You’ve seen the video. Or, rather, you’ve seen dozens just like it, maybe even hundreds by now. In this one, shot in late September, a minor league baseball team is crammed in a locker room in Buffalo, New York. The walls, ceiling and floor are lined with plastic. Matthew LeCroy, manager of the Rochester Red Wings, is at the front of the room, a bottle of champagne in his left hand, the cork fighting for its life. When he speaks, he yells. The team had a rough first half, he says, the rasp in his voice dulling down his Southern drawl.
“But you know what we did?”
The slightest pause for emphasis.
“We fought — and we ain’t finished!”And then it’s sleeting alcohol, nobody or body part spared. His players fly with the beer and champagne, colliding into one another. In the last hour, the Red Wings, the Nationals’ AAA affiliate, had clinched a spot in the International League playoffs. In four days, they would win the second-half title in Memphis. In six, they’d lose in extra innings of the Triple-A National Championship Game in Las Vegas, falling one timely hit short. For the moment, though, LeCroy was only thinking about what was right in front of him. It’s what he’s always telling his guys — to be where their feet are — but of the many limitations of the human brain, the inability to take our own advice is near the top of the list.
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So for a better view, he inched away from the chaos, ceding the thick of it to younger livers. His back found a brick wall, painted white to feel like every clubhouse he’d be in during 18 years as a minor league coach. In one motion, he rubbed his face and slicked back his hair, which is white, too, making most people assume he’s older than 50. Champagne dripped off his arms. He could not, for the life of him, wipe the smile from his face. It was amazing, really, to watch these players celebrate like this, especially with all they’d gone through at what LeCroy calls the hardest level of affiliated baseball. Seven months earlier, on the first full day of spring training, he had introduced himself with that in mind, telling the same joke he does every February.
Matthew LeCroy, AAA manager. I’m the guy none of you want to meet.
And like with any good joke, the players laughed for two reasons: because it was funny, and because it was true.
* * *
The most basic definition of AAA is that it’s the step right below the majors (and, for balance, right above AA). But that’s an oversimplification for a lot of reasons, one of which is that not every AAA player is the same-sized step from the bigs, which can make for a lot of grumbling, quiet or otherwise.
As I called around about LeCroy this month, everyone I spoke with — a handful of his former players, two of his former farm directors, Devin Pearson, the Nats’ assistant general manager in charge of player development, plus LeCroy himself — said it’s the toughest minor league level to manage. In a recent phone interview, Pearson started explaining why before I even asked a question.
“Guys are so close to the big leagues, but at the same time they’re not in the big leagues,” Pearson said. “Matt has this unbelievable ability to get guys to give their all even when they are frustrated. That’s a unique trait.”
LeCroy, named the International League’s manager of the year in September, is as familiar as anyone with that tension. Not only has he managed in Rochester since 2021, but he appeared in 280 AAA games as a player, the last 80 of them in his final season with a major league franchise. So every spring, in his opening day meeting with his new team, he acknowledges that everyone in Rochester has the same goal: to leave. And he’s not just talking about the players, either. Sure, he got his cracks at the majors, first as a catcher for parts of eight seasons, then as the Nats’ bullpen coach in 2014 and 2015. But LeCroy still dreams of being a big-league manager, of getting the same kind of news he delivers to a handful of players each season.
You know these videos, too. In 2019, LeCroy sobbed in front of the team — and in front of a camera — while telling reliever Aaron Barrett he was going back to the majors. Barrett had recovered from a gruesome arm injury. The clip went viral, then the canon of staged call-ups kept growing. This past summer, he brought reliever Erik Tolman into his office, a camera hidden in the room. Like Barrett, Tolman had dealt with a grisly injury that derailed his career.
At one point, he wondered if doctors might amputate his right foot, let alone whether he’d pitch again.
LeCroy, always game to act a little, asks Tolman if he’s interested in throwing in winter ball. Tolman responds earnestly, saying he would be open to it but hasn’t given it much thought. Then someone else tells Tolman it might be hard to play winter ball after he pitches in Texas. LeCroy asks Tolman if he knows where the big league team is at that moment. Tolman, grinning now, asks if they are in Texas to face the Rangers. They are, of course. Tolman starts to laugh, dropping his face into his hands. LeCroy claps from behind his desk, then stands up to hug him.
“Way to go, kid,” LeCroy says. “I’m proud of you, man. Awesome.”
It’s one of the best parts of the job, telling young men their lives have changed, that all their hard work led to what they prayed it would. And when LeCroy is doing that job well, he’s sending player after player to where he also wants to go.
“I realize I have a role here, and that’s to help guys maximize their skillsets,” LeCroy said. “So I don’t view it as … look, I know it’s a goal for me to go to the big leagues. The dream is to manage there at some point. But that doesn’t take away from what I love doing, which is exactly what I am doing right now. I believe that if I pour into that and do it to the best of my ability, I am going to get rewarded somehow.”
* * *
LeCroy’s major league call-up wasn’t as cinematic. At the end of spring training in 2000, the Twins had three catchers and then they had two, LeCroy included. Tom Kelly, the Twins’ manager, told LeCroy he had made the team. Recently married, LeCroy called his wife, Holly, who he’d met in sociology class at Clemson. He then made sure his family all had tickets to see his debut in the Metrodome.
“No cameras or anything for my reaction,” LeCroy said. “There wasn’t much internet back then. There certainly was no social following to think about.”
