CITY OF SAN DIEGO — Padres San Diego Third-base coach Matt Williams has been diagnosed with colon cancer and will be leaving the team for an undisclosed amount of time.
The news was revealed by Padres manager Bob Melvin on Wednesday afternoon, about 24 hours before the team’s highly anticipated start of the season. Williams will join the Padres in Opening Day festivities as they host Colorado Rocks on Thursday, will then undergo surgery to remove the tumor near his colon on Friday.
Williams, 57, learned of his condition about three weeks ago, when a standard physical exam showed a low red blood cell count prompting him to have additional testing. He says he feels “as good as I’ve felt in 20 years.”
“I don’t have any symptoms, I don’t have any problems,” Williams said. “At this point, the important thing now is to get it out there. That’s the plan for Friday, and we’ll see how things go from there. They’ll check, and they’ll do. all the pathologies and all that stuff at that point.
“But the initial scans were positive in that on the first cat scan, they didn’t see any spread anywhere else. That’s a good thing. We’ll see where it goes from there. there.”
There is no timetable for Williams’ return to the team. Mike Shildt, former manager of St. Louis Cardinals, who is serving as a senior adviser to the Padres, will coach the third facility in his absence.
A five-time All-Star, one of the game’s best third players throughout the 1990s, Williams began his major league career as Melvin’s teammate on San Francisco Giants in the late 1980s, then began his career after playing with the staff Arizona Diamondbacks team that Melvin managed from 2005 to 2009.
Right after two years as a manager Citizens of WashingtonWilliams served as Melvin’s third junior coach with Oakland athletics from 2018 to 2019, then joined the Padres at the start of the 2022 season, serving as their manager for the first time.
Melvin said of Williams: “He’s probably the toughest guy I’ve ever met in baseball. “We know, I especially know, that he’s going to give his best in this life and that he’s going to beat it. Our players have fully supported him, but it’s difficult, to be here. being too close to someone and knowing he has to deal with it. But I know he is, and I know he’s going to beat it.”
