The car was quiet on the drive home from the game.

Whether that afternoon nearly two decades ago had seen the Sluggers win or lose isn’t remembered and, for the purpose of understanding just what that drive says about Jayce Tingler, knowing the result isn’t imperative.

What matters is the Sluggers — arguably Missouri’s premier youth baseball team for many years in the 1990s — had been in a skirmish with the team they were playing that day and what a Tingler does in such a situation.

No one threw any punches. But the players, in their early teens, had converged on the field and at least one of the teams was ready to go.


As they drove away from the pristine ballpark that was the Sluggers’ home, Jayce sensed his mom was upset even before he saw the tears in her eyes.

After a short while, Diana Tingler pulled over.

A woman known as much for her humility as for her quiet intensity and a glare that made young athletes quiver, Diana looked at her son and said, “The next time that happens, if you’re not the first person out of the dugout ...”

The anecdote would speak for itself. But it doesn’t have to.


And neither is there any reason to simply rely on anyone’s word that Tingler heeded the advice/warning from his mother.

The evidence is on video.

On May 15, 2016, the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays engaged in one of the more severe baseball brawls in recent memory after Rangers second baseman Rougned Odor punched the Blue Jays’ Jose Bautista following Bautista’s hard slide into second base.

A YouTube video of the telecast shows a coach was the first person charging out of the Rangers dugout.

That coach was Jayce Tingler, who actually stumbled as he left the top step, immediately caught himself and sprinted until he was about 20 feet past first base. At that point, he fell out of the camera’s view because he slowed, having pulled his hamstring. But he was quickly back in the shot, hobbling into the fracas that had materialized on the grass in right field even as he held the back of his right leg.


Of all the effusive praise lavished by those who know Tingler, the most frequent words allude to his humility.

A Tingler doesn’t use his words very often. Actions with a purpose are what speak.

And a lesson instilled deep in his soul long ago is that a man stands up for those on his side.

“If someone says something negative about one of his players,” said Rusty Meyer, a travel ball teammate of Jayce’s and still one of his closest friends, “he’ll want to come out of his shoes.”


Hometown product

One question more than any other was asked when the Padres hired their manager in October.

Who is Jayce Tingler?

If you want to know, a tiny town north of Kansas City and a warehouse and field to the east of Kansas City are the places you really need to start.

Along the way to becoming the major leagues’ second-youngest manager, the 39-year-old Tingler learned plenty playing baseball at the University of Missouri and in the minor leagues, coaching in the minors and on the Texas Rangers’ big-league staff, managing in the Dominican Republic and serving as an assistant general manager with the Rangers.


But after all that, he remains undoubtedly the product of Smithville, Mo., and of being a Slugger.

Spend just a little time with those who knew him and guided him through his formative years, and it becomes less and less of a surprise that Tingler’s greatest attribute, on display at his introductory news conference and in virtually every public appearance since, seems to be that he is so comfortably himself.

“I’m not very good being anything else,” Tingler said last month. “I didn’t grow up in Hollywood. I don’t have any acting skills. I figure this is me. Love me, hate me. It is what it is. I’m just being me.”

Apple from the trees

Smithville is twice as big these days as when Tingler was an all-state basketball and baseball player there. The sign on the side of Highway 92, directly across the street on which Tingler was raised and where his parents still live, lists that population as 8,425.


The drive to town from Kansas City’s airport is a mere 12 miles, past giant barns that are leaning and practically see-through because they’re no longer used. Neighbors are generally separated by fences only if there are horses or cattle to keep penned. Once in town, a half-mile stretch of Main Street, from the Montessori School to City Hall, consists solely of brick buildings.

It was at Smithville High School that Tingler once hit four doubles in a baseball game and once had nine steals in a basketball game.

Jayce Tingler poses for a photo as a member of the Smithville High basketball team. (Courtesy Tingler family)

Meyer recalled attending a Smithville game in which Tingler went down and got kicked in the face.


“He lost two teeth, played the rest of the game,” Meyer said. “The guy is a maniac.”

Asked what kind of basketball player her son was, being that he topped out at 5-foot-8, Diana Tingler said, “He was good.”

This is how Diana talks, truth in its briefest form.

She also knows a good basketball player when she sees one. Diana Tingler was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2017 after coaching the Smithville girls’ basketball team from 1977 to 2005. Her teams, marked by a full-court pressure defense, won 10 district titles and six conference championships.


“Everybody was terrified of her,” said a former player who went by the name Callie Langton when she played for Smithville High almost 20 years ago. “She didn’t yell. It was just a silent focus. You don’t jack around. … Show up and do your job, and there are no problems.”

Because Padres General Manager A.J. Preller wasn’t the only one to fall for Tingler long ago, Callie Langton is now Callie Tingler.

When she was 14 and Tingler was 17, Callie told her friend Jenni Flanders that she was going to marry the boy with the thick brown hair who “was really cool.”

