Miami Marlins manager Skip Schumaker is sitting behind home plate at the home of the Marlins, talking about home for City & Shore magazine’s home issue.
He’s homeless.
No. Of course he isn’t. But sort of. He’s got a place to live in South Florida. Asked where, he says just one word and kind of does a brow toss toward whatever direction it is from the ballpark’s home in Little Havana: “Brickell.”
Brickell. Now there’s a place that used to be home. If by home you mean early 20th century mansions for folks like William and Mary Brickell who traded Cleveland, Ohio winters for Miami sunshine (duh) at a time when massacres of white “settlers” by native Americans was still a thing.
Turns out Mary had mad skills at urban development waaaaay before that was even a term (unless you count Mesopotamia, which we don’t, cause whoever heard of “Mesopotamia Vice”?). Soon enough the section of Miami that became “Brickell” was adorated as “Manhattan of the South” where, today, rental apartments average about $3,000 a month for 950 square feet.
So, no, the manager of the Miami Marlins isn’t homeless, sitting behind home plate in loanDepot park on the first day of FanFest, probably wondering why a writer with only 15 minutes of Major League Baseball’s 2023 National League Manager of the Year’s time, wants to know about “home.”
Home for Skip Schumaker is about 2,500 miles away on the other coast, in Orange County, Calif. Specifically, Ladera Ranch – a planned community of “villages” with a population of about 30,000 between San Diego and Los Angeles.
(Seven years ago, the Schumakers sold a house in Ladera Ranch for $2.2 million; but it had a batting cage in the back yard, so that price may have skewed the average.)
Home is where Lindsey and Brody and Presley – wife, son, daughter – are while Skip resides in Brickell and makes his living trying to get ballplayers home at loanDepot park.
He’s got about a three-mile commute to work. Nothing like the one his dad, Wayne, dealt with in the 1990s going to his job in Los Angeles from Orange County – known then and now as a good place to raise a family. (Known, too, as home of Richard Nixon, which may or may not be relevant to the county’s reputation for wholesome living.)
Wayne became Skip’s hero because Wayne put family above personal comfort and proved it every workday. You think I-95 is a mess? Coyotes plan their hunting patterns to avoid rush hour activity on the stretch of highways Wayne Schumaker would have driven 90 minutes each way back then, just to keep his family in a family-friendly place. (Skip was born in Torrance, Calif. The family moved to Orange County when Skip was an eighth grader.)
“Seeing how he always cared more about family than anything else made an impression on me,” Skip says of his dad, who passed away last month just days before the start of the new season.
Wayne had a Los Angeles County job in LA. Up before the sun; home with the moon, where his baseball playing son Jared soon-to-be-named Skip was waiting with games to play and batting practice to take.
So Wayne, who was in charge of safety and sanitation at Los Angeles county beaches and harbors, would swap shifts with co-workers when necessary to accommodate the boy.
Wayne’s sports background was hockey and football. But when Skip took up baseball in Little League, Wayne watched MLB games and learned drills so that he could coach his son. Wayne remembered Skip waiting at the door, bat in hand.
“I would automatically know when I got home if we didn’t have practice with the team, I was going to batting practice with Skip in the cages,” Wayne told MLB beat writer Christina De Nicola. “He was just that type of young man, young boy.”
And now that young-middle-aged man (he’s 44) wants to be like his father – to make family priority, even if “home” is not a commute.
On the other side of the country, Brody Schumaker, 16, plays baseball and by some accounts has professional potential.
Brody’s dad can’t often be around to take him to games or batting cages. But two-time World Series champion Skip Schumaker tells his son to “treat every game like it’s the seventh game of the World Series. . .”
“Get a hobby . . .”
Skip and Lindsey met on a high-school graduation cruise on the Baja California coast of Mexico.
“She’s pretty,” Skip says of the initial and lasting attraction, “so there’s that. She’s smart, and being a student-athlete [she played soccer], we understood each other’s lives. . .”
Their lives merged when Skip was in AA minor league. And even after getting called to the major league club, he was back and forth to the minors six times, so the young couple got a good dose of professional baseball life.
His big-league playing career lasted 11 years that included eight seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals (he was with the Cardinals when they were World Champions in 2006 and 2011). He retired as a player in 2016.
“When I retired, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Schumaker says.
Neither did Lindsey. But she knew what she didn’t want.
“Lindsey said, ‘Get a hobby, cause I’m not going to be your hobby’,” Schumaker recalls.
Major league teams’ management with an eye for managers had a post-playing career route laid out for Schumaker and it wouldn’t be anybody’s hobby.
From 2016-21 Schumaker had different coaching roles with the San Diego Padres (an hour’s drive from Ladera Ranch) and then accepted St. Louis’ offer to become bench coach. (A bench coach is many things on most teams; the manager’s right hand, the players’ liaison; the fill-in manager when the other one gets kicked out of a game for arguing and so on.)