LeCroy was a first-round pick who had thrived in the upper minors. But by mid-June, LeCroy wasn’t hitting and got sent down. It was a harsh introduction to the shuttle between the majors and AAA. What he took away from it was how honest everyone was.
After six seasons with the Twins, LeCroy signed a minor league deal with the Nationals in 2006. His knees were worn down. His arm, too. But in late May, he was starting for the Nats because of injuries to the other catchers. And in a game against the Astros, he allowed seven stolen bases while fumbling behind the plate, which only stopped when manager Frank Robinson removed him mid-inning. Worried he had embarrassed LeCroy, Robinson cried in his postgame news conference, saying: “It’s just a move that, at the time, I felt like I had to do.”
Around that time, Bob Boone, then an executive with the Nationals, asked if LeCroy was close to retiring. Boone wanted LeCroy to start managing in the minors for Washington. Feeling like he may have had a tiny bit left, LeCroy kept going, spending most of the next season in AAA with the Twins and then the next one playing independent ball in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But that was the end of the line for him.
On the drive home to South Carolina, he called Holly and told her he was finished. Then he called Boone, who would eventually hire him to manage the low-Class A Hagerstown Suns in 2009. In Hagerstown, the ballpark was ancient, the uniforms were itchy and the clubhouse bathrooms smelled like sewage. But LeCroy viewed the situation as if he were still a player: If they won, he would rise — and rise quickly — all the way to a major league dugout.
Instead, Hagerstown went 56-78 and LeCroy was miserable. He had no control over the roster. He thought about quitting, about heading home for good, figuring he could take his credits as an education major and become a superintendent. At the end of the season, right before he steered his GMC Sierra toward South Carolina, he called Holly to complain some more.
“I’m hearing a lot about you,” she told him. “You’re done playing. It’s about the kids now.”
“And for me it was like: ‘Man, you’re right,’” LeCroy said years later. “The truth hurts, but she saved me and made me into a soldier for these players, for this organization.”
* * *
LeCroy tells two stories about Juan Soto.
The first: When LeCroy was managing in AA Harrisburg in 2018, Soto arrived after making quick work of the previous levels. Mike Rizzo, then the Nationals’ GM, told LeCroy that, barring any unforeseen developments, Soto would spend the rest of the season in Harrisburg. After a few days, LeCroy heard that Soto was sleeping on an air mattress in an apartment with a few other players. But after LeCroy called around about getting Soto his own place, the 19-year-old stopped by his office, saying not to worry about it because he wouldn’t be in Harrisburg long. That wasn’t how Rizzo had described it to LeCroy. And yet after eight games with the Senators, Soto was on his way to the majors, never to return.
The second story: In one of those eight games, LeCroy benched Soto for not running hard to first.
“He creates a loose, family-type atmosphere in the clubhouse and has a lot of fun with the guys,” said Jake Alu, who played for LeCroy in Rochester for parts of three seasons. “But he has a presence, too, like an intimidating presence, that we’re going to get things done the right way. Everyone loves him, but they’re also a little bit scared of him at the same time.”
Since that start in Hagerstown, LeCroy has hit every step of the minor league ladder, spending a year in high-A, six in AA and the last six in Rochester. His staffs have turned over. His bosses have changed.
But last fall, when the Nats’ new front office was deciding who to retain, Pearson wondered if LeCroy would buy into their vision. They planned to overhaul the entire player development operation, putting data at the forefront. LeCroy, on the other hand, was just about an organizational lifer, used to doing things a different way.
Yet once they met with LeCroy, any concern vanished. “The whole way he handled himself was: ‘I just want to learn, I just want to be a part of this,’” Pearson recalled. “I was shocked, to be honest, the first time I talked to him about how open he was to what we were doing.” They didn’t need LeCroy to speak in new-age baseball talk, either. They needed him to be himself while serving as a coordinator for the whole AAA level.
From 2 to 6 p.m. every day, that meant overseeing detailed, individualized training plans for every player. From 6 p.m. on, it meant managing the games. At all hours, he had to be on top of the nonstop roster churn, as the Nats were often sending players to and from Rochester to aid their struggling bullpen. The Red Wings rostered 80 different players in six months. They also won 90 games in the regular season, the most of any minor league team.
“The only constant in AAA is change,” said Dan Mason, Rochester’s longtime general manager. “It can be really hard to win without any consistency, but he just kept figuring it out.”
* * *
It’s a busy week in the LeCroy house, as it is at the end of every October. In 2004, they bought in Belton, South Carolina, a half hour south of Greenville. Right before their first Halloween, their neighbor told LeCroy he’d better be ready for a lot of kids, so LeCroy bought a good bit of candy. He was sure it was enough. But then they were streaming into his yard, one wave after another. He rushed to the store to get more bags.
From then on, the LeCroys made Halloween their thing, a kind of annual thank you to the community that raised him. LeCroy grew up in Belton, his dad working in a textile mill like many of the men there. Around the turn of the century, though, some of the mills started closing, making the place “go down in the dumps,” as LeCroy put it. A big Halloween felt like the least he could do, especially with how closely the town had followed his career.
He and Holly bought a popcorn machine. One year, when a little kid got only one piece of candy, LeCroy heard him say to his dad: “I thought you said a major league player lived here.” Everyone got handfuls after that, no exceptions. LeCroy estimates that they see as many as 2,500 trick-or-treaters, spending up to $2,000 on candy to make sure they never run out again.
His five kids love it, always inviting their friends over for a big meal. But no matter how many times they’ve told their dad to dress up, he never puts on a costume. The night is about everyone else.
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