Reds Matt McLain gained perspective from his father on what baseball is all about

May 19, 2024

Mike McLain didn’t really care about winning as a Little League coach.

The father of three talented baseball players in Orange County, Calif., McLain was often recruited as an assistant coach in part because it would guarantee the head coach would have McLain’s two oldest sons, Matt and Sean, just 19 months apart in age.

Although his sons, including Nick, the youngest, were extremely competitive, that wasn’t Mike McLain’s main focus.

“We had an Icee machine at Tustin Eastern Little League, and if everyone could get an Icee at the end of the day, it was a good day,” said McLain, who was able to go to Houston this weekend to spend Father’s Day with his oldest son.

Bill McLain, the grandfather of the Reds shortstop, was an Air Force pilot and at one point served as a football coach at his alma mater, the Air Force Academy. He told his son about the difficulties of recruiting high school players with an eye on what they could be in the future and came to the conclusion that until age 17, the results didn’t really matter.

That’s not exactly the prevailing theory around American youth sports at the moment. There are plenty of businesses built around youth baseball, from large sports complexes to private coaching and travel baseball. This is big business, not just in Southern California, but throughout the United States.

Southern California, though, has the weather and population that makes playing baseball year-round possible. Mike McLain remembers seeing the likes of Nolan Arenado play in high school. Oakland A’s pitcher James Kaprielian was ahead of the McLain boys at both Tustin Eastern and Beckman High School.

“You never know, that’s why when they’re young, just make sure they’re having fun,” Mike McLain said of his philosophy of coaching. “There are plenty of good coaches around, especially in Southern California. In order to get that good coaching, you need to enjoy the game and (have) fun and then your skills can develop. If you’re not having fun, you won’t do the work to develop the skills, right?”

McLain’s three sons did just that. Matt, the oldest, has fond memories of Tustin Eastern.

“They’d give you a green piece of paper and it was like a dollar, you’d get an Icee and a hot dog,” Matt McLain remembers. “It was a pretty good day.”

Matt McLain (Katie Stratman / USA Today)

When the boys were young, McLain mentioned to a fellow parent that he couldn’t believe just how seriously some of the parents took baseball. Although he was an assistant for his sons’ team, that same parent came back a week later and said he had an idea of a job that might be a better fit for Mike. The coach of the Challenger Division was in his last season and the league needed a coach for the adaptive baseball program for kids with physical and intellectual challenges.

During baseball season, the McLain family — Mike, Wendi, Matt, Sean and Nick — would spend the entire day at the ballpark.

“Every Saturday it was the Challenger game at 8, and then a game at like 10, another at 1 and maybe another around 4,” Matt McLain recalled. “We were at the field all day. It was the hangout spot on the weekends.”

Not only did Mike coach the Challenger Division, his boys and the players on their teams would assist. Each player on the Challenger Division team would have a helper.

Among the players on the Challenger team was Cade Hudler, the son of former big-leaguer Rex Hudler, who is now a broadcaster for the Royals and previously called Angels games and hosted a radio show.

Hudler told the story on the air this past week when the Reds were in Kansas City. Before Monday’s game, Hudler let his broadcast partner, Ryan Lefebvre, know that he was going to have trouble speaking when McLain came up because he was going to be so emotional thinking about the McLain family and seeing Matt in the big leagues.

For Hudler, it was the emotion of seeing someone so connected to his family and the kindness shown by Mike McLain, his wife and sons, as well as the rest of the kids, who helped make every Saturday special.

Mike McLain remembered just how hard Cade Hudler hit the ball, that he was so strong that the boys with the players had to be on their toes to make sure nobody got hurt by Hudler’s batted ball.

“We had some characters on that team,” McLain said. “We had one kid who liked to sing. He’d always get ahold of a microphone I was supposed to be monitoring and I’d always forget.”

There was another kid, Jeremy, who wore his Southern Cal regalia every week and would talk trash with McLain, a UCLA graduate.

“We just pounded down the doughnuts and hit the ball off the tee,” Mike McLain said. “We’d play our game in the afternoon and a lot of the families would come back and watch us play.”

With Matt making the big leagues, Mike McLain said, many of those players and their families have reached out to congratulate him.

For Matt and his brothers — Sean, who is now in the Dodgers system, and Nick, who is playing at Arizona State — the Challenger games were just another fun part of a weekend at the ballpark.

“Really, all those kids just wanted to have fun out there,” Matt recalled. “That’s what the sport of baseball is all about, having fun.”

(Top photo of Matt McLain: Katie Stratman / USA Today)

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