’re going to have a conversation. When we’re finished, I’m going to ask you for two things that you walk out of here with, two things you heard loud and clear. you’re going to hold on to. Because if you can’t take something with you, we’re going to have to have this whole conversation again. So I would share my thoughts. I would usually wrap it around, here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s what some other people are sharing with me. What are your thoughts? And they may have a reason for it, or they don’t see it that way. And I go, OK, here’s my suggestion. Here’s what the team needs from you now. Not here’s what I need. Here’s what the team needs from you now moving forward. And this is what we’re going to expect to get. And if we don’t get it, and this doesn’t start to happen, we will have a conversation next time.
Adam: Have you ever felt like you lost the clubhouse and lost the room, lost your players? And if so, how did you turn that around?
Clint: It really doesn’t matter what I feel. I think there’s been times, both places I got fired at the end, you know, those things come up. People say, well, he lost the clubhouse. Well, maybe he did, or maybe the messaging gets stale. But I’ll say this, I spent two terms as the manager of the Big Leagues, one for eight years and one for nine years. So there was an ebb and flow that seemed to have some success. Didn’t win a World Series, but we obviously accomplished some things because people put me in charge and kept me in charge for a long time. I don’t think it’s a bad thing if you get to the point where the messaging is just not working anymore. Sometimes different groups of all different thoughts come up. Maybe you missed an opportunity along the way to move in a situation that may have been more beneficial for the club. I look back and, are there things you do different? I think, yeah, I wasn’t the same manager in Pittsburgh that was in Colorado. I’ve learned things. And if I ever had another opportunity, I probably have learned some things from a time in Pittsburgh as well. But we all evolve. And when there’s a divorce rate out there at over 50% right now, people that swear they’re going to be married together forever. Managers spent eight or nine years in one place or nine years in another place. Mike Malone, my friend, just got fired in Denver. He went to the NBA championship two years ago. Fourth place in the NBA at the time in 15 games, something over 500, got fired. We get fired. One of the things I held on to throughout my career, managing, coaching, and Kelly McGregor, then president of the Rockies, shared with me when I became the manager there, he said: as long as God wants you in that chair, no man can move you out. And when God doesn’t want you in that chair any longer, no man can keep you in it.
Adam: Clint, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?
Clint: Be a lifelong learner. Look to get better. Try and seek out those that have had the experience in the area you’re hoping to have experience in and see what they learned along the way. It’s hard to ask somebody how to make a watch. Why would I ask somebody who’s never made a watch how to make a watch? I would seek out wisdom. I would find your coaching rhythm or your leadership rhythm and method and make sure you’re honest, you’re transparent, you’re authentic.
Adam: Clint, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
Clint: That was very enjoyable. Thank you for your time today.