Two years later, Jayce and Callie went on their first date. Now their sons, 8-year-old Gabe and 6-year-old Gio, live with them in a house they built on the property that has been in Callie’s family for almost a century.


Jayce Tingler with his wife Callie and sons Gabe (8) and Gio (6). (Courtesy of the Tingler family)

Callie also played softball at Smithville for Steve Tingler.

“Jayce’s dad is more laid back,” Callie said.

Steve, who retired from teaching along with his wife in 2005 but just stopped coaching softball after the 2019 fall season, is a member of the Missouri High School Fastpitch Coaches Association’s Hall of Fame. There was a time early in Jayce Tingler’s life when Steve coached girls’ basketball as well — at rival high school West Platte.


“Whoever won that game would win district,” Jayce remembered. “Growing up, you didn’t know any better, but there was definitely some weird tension in the house during basketball season.”

It was in that house with the long, narrow garage on the other side of the driveway where Steve gave softball pitching lessons, that Jayce would wake up in the middle of the night and see the light on in the room where Diana was watching video of basketball games.

Growing up with this devotion to a team’s cause as the norm was not only part of Jayce Tingler’s formation as a coach but what made it normal for him that Preller makes a habit of calling at 2 a.m. to talk about baseball.

“The main thing I took away — and you could write all or some of the qualities — just the work ethic,” Jayce said. “They were teachers. They’d work long hours teaching and then they’d coach. And they had their summers off, so I could travel around and play baseball.”


More than anything, though, the people around Smithville say what Jayce Tingler became was a product of a home where doing things the right way and doing them without a fuss were requisite.

“He’s the most genuine … what you see is what you get,” said Chris Wohlford, the school’s athletic director when Tingler was a student at Smithville High. “Maybe it comes off as too much to some people, but that’s who he is. It’s the way he was raised. Both his parents are the same way. They’re the most humble people.”

Dirt bag, then and now

Virtually everything discovered about Tingler in a visit to where he grew up is virtually everything the Padres said they were looking for in a manager.

A religious devotion to fundamentals and discipline. A collaborator. Instinctual and willing to adapt.


And won’t Padres Executive Chairman Ron Fowler smile when he hears how Russ Meyer, Rusty’s father, described Tingler.

“A dirt bag,” Meyer said, certainly not knowing that is arguably the most endearing description Fowler will place on a ballplayer.

The kid who at 2 would take his Wiffle ball bat to the basketball camps to his parents worked so he could get his swings in and at 5 or 6 knew the Royals lineup by heart was 10 when he caught the eye of the coach of the Sluggers.

“We were playing this team, and they had a really good little left-handed shortstop,” Russ Meyer said. “He was the smallest guy on the field, but it became readily apparent he we was the toughest guy on the field. He was a little dirt bag. I’m talking about an old-school player.


“They had a pick-off play at second base. He’d run into second, the pitcher would turn and throw, and this little 50-pound kid would lay down in front of the base and sacrifice his body. They were 10 years old. We had never seen that. (The runners) couldn’t get to the bag. This little shortstop would get drilled, but he would tag them. I thought, ‘Ooh, I’d like to have him on my team,’ not thinking I ever would.”

That winter, Meyer got a call from Steve Tingler, asking if his son could try out for the Sluggers.

A few days later, the Tinglers arrived at the headquarters of Meyer Laboratory. Inside the commercial cleaning supply company’s warehouse is a full basketball court and a pair of batting cages. The walls are pocked with holes, and baseballs reside in the insulation all these years later from the Sluggers playing catch during the Missouri winters.

Jayce Tingler hit and threw, which was a formality since Meyer knew he was going to accept him on the team.


At the end of the tryout, Meyer specified one condition. Tingler had to cut his hair.

Thus began a relationship that endures today.

“How do I explain Russ?” Tingler offers before pausing. “He was (expletive) John Wayne.”

Meyer, who was 6-foot-3 and seemed even taller to his young players, returned to the Kansas City area after his minor league playing career was over and began selling cleaning supplies out of his van. He grew Meyer Lab into a multinational company that now generates tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year.


“He’s a self-made man,” Tingler said with ample admiration.

Such a man tends to be demanding.

“After playing for him, everything was easy,” Tingler said.

The most words Diana Tingler put together at one time in a recent conversation were in her assessment of Meyer.


“He’d get on them,” she recalled. “And they better man up. He said they weren’t 12-year-olds. He wanted men. They weren’t going to cry.”

Fertile ground

The field is a pasture now, about to be encroached by a housing development. Part of one of the advertisement boards that used to line the outfield fence remains, hanging crooked by one corner. The wooden dugouts are gap-toothed and splintered. Large piles of dirt sit in the spot where the bullpen once was.

Winter has thinned the forest beyond left field, but even so, there is no doubt this was once a magnificent home field for the Sluggers.

At Russ Meyer’s expense, the field was built and maintained in the early years by members of the Kansas City Royals grounds crew.


