Kinzer enjoys baseball bonds as player, scout, agent, coach

By STEVE KRAH
http://www.IndianaRBI.com

Matt Kinzer has an eye for baseball talent.
The former Norwell High School (Ossian, Ind.) and Purdue University athlete who played in the majors and the National Football League was living in Fort Wayne, Ind., when he became an amateur scout in 1995 with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
Kinzer was responsible for assessing amateur players in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Ontario and Quebec.
After five years with Tampa Bay, Kinzer spent a decade as a baseball agent for Reynolds Sports Management, whose owner and CEO is Larry Reynolds (older brother of big league second baseman Harold Reynolds).
“I was his recruiting coordinator for the whole country,” says Kinzer. “We hoped these amateurs are going to make the big leagues and get paid.”
Among others, Kinzer got the Upton brothers — B.J. and Justin — to commit to the company.
LaTroy Hawkins, a Gary, Ind., native who pitched in 1,042 games over 21 MLB seasons, was also a Kinzer client and later went into the Indiana High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
At the 2010 Winter Meetings, Dan Jennings (who had been with the Devil Rays) hired Kinzer as a pro scout for the Miami Marlins.
Kinzer went to minor league games and an occasional major league contest to evaluate players and file reports for potential trade opportunities.
The first year he scouted the entire Midwest League out of Fort Wayne. During his five years with the Marlins, he also did international scouting in the Dominican Republic.
While Kinzer was still with the Marlins, the Atlanta Braves called for permission to interview him to scout on the major league side and take on special assignments. He talked with general manager John Coppolella and accepted the deal.
“That gave me a seat at the big table,” says Kinzer, who worked with top executives including president John Hart and senior advisor John Schuerholz in giving opinions and developing a preferential list of who could be traded and who was hands-off in the Braves minor league system. “It took us a couple of years to turn that club around.”
Kinzer also did advanced scouting to check out possible playoff opponents for Atlanta. He had the Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League and Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees in the American League.
Because of COVID-19 and budgetary reasons, the Braves dismissed the entire major league scouting staff toward the end of the 2020 season.
Leading up to the Tokyo Olympics (which were postponed from 2020 to 2021), Kinzer selected by his peers to sit on the committee that chose Team USA. They started with a big pool and narrowed it down to the final roster.
“It was hard assignment because you could only get guys not on a 40-man roster or had get permission from a club for them to play,” says Kinzer. “It was an honor to be part of the decision-making for our country.”
When Kinzer joined the process, Joe Girardi was Team USA manager. When Girardi became Philadelphia Phillies manager the job was passed to Scott Brosius and it wound up with Mike Scioscia.
“I got to listen to Joe Girardi on how he likes to design a team and I said to myself, ‘this is pretty cool,’” says Kinzer. “It was a very humbling experience. You put all those years into working the game of baseball and someone has recognized your ability to evaluate.”
More recently, Kinzer has lent his appraisal skills as a consultant for Program 15 — a part of New Balance Future Stars baseball tournaments. He lives in Lakeland, Fla., and writes player reports on weekends.
Kinzer is also a special events coordinator and fundraising director for Major League Fishing — a circuit that features the world’s top bass anglers.
He is helping prepare for a charity fishing event featuring current and former major leaguers Nov. 19-21 in Guntersville, Ala.
“I’ve spent three decades in the game professionally building trust with current and former guys and their second love is fishing,” says Kinzer. “I grew up on a pond and I liked fishing.”
Participants have baseball and angling in common.
“There’s a connection there,” says Kinzer. “They have a tight fraternity. They’re good old boys.”
Kinzer played youth baseball for IHSBCA Hall of Famer Colin Lister and graduated from Norwell in 1981.
As a sophomore, it was discovered how well he did in booting a football and he led Indiana high schoolers in punting as a junior and senior. He went to Purdue on a full ride in football and also played baseball.
He was selected in the second round of the 1984 Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft by the Cardinals and made his MLB debut in 1989 at age 25 and went on to pitch nine games for the 1989 Cardinals and 1990 Detroit Tigers. He punted seven times in his one NFL game with the Detroit Lions with a long of 42 yards in Week 5 of 1987 against the Green Bay Packers.
Kinzer, 58, has three sons who all played baseball and graduated from Homestead High School in Fort Wayne.
Taylor Kinzer (33) was drafted twice as a right-handed pitcher — once at the end of his high school career in 2006 in the 34th round by the Washington Nationals and then out of Taylor University (Upland, Ind.) in the 24th round in 2009 by the Los Angeles Angels and competed three seasons in the minors.
Derek Kinzer (31) was an outfielder for IHSAA Class 4A state runner Homestead in 2008, graduated in 2009 and also played at Taylor.
Jordan Kinzer (29) played junior college baseball and now serves in the U.S. Navy.
Matt Kinzer, a Northeast Indiana Baseball Association Hall of Famer, was head baseball coach at Indiana Purdue-Fort Wayne in 1993 and 1994 and a volunteer assistant coach at Taylor 2011-14 and got to work with Trojans head coach Kyle Gould and assistant and IHSBCA Hall of Famer Rick Atkinson.
‘Kyle is one of the best non-Division I coaches around,” says Kinzer. “It was an honor to share a bench with Coach A.
“The game itself creates a fraternity and a bond that lasts forever.”

Matt Kinzer.

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A tip of the cap to the career of Bethany Christian’s Bodiker

By STEVE KRAH

http://www.IndianaRBI.com

To say Dan Bodiker has worn many hats as a fan of baseball and other sports is quite the understatement.