The bench coach role is often seen as a stepping stone to becoming a manager. Schumaker saw it, also, as a challenge to his priorities.
“I’m not ever going to be married to the game,” he says. “If my service to the game becomes more important than family, I’ll quit.”
So the Cardinals’ offer wasn’t as easy a decision as it might seem.
“When I was offered the job in St. Louis, Lindsey and I said let’s do this for a year – the being away from home, the kids,” Schumaker says. “Let’s see if we can do this. Is it too hard on the family?”
The Schumakers hardly got a chance for a postmortem on that season, until the Marlins came calling. Then-general manager of the Marlins, Kim Ng, led efforts for Skip to replace Don Mattingly whose managing skills had not earned the same love in Miami as he got as “Donny Baseball” in his playing days as a New York Yankee.
Lindsey and Skip may not have expected such a quick rise to the top on-field position, but hardly anyone in baseball seemed surprised at the offer.
Schumaker played with and played for baseball Hall of Famers. His father recalled how when Schumaker was with the Cardinals, if he wasn’t in a game he sat near manager Tony La Russa, listening, learning. (La Russa – as is often the case in baseball clubhouses – was known by his players as “skip[er].” Straight into his Cardinal career, La Russa told Schumaker: “You may be Skip; but I’m the only skipper.”)
When he became Marlins manager in November 2022, former teammate, Hall of Famer John Smoltz told the Miami Herald: “There are certain players that you can tell when you’re playing with them, they’ve got that mindset that if they ever decided they want to manage, they could be that guy.”
Skip Schumaker, plenty will tell you, is “that guy.”
John Mabry has known Schumaker since they were teammates in 2005. Now, Mabry is on Schumaker’s staff, as Marlins hitting coach. Mabry says the Schumaker that is now his boss, is pretty much the same Schumaker that was his teammate.
“He was pretty similar to what he is now,” Mabry said when Schumaker took over with the Marlins. “He has a thirst for knowledge. He’s a hard worker, very thoughtful, considerate of others, professional. All the qualities you look for in folks that you want leading a club.”
Talk even for 15 minutes with Schumaker, though, and you get the impression that managing baseball is an avocation of sorts, while managing lives is the real game.
Schumaker goes to the wall for the St. Louis Cardinals in 2008. (AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian)
“Everything you need to know . . .”
To manage his own life, Schumaker relies on biblical principles.
In 2000 Schumaker missed his college season at University California Santa Barbara due to an injury. As part of the team, but not a player, Schumaker found himself with little to do before games. A coach invited him to attend a 10-minute chapel service before each game.
“That’s where the wheels started spinning,” Schumaker said on a Sports Spectrum podcast.
In 2005, Schumaker and likely Hall of Fame pitcher Adam Wainwright were teammates on the Memphis Redbirds before each would be called up to St. Louis. Both regularly attended pregame chapel. When Wainwright saw Schumaker showing up without a Bible, he gave him one (“I’ve still got it,” Schumaker says) into which Wainwright wrote: “Everything you need to know in life will be in this book.”
Around that time, Schumaker says he “started to live life differently.”
The St. Louis organization, Schumaker said, is “really good at hiring good baseball players but [also] really good people.” Teammates Lance Berkman, Matt Holliday, Albert Pujols, Wainwright were, in a manner of speaking, Schumaker’s soul mates. Sometimes 15 or more players would meet for Bible study. Each kept the other accountable.
“Having that group around me, early on in a marriage, early on in fatherhood . . . I really needed it,” Schumaker said in the 2022 podcast. “They were constantly growing, also, because of the rookie in that group.”
Schumaker went from attending chapel out of boredom to, now, leading his own weekly Bible study every Thursday in his home during the off season.
Sports coaches and managers often use mantras and aphorisms meant to inspire.
Skip Schumaker borrows Theodore Roosevelt: “They won’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
He talks about the player-manager relationship like he’s reading a police car fender: “My job is to have the best interests of the players,” Schumaker says. He says he works at doing everything he can for the players, to “serve and protect them.”
Tommy Lasorda in 1984.
“I learned from somebody else . . .”
As a little Southern California kid, Skip Schumaker was a Los Angeles Dodgers fan. The Dodgers of the time were led by one of the game’s most beloved and colorful managers, Tommy Lasorda, and the team’s star player was one of the most dominant pitchers ever in the game, Orel Hershiser.
Skip’s father took him to a game and afterwards they went to a restaurant where Lasorda and Hershiser also happened to be eating.
Schumaker had a baseball with him, and, when his heroes left their table to play arcade games, the kid asked for autographs.