That’s when the Sluggers were hosting national tournaments and traveling the country and winning a lot. That’s when Tingler’s teammates included Albert Pujols and a dozen other players who would earn Division I scholarships and nine who would eventually sign a pro contract.

The Sluggers. (Courtesy of the Tingler family)

One of Meyer’s assistant coaches was Dave Bingham, who served as an assistant on the United States Olympic team from 1984-88 and was head coach at the University of Kansas when the Jayhawks advanced to the College World Series in 1993.

Russ demanded excellence through effort. Every player took a turn catching pitchers’ bullpen sessions in the winter, including little left-hander Jayce Tingler with his infielder’s glove.


After the Sluggers made the last out in an inning, players had 20 seconds to get to their defensive positions. It was like they were storming the field for war, metal spikes screeching as they practically launched from the dugout.

Meyer would take players fishing on a Friday and make them run until they puked on Saturday. Pitchers were to jump off the mound to receive the ball from the catcher. Double plays were to be broken up hard.

“I felt like it was the right way,” Meyer said. “It was the old school way.”

It was about winning.


There is not a Slugger who doesn’t vividly remember the prestigious tournament in Colorado when they were about 16. The team was driving back to Missouri after a loss in the championship game when Meyer’s Suburban got a flat tire.

Meyer walked to the back of the vehicle to fetch the spare tire, opened the hatch, removed the trophy so big it rose from floor to ceiling of the big SUV, and hurled it down a hill into a pasture.

“Second sucks,” he yelled.

By their recollections, no one was surprised.


“We just sat there while he changed the tire,” Rusty Meyer said.

And the trophy was left for someone to find and wonder about right there on the side of I-70.

The tales seem drastic, even comical, especially when viewed through the modern prism of politeness and participation trophies.

Russ knows that. When Rusty asked him to help out a few years back with the team he was coaching, Russ told him, “I can’t coach today.”


But there is immense pride among those involved about what they learned and how they still carry those lessons.

“Russ was an imposing figure, he was a demanding figure, he was a father figure,” said Dan Bane, a former Slugger who went on to play at the University of Missouri and is now an attorney and the mayor of San Clemente. “He expected the best from us, no matter the circumstances, no matter what the obstacles were. So many guys from our team have been incredibly successful in their own way. A lot of that was what Russ instilled in us — work ethic, ability to cope with adversity. So many life skills we learned from that experience have been applicable to every facet of life.”

Knowing the game

As serious as the Sluggers were, kids will be kids.

Except, apparently, young Jayce Tingler.


“He was so focused,” Russ Meyer said. “You know that age. The kids would come in from the field when they weren’t at bat, some of them would be jacking around. In the corner, there is Jayce trying to steal the coaches’ signs and pick up the grip on the pitcher. He’s studying the game the whole time. Some of that rubbed off on other players. My son got pretty good at it, and I know it was because he saw Jayce.”

Tingler, the man who readily volunteers he will make mistakes in his new job and last month asserted in an interview that he has “no strengths,” swears his being recruited by Missouri was a by-product of coaches coming to see Rusty Meyer and Pujols play for the Sluggers.

“Albert and I were bigger,” said Rusty, who was drafted by the Royals in the 13th round out of Texas A&M in 2002 and played seven minor-league games before going to work for his father at the company he now runs. “But you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference with Jayce. If you had to pick an MVP, it would have been one of the three of us.”

Despite being a lefty, Tingler played shortstop until high school.


“He was awesome going in the hole with the glove on that side,” Russ Meyer said. “He had it perfected, the spin 360 degrees. … At 13, we moved him to center field. Then he became the coach of the outfield. He directed traffic out there. He moved players around out there based on the hitter.”

Tingler hit lead-off for the Sluggers virtually his entire time with the club.

“He milked the pitcher; he tried to get walks,” Russ Meyer said. “I don’t know what his on-base percentage was, but it would have been 600-plus. When we got him on first, he worked hard to get to second — we’d steal or bunt him over — because when he got on second, 80 or 90 percent of the time, the very first time there, he’d pick up the catcher’s signs.”

Asked about his seemingly inherent baseball instincts, Tingler said, “Everything seems slow on the field. Where in life I have problems remembering birthdays and things like that. …”


His wife interrupted.

“But you can tell me about a player from fourth grade and their stats.”

Jayce shrugged.

“Everything down there seems slow and clear to me,” he said.


When Tingler had a strike called on him, the assumption was an umpire made a mistake. He took to bunting with two strikes, and Russ allowed it because it generally turned into a hit.

“He had a knack for stealing home on the catcher’s throw back to the pitcher,” Russ Meyer said. “They didn’t have a sissy swipe tag by the catcher back then. The guy would be blocking the plate, and Jayce would blast him. And Jayce made it his mission to break up double plays. He felt like a failure if a double play was made. He took out guys hard. That stuff carried over to the team. I know where it came from. It came from his mama.”