Overview:
Matt Arnold, who majored in economics at UCSB, got his start in baseball in 2000 by driving to Los Angeles daily to serve an internship with the Dodgers
Matt Arnold had the drive to make it in baseball, even when stuck behind the wheel of an old pickup.
He got his start in 2000 during his junior year at UC Santa Barbara by motoring back-and-forth to Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium every night in a 1977 Chevy Cheyenne truck.
The $30 he got as an intern for each game barely covered his gas.
“I was getting eight miles a gallon with AM-only radio,” Arnold recalled. “A lot of times I was back after a game at midnight.
“My experience with the Dodgers was incredible and really challenging.
“I was basically commuting from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles every day, through L.A. traffic.”
He’s come a long way in the quarter-century since then.
Arnold is now senior vice president and general manager for the club with the best record in Major League Baseball.
He’s guided the Milwaukee Brewers — a club whose payroll of $113.1 million ranks just 20th out of 30 MLB teams — into first place in the National League’s Central Division.
With a week to go in the season, Milwaukee sports a 95-61 record.
“Matt has been the glue in our baseball operations group,” Brewers owner Mark Attanasio said after Arnold won last year’s MLB Executive of the Year Award.
Benedict Arnold
His baseball acumen did cost his alma mater dearly this summer.
Arnold used his 11th-round pick in the MLB draft to select C.J. Hughes, a shortstop for Gardena’s Junípero Serra High, and then signed him to a bonus of $700,000.
Hughes had previously committed to UCSB coach Andrew Checketts.
“We took (Arnold’s) Gaucho card away,” Checketts told Noozhawk in mock indignation.
The brainiac of the Brewers has otherwise been a true-blue Gaucho.
Arnold even attended a dinner during spring training in Arizona, arranged by UCSB’s Matt English and Andy Graham, for the Gaucho alumni in pro baseball.
The gathering ranged from Class A minor leaguers to big-league stars, managers and executives.
“It’s more of a friend-raiser than a fund-raiser,” Checketts said. “We just wanted to give those guys the opportunity to rub elbows and connect with each other.
“(Arnold) showed up, which was really cool. His traveling secretary (Dan Larrea) is a Gaucho, too.
“They’ve been engaged and have been active with us.”
Arnold was born in Santa Barbara but moved with his family to Ventura as a child.
He also lived in Davis before his family settled in Bakersfield. He played for a powerhouse Highland High School baseball team before returning to Santa Barbara for college.
“It kind of came down to Cal Poly and UCSB — I checked out both of them,” he said. “Ultimately, with UCSB, the second you walk onto the campus you have a pretty good idea of how amazing it is.
“In the summertime, I’d go home and play summer baseball over at Bakersfield College. I enjoyed my time in Santa Barbara, for sure. It was incredible.”
He thought about playing for the Gauchos but gave up the quest after a few tryouts.
“I realized quickly that even if I do make this team, I’m probably going to be carrying the balls around for the most part,” he said.
Class Act
He graduated from UCSB in 2001 with a degree in economics while angling his career toward baseball by minoring in sports management.
Arnold’s professors included former Gaucho baseball coach Al Ferrer, ex-athletic director Jim Romeo and Jon Spaventa, the longtime director of UCSB’s Exercise & Sports Studies Department.
“Those guys were super-influential for me there,” he said. “I would stay after the classes I took from them in my sports management minor and listen to them and pick their brains.”
He did that so well that UCSB selected him as its Sports Management Student of the Year in 2000.
“I was pretty passionate about trying to work in sports,” Arnold said. “I just didn’t know what that looked like and had no idea about how to get into it.
“I just had to find a way to get there. Those guys were incredible for me.”
Their advice was “to grind when you don’t necessarily have a separator.”
“I’m not the smartest guy in the world,” Arnold said, “but I worked overtime and learned as much as I could from as many different people as I could until the opportunity presented itself.”
He served a post-graduate internship in Santa Barbara’s office of A.G. Edwards Financial Advisors. He was back in baseball in 2002, however, when the Texas Rangers offered their own internship.
Arnold said his job was as simple as it was diverse: “To help the coaches and players in whatever they needed.”