Bodiker, 75, came to northern Indiana from northwestern Ohio in the early 1960’s to attend Goshen College, where he represented the Maple Leafs on the baseball diamond and the soccer pitch.

In the fall of 1964, he was hired just up the road at Bethany Christian High School to coach an entire athletic department.

He led BC in boys soccer, boys and girls basketball, baseball and track.

By the time Bodiker retired, his overall mark in all sports was 918-719-39 and he served terms as athletic director. He was taken into the Indiana Soccer Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2007 and is also a member of the Elkhart County Sports Hall of Fame.

His last season as head baseball coach was 1995-96. After one season under Jason Leichty, Brent Reinhardt led the program through 2017. The new coach for 2017-18 is Jim Kraft.

The first BC baseball team wore white T-shirts and blue jeans and only played a handful of games (but only lost one of them).

Starting out as an associate member of the Indiana High School Athletic Association, the school could attract some good athletes who did not have to sit out or be restricted to junior varsity play. The trade-off is that BC was not eligible for tournament play.

That changed when the school became a full member in the early 1970’s.

Today, baseball, soccer and softball teams play on Bodiker Athletic Fields, located across the railroad tracks behind the school.

For years, the baseball team used a field with no fence and surrounded by a cinder track. It was BC’s home when they earned the lone baseball sectional title in school history in 1987.

Dan’s wife, Diane, has preserved the memory of that championship and many other moments in the pages of scrapbooks housed in the couple’s Goshen home.

Bethany — then known as the Braves and later the Bruins — rallied for six runs in the bottom of the seventh inning to beat Goshen 9-8 for the Goshen Sectional title.

With the scored knotted 3-3, Goshen had scored five in the top of the seventh.

In the bottom of the frame, Eric Risser and Scott Bodiker (the oldest of two Bodiker sons; Mike is the youngest) began the comeback with a pair of singles.

Doug Horst, the No. 9 hitter in the BC order, took a 3-2 pitch with the bases loaded and cleared them with a bloop hit. The decisive run was scored from first base by Gary Chupp (who is now athletic director at the school).

“Of all the sports I coached, I thought baseball was the toughest,” says Bodiker. “You have to make so many tough decisions and you have to live with those decisions.”

Bodiker was faced with choices like whether or not to stick with his top pitcher who was not throwing strikes when he knew his No. 2 was not nearly as good.

“What do you do?,” says Bodiker.

There is also the case of a freshman — a poor bunter — being up in the last inning with runners or first and second base and less than two outs.

Bodiker could let him try to bunt or swing away. He chose the latter and the frosh hit into a double play.

The same player came up in the same kind of situation as a senior. He was a better as a bunter and hitter. This time, Bodiker called for the bunt.

The result: Another double play.

“True story,” says Bodiker. “It’s that tightness.”

When the coach wanted to call for a squeeze bunt he would give a verbal cue — “Bust that apple” — so all players could hear.

Sign stealing — sometimes with the help of technology — has been a hot topic in Major League Baseball.

As a regular part of clean play, Bodiker and some of his players were sometimes able to figure out the opposing signs.

“I’d ask (the batter) if you want me to call the pitches if I see them,” says Bodiker. “I might say their first name for a fastball and their last or their number for a curve.”

It’s about making decisions in critical moments.

“There’s a lot of that in baseball that you don’t get in any other sport,” says Bodiker.

It was as a boy in Lima, Ohio, where he was born in 1942, that Bodiker learned baseball and became a lifelong fan of the Cleveland Indians.

“I never like to brag on the Indians because it’s never over until that last out,” says Bodiker, who recalls Cleveland’s World Series teams of 1948 and 1954 and counts many Tribe replicas in his collection of more than 390 big league and minor league caps. He started the collecting hobby in the 1980’s.

As a youngster, Dan and his train engineer father would walk to games of Lima teams in the Class D Ohio State or Ohio-Indiana leagues — like the Red Birds, Reds, Terriers, Chiefs and Phillies.

One of his replica caps pays tribute to the old Lima Pandas.

Dan would grow to be a catcher at Lima Senior High School (which had 1,500 students in the top three grades) and with the local American Legion team. Lima Senior placed second in the Ohio state tournament in Bodiker’s senior year of 1960.

When Bodiker was a junior, he was a back-up to Gary Moeller (who went on to become head football coach at the University of Michigan and with the Detroit Lions).

“What little I got to play, I enjoyed,” says Bodiker.

The Joe Bowers-coached Spartans beat Massillon Washington in the ’60 state semifinals and lost to Cincinnati Elder in the championship — both played in Columbus.

“He knew his baseball,” Bodiker said of Bowers.

Dan Matthews was the Legion ball manager who also took a team to the State Finals and placed third.

“I patterned a lot of my coaching after him,” says Bodiker of Matthews, a former New York Yankess minor leaguer. “If I didn’t block a ball behind the plate, he would pull me aside rather than chewing me out.”

Pitchers were led by former Brooklyn Dodgers farmhand Ed Oley. He had been a travel roommate of Hall of Famer Duke Snider.

Many of the blue caps worn by Bethany baseball have had that Brooklyn “B.” It seems to be no small coincidence.

“B” for Brooklyn.

“B” for Bethany.

“B” for Bod.

Dan Bodiker started the whole athletic program at Bethany Christian High School when he began working there in the fall of 1964. That includes a long stint as baseball coach. (Steve Krah Photo)