Rays' Scorekeeper Bill Matthews Lives a Baseball Lover's Dream

Popular belief says that baseball coaches eat, breathe and sleep the sport, but that perception is not always the entire reality.

Bill Matthews also does the laundry.

As the head coach of Eckerd College for the past 21 years and current official scorer for the Tampa Bay Rays, Matthews has literally done it all in the name of his love of baseball.

“I’m lucky because I enjoy doing what I do, and I have an incredibly supportive wife,” he says one afternoon while cleaning out the Tritons locker room, which includes doing the leftover dirty laundry. “She knows baseball is what I do.”

That is somewhat of an understatement. Baseball is not only what Bill Matthews does, it’s who he is.

Born in Rhode Island in 1957, Matthews came to Florida in 1975 to attend Eckerd and play baseball.

While earning his master's degree in teaching, he became an assistant coach as a junior alongside future Major League coaches Carlos Tosca and Brian Butterfield and current San Francisco Giants General Manager Brain Sabean.

In 1980, he left Eckerd and went to the Canterbury School of Florida, where he worked as a bus driver and P.E. teacher before eventually becoming head of the upper division for the St. Pete prep school.

But Matthews never stopped coaching and never forgot about his alma mater, and in 1990 he migrated back to Eckerd to take the head coaching job; he’s been there ever since.

“My dream was always to be able to come back here and coach at Eckerd, and oddly enough, it worked out,” Matthews muses. “That was kind of my dream job, and it happened.”

Another thing that happened was the opportunity to be an official scorer for his hometown Major League Baseball club.

After running the Rays summer baseball clinics for four years, Rick Vaughn, the team’s vice president of communications, approached Matthews in 2004 about doing some official scoring for the club.

Vaughn "came to me one day, and he said, … 'I want to get away from the newspaper writer scorer. I want to try using a coach as a scorer,' ” Matthews recalls. “I had never done it, but I said 'sure.' ”

Matthews took over the role full time in 2008, the year the Rays went to the World Series. He says he never knew the real pressures of baseball until that time.

“I thought coaching was pressure, and I realized very early on that it’s not,” he confesses. “Being a big league scorer and being responsible for … the exchange of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, that’s real pressure.”

Still, he takes the pressure in stride.

“I score like a coach. I take all of the baseball things into consideration, and I think baseball teams appreciate that. I just do the best job I can do every day.”

Being a Major League Baseball employee, he is able to travel to other countries to help set up baseball academies and coach foreign teams. He has coached in Sweden, Russia and the Czech Republic, and he led the Polish National Team to two gold medals and one silver medal.

But St. Petersburg is where the self-described “homebody” prefers to be, and he plans to remain here for a long time.

“I got the job I always wanted, to coach at my alma mater. I made it to the big leagues, and I get to travel and represent Major League Baseball in other countries. What more could you ask for? I’m the luckiest guy alive.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I still gotta get those pants out of the washing machine.”