You’ve gotta believe this was always Shelley Duncan’s destiny.
You grow up the son of a famed major-league pitching coach, and you go one of two ways. All in, or all out.
Duncan was all in.
Baseball, Duncan says, “has been the passion of my life ever since I can remember.”
He pored over baseball books, cards, biographies. He was reading Bill James’ books in the late-1980s. Life stories on Reggie Jackson, Joe DiMaggio, Ty Cobb.
“It’s almost like baseball was never enough,” he says.
And on Thursday, the next chapter of his lifelong baseball journey begins in the Pacific Northwest.
The 35-year-old Canyon del Oro High School and UA product will manage his first career game as the skipper of the Arizona Diamondbacks-affiliate Hills-
boro Hops in their short-season opener at the Spokane Indians.
“I feel like this has always been in the cards,” Duncan said while driving through Oregon on Tuesday. “My brother Chris and I joked about this the other day — way back to Little League, our coach would give me the reins of the club until he got there.”
He assumes the reins once more Thursday.
It will be his first game as a manager, 30 years in the making.
Duncan has always had a fascination with the sport and its inner workings. Dave Duncan, a famed pitching coach with the Oakland A’s and St. Louis Cardinals, began his career in 1979, the same year Shelley was born.
Shelley himself played 338 games over parts of seven big-league seasons with the Yankees, Indians and Rays. He hit .226 with 43 home runs and 144 RBIs.
But as the lights dimmed on his professional career, Shelley doubled down on learning from the greats. His last few years, he says, were spent “as preparation for this”; he based his free agency decisions — where to sign — on the managers from whom he’d learn.
These were no ordinary Joes. He came up with Joe Torre and Joe Girardi with the Yankees. For the final season of his major-league career in 2012, he chose Tampa Bay so he could pick Joe Maddon’s brain.
“He was one of those guys who was like a coach on the field,” said Jerry Stitt, Duncan’s head coach at the UA. “He was always talking to the other guys about hitting, asking what they saw, figuring what they could do to get an edge. Always communicating. He was always trying to learn a way to win a game.”
Duncan hasn’t lost that competitive knack, and it’s what he’ll primarily be trying to instill in his young players up in Oregon.
A Single-A coach — a short-season Single-A coach, in particular — is there to move his players along, to help them survive the turmoil of the transition into professional baseball, to be a step on that arduous ladder toward the majors.
On Thursday, he starts near the bottom, just like the rest of them.
“I want to prepare them to be a better baseball player than they are today,” he said. “I want to prepare them to be successful when the game starts. As a baseball player, people look at your batting average. Are you good? As a manager, it’s wins and losses, and I get a thrill out of that competition. That’s why I really like managing. I want to change the focus of players from preparing to competing to win a baseball game.
“When you get to the big leagues, all the numbers, all the accolades go away, and the focus is on winning. (If) you can’t be a winner, you won’t have a long career. I have to teach these guys how to win.”
Shelley Duncan has always been a leader, Chris Duncan will tell you.
“I worshiped Shelley,” he said. “I still brag about him. People get annoyed I brag about him so much. I was his little brother, and I worshiped him. We were a baseball family, growing up on a big-league field, shagging fly balls. I remember Wiffle balls smoked at me ever since I was a little baby.”
By the time they were in Little League — Shelley on the mound, Chris at first base, and sometimes third — he was already taking on managerial duties.
Driving up to Oregon on Tuesday, Shelley laughed as he told a story.
They were kids, he and Chris, still in Little League. Chris, Shelley says, missed a ball at first base. Shelley stopped the game and moved him to left field.
“I was actually playing third base, and Shelley was pitching, and it’s funny looking back, because at the time I was really upset,” said Chris, a former big-leaguer who now co-hosts a baseball radio show in St. Louis. “A ball got between my legs, and he was so pissed off, he was yelling at me, ‘If you’re gonna let that happen, go out to left!’ We got into it on the middle of the field.”
Shelley has toned it down since then — a little.
He’s approaching this second act with patience and caution, planning and optimism. He knows where he stands on the totem pole of professional coaches.
News flash: It ain’t high.
But baseball kicked Shelley Duncan around a bit himself — his professional career was nice, like his brother’s, though neither got out of their careers what they wanted — and he is using that experience to teach the next generation. He is married now, with twin boys.
“I’m enjoying growing into myself,” he said. “I’m not going in there with a stubborn mind. In 10 years from now, I’m curious to see what kind of manager I am. I’m going to grow into something. I’m not it now. I’m gonna tell you, a lot of it could be wrong.”
That attitude is refreshing, and also a reflection of his own disappointment.
He debuted with the New York Yankees in 2007 in a splendid fashion, hitting a home run in his second game, three more in his third and a fourth just 11 days into his MLB career. His second season was a bust, up and down between the bigs and Triple-A before he separated his shoulder.
In Year Three, he busted his elbow and spent the entire winter rehabbing just to be able to play. A couple years later, he was done. Just a ripple in the calm lake of major-league success.
The experience “helped with a lot of (my ego),” Duncan said. “But look, I talk to kids everywhere I go, and they only know the big names right now. I went and talked to elementary school kids this winter, and a lot of them didn’t know who Derek Jeter was! It’s mind-blowing. If you realize that, it’s easier to take a step back and realize you’re really not a big deal.”
For now, maybe. As of Friday morning, Shelley Duncan will be exactly one game into his second career.
Who knows where it goes from there?