“Matt stood out from Day One in how he dealt with people,” said former Rangers baseball operations president Jon Daniels, now a senior adviser for the Tampa Bay Rays.
“Matt quickly took to what was a relatively new scouting software at the time and looked for ways to get better info from it.
“You could tell he had a feel for the game and a desire to get better. … We missed by not hiring him full time.”
The Cincinnati Reds beat them to it by snatching up Arnold to serve as an assistant to the director of baseball operations.
“At the time, there was much-less specialization across the game,” he said. “You had to wear a lot of hats … I did a lot of everything.”
Rays of Hope
He hit the road again in a different clunker in 2006 after the Rays hired him as a pro scout.
“I was still living in Cincinnati,” Arnold said. “You can get everywhere from there … to Alabama in eight hours … to Michigan … to Washington, D.C. … over to Iowa.
“These are all within driving distance, right? I drove everywhere.
“We’re talking 50,000 miles a year in my little, green AMC Gremlin, with the bumper falling off and the window cracked.
“A power bar was melted into the front seat somewhere.”
He soaked up all he could from the old scouts he shadowed behind the backstops.
“It was a little bit of a leap to go from the front office out into the field, but it was a good experience,” he said. “I met so many people on the road.
“I learned how to evaluate from so many different people, writing hundreds of reports.”
Arnold’s travels even took him to Mexico to check out a Cuban slugger.
He faced some grave circumstances — quite literally — in his futile search for a field to hold the tryout.
“I worked him out in a graveyard,” he said. “He was hitting balls off headstones.
“It is a challenge, working a guy out in a graveyard when there’s no track record and no stats to go by.
“You’ve got to know what you’re looking at, and that comes from experience. It’s hard to simulate that.”
Tampa Bay Rays baseball operations president Erik Neander gave Arnold his first big breaks after noticing the long hours he worked. He first promoted him to scouting director, and later to director of player personnel.
“He’s got the work ethic of an intern trying to break into the game,” Neander said. “That’s never left him.
“Those things have been constant, no matter his role.”
Arnold also had a knack of spotting the value of a prospect beyond his physical toolset.
“I learned to look for how guys interact with their teammates, and what kind of leadership skills they have, what they bring to the clubhouse,” he said. “If you’re not going to be a very good teammate, you’d better be a really, really good player.
“How do they handle themselves with failure? How do they respond as a pitcher when they get hit around?”
Brewer Crew
David Stearns liked the way Arnold handled himself. One of his first moves in 2015 as the then-new general manager of the Brewers was to bring him aboard as his right-hand man.
“We immediately hit it off,” Arnold said. “I was fortunate to come into a real good opportunity.”
Their partnership continued seamlessly in November 2020 when the Brewers named Stearns as their president of baseball operations while moving Arnold into the role of senior vice president and general manager.
Arnold combined the front-office education he got in analytics to what he’d seen on the field as a scout.
“I think he’s ahead of the game in that regard,” Brewers’ manager Pat Murphy said. “The numbers to him are a resource, but his ability to relate to people is what’s incredible.”
He’s on the verge of taking the Brewers to their seventh postseason berth and fifth NL Central title in his 10 seasons with the club.
His name has been mentioned for jobs with richer ball clubs in bigger markets.
But Milwaukee has become home for Arnold, wife Jodi, and their two teenage children, Julianne and Tyler.
The city hasn’t won a World Series since 1957 when another Santa Barbaran — Baseball Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews — fielded Bill Skowron’s hot smash and stepped on third base.
The bases-loaded force-out sealed the then-Milwaukee Braves’ victory in the seventh and deciding game against the New York Yankees.
The Brewers have been to the World Series only once, in 1982, when they lost in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals.
“The Milwaukee community has been awesome,” Arnold said. “The people here tell me if you can win here, this place would just go nuts.
“The people here still talk about the 1982 World Series, and I would love to be able to try and do that again for this community.”
He does marvel at how far the old Chevy Cheyenne and AMC Gremlin took him in the game of baseball.
“Everybody takes their own pathway,” Arnold said.
And his drive now has the Milwaukee Brewers on course for the top of the hill in Major League Baseball.