The Dodger manager not only gave the kid his autograph, but wrote on the ball “to a future Dodger.” Hershiser signed the baseball, and Schumaker’s father snapped a Polaroid photo.
Just another kid with a dream; just another father trying to make his kid happy.
But not just.
About 20 years later when Schumaker made his professional debut with the Cardinals, he was asked to pick a uniform number. He picked No. 55, because that had been the number Hershisher wore. (Until high school, Schumaker also used an Orel Hershiser-model glove “because of the impact he had on me as a kid.”)
And as it turned out, Lasorda’s scribble became prophecy. In 2013 Schumaker became a Los Angeles Dodger, where Hershiser was a commentator for KLAC radio. In a game at Dodger Stadium Hershiser threw out the ceremonial pitch – caught by Schumaker, wearing No. 55.
(Also as a Dodger, Schumaker was managed by Mattingly, who would be replaced by Schumaker as Marlins manager nine years later.)
Schumaker still wears No. 55.
“All that coming full circle is pretty neat,” Schumaker says.
But Schumaker tells the story, not just because it’s a remarkable tale of life’s twists, but because the whole story is also a parable.
There was another famous Dodger player at the restaurant who young Skip also asked for an autograph. That player refused.
“I don’t know what [the other player] was going through,” Schumaker says. “Millions of kids have probably asked him for an autograph, and you can’t sign every one of them . . . I don’t have any hard feelings.”
Still: The player who shunned Schumaker coached an opposing team while Schumaker was a Dodger. Schumaker approached him and relayed the story. The other player said he didn’t remember.
But nearly 40 years later, Schumaker remembers, and that’s the lesson.
“I can’t sign every kid’s ball or whatever,” he says. “But it’s tough for me to say ‘no’ now, because I have that memory. It still resonates.”
That memory. And the memories of a father’s family ethic. And memories of lessons learned on benches next to his own baseball managers. And from a teammate’s gift book of lessons . . .
“Everything I know, I learned from somebody else,” Schumaker says. “I didn’t make any of this up.”
Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder Roberto Clemente, shown in 1968, played 18 seasons in the majors, all with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
In a “get to know the new Marlins manager” article for MLB, Schumaker was asked who – living or dead – he’d want a selfie taken with.
He chose the baseball/humanitarian legend Roberto Clemente and Schumaker says he’s “been all in on Roberto. I’ve quoted him many times.” And, most often that quote is this:
“Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world, and you don’t, you are wasting your time on Earth.”
“Super grateful . . .”
Jared Michael Schumaker didn’t know how to skip. But Wayne Schumaker started calling him “Skip” when Jared was a kid. So Jared learned to live his name.
Skip learned to skip.
“I couldn’t skip for whatever reason,” Skip says. “It wasn’t pretty. [But] I can dominate a skip now.”
He adapted. Like he adapted in his career going from playing outfield to playing infield; or from an everyday player, to coming off the bench.
In some sort of baseball oxymoron, Schumaker made a career specializing as a utility player. In other words, he mastered another of his aphorisms: “Bloom where you’re planted.”
There was little reason to believe the Miami Marlins would blossom as quickly as they did under their rookie manager.
The Marlins finished the 2022 season with 69 wins and 93 losses. A year later, Miami won 84 games, lost 68, and made the postseason playoffs for the fourth time in the team’s 30-year history. In the four previous (non-pandemic) seasons, the Marlins had 93 or more losses per season.
Commentators, prognosticators, and general big-noggin baseball experts called the team’s success “improbable.” The Marlins surprised the media, the competition and, significantly, the South Florida market. Average game attendance was up by more than 3,000, and the highest in six years. Miami was again “MYami” for otherwise fickle fish fans.
Schumaker credits staff and players with the turnaround. The Baseball Writers Association of America credited Schumaker, naming him National League Manager of the Year.
At the Manager of the Year awards ceremony in January, Schumaker thanked the people you might expect – staff, players, front office; names at the top of roster directories to whom he is “super grateful.”
Schumaker thanked, too, TJ Lasita, the Padres’ director of player and staff services – aka traveling secretary. When’s the last time you heard a pro athlete thank a traveling secretary – from a team he hasn’t been on in three years?
Wife Lindsey and daughter Presley (age 14) were at the awards dinner. Schumaker thanked his family, and also thanked the baseball writers for naming him Manager of the Year because: “It gives me street cred with my kids.”
Son Brody, though, didn’t make the ceremony. He was home in California. He had a baseball game. And Brody’s dad has taught him to treat every game like Game 7 of the World Series. Everything he knows, he’s learning from somebody else.
Miami Marlins manager Skup Shumaker looks on prior to Game 1 in an NL wild-card baseball playoff series against the Philadelphia Phillies in 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Szagola)