The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  “I was killing myself,” he said.

  One day, before a series against Seattle in September 1998, Maddon printed out the chart on Ken Griffey Jr. and was stunned to discover that Griffey had not hit any balls on the ground to the left side of the infield. He approached Angels manager Terry Collins and said, “The numbers show that Ken Griffey Jr. almost never hits a ground ball to the left side of the infield. What do you think if we shift the shortstop over and play three infielders on the right side?”

  “Let’s do it,” Collins said.

  The modern shift was born on September 20, 1998. Griffey came to bat in the first inning against Angels right-hander Omar Olivares with runners on first and second and no outs. He looked up and saw just one infielder on the left side. Griffey took one pitch for a ball. Then he decided to exploit the defense by dropping a bunt—except when he tried to do so on the next pitch, he popped out. The Angels won the game, 3–1. Maddon would later tell Griffey, “If you want to bunt every time up, that’s fine with us.”

  Said Maddon, “That stuff I did in the mid-’90s, it was labor-intensive. You had no idea. There was one year we had like 25 two-game series. When we were on the road I had like a big anvil box, with my printer in it and my laptop. I’d get in at two o’clock in the morning and I’d do all this before I went to bed so I could have it ready in time the next day. I don’t know how many times I did that.

  “You talk about learning your craft. All this stuff we can talk about now, it’s about all the stuff I did to prepare myself for these moments, the labor-intensive work, the 10,000 hours. My God, it had to be way more than 10,000 hours.”

  After missing out on the Boston job in 2003, Maddon interviewed with Tampa Bay after the 2005 season. He arrived at the interview with general manager Andrew Friedman in Houston (where the World Series was being played), armed with a thick binder of his own reports on players in the Tampa Bay system. He got the job, his first big league managing gig, as pilot of the 2006 Devil Rays, who would be playing the ninth season in franchise history. In his first spring training, Maddon, in a harbinger of the boon he would be for the silkscreening business in Chicago, handed out to his players T-shirts that read, TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK, NOT WHAT YOU’VE HEARD. They lost 101 games in Maddon’s first year, but two years later won the American League pennant, beating the Red Sox of Epstein and Hoyer in a thrilling seven-game American League Championship Series.

  Epstein saw plenty of Maddon over the years as intradivision rivals. Under Maddon, the small-market Rays played baseball in the manner of an annoying little brother. They never went away easily. They played a loose, unconventional style of baseball, but never compromised on fundamentals, especially on defense. Before Maddon, Tampa Bay had never won more than 70 games in its eight seasons. With him over the next nine years, it averaged 84 wins and made four postseason appearances, including a 2008 run to the World Series. Twice Maddon was named American League Manager of the Year (2008 and 2011).

  “Joe’s different,” Epstein said. “He’s special. When I had a chance to interview him, I kind of knew how he thought about the game. I knew how his mind worked. But I got to see him across the field for the better part of a decade. Every time we played the Rays it felt like they dictated the game to us. We were constantly on the defensive. Some of that was personnel-related. A lot of it was how he was able to put his imprint on the game.

  “You could tell there was a lot of thought involved, that he had thought through the game situations, such as the defensive positioning, and he had thought in advance in a really creative way. There was a lot of innovation with respect to strategy. I think there was a fearlessness associated with his style. He wasn’t afraid to look silly. If he thought something worked, he was never afraid to try it in the most important part of the game.

  “The safety squeeze had been around forever, but he realized that the first-and-third bunt was too hard to defend. As far as the shifting, he realized it worked in principle, but he also realized it worked psychologically against the hitter, so he took it to extremes. He relished the opportunity to be different, not just to be different but because it begs thoughts and questions and analysis. It makes life a little more interesting and fun.”

  Epstein saw Maddon’s vibe reflected on his young players in Tampa Bay. Epstein thought they played with a coolness and creativity on the field. He attributed such ease to the environment Maddon created. Maddon gave them room to be their genuine selves.

  “ ‘Vibe’ is a good word when talking about him,” Epstein said. “He creates a certain vibe. He needs a certain vibe. He needs feedback to operate. He needs a more open, relaxed vibe. I think he’s really intuitive. He can read situations, people, and environments, and engage with people, connect with them.”

  Sitting on a cache of young players ready to win, Epstein couldn’t believe his good fortune when Nero called him about Maddon. Great managers in their prime simply don’t become available. The pool of available managers typically requires taking a risk on a rookie manager or hiring somebody coming off a bad breakup. Maddon became a free agent by such an overlooked provision in his contract that he wasn’t even aware of it.

  The cascade of events that made Maddon available to the Cubs began with a hanging curveball from Clayton Kershaw, a rare event in itself. Kershaw, the Los Angeles Dodgers ace, held a 2–0 lead in the seventh inning of the fourth game of the 2014 National League Division Series against the St. Louis Cardinals when he hung the curveball to Matt Adams with two runners on. Kershaw had thrown 409 curveballs to left-handed hitters in his career without ever giving up a home run—until this one.

  Because Adams hit the curveball for a home run, the Dodgers lost. And because they lost, the Dodgers were eliminated. And because they were eliminated, they reassigned general manager Ned Colletti and replaced him by poaching Friedman from the Rays, where he had been working without a contract. (Dodgers president Stan Kasten disputed that the Dodgers sought change simply because they were bounced in the first round, but would they have cleaned house if they reached the World Series?) And because Friedman left, Maddon was free to opt out of his contract—a provision Maddon knew nothing about until Nero phoned him with the news, and Nero recalled it only because Rays president Matthew Silverman had called Nero and asked, “So what will you do about the opt-out?”

  “If nobody had told me I would never have known about it,” Maddon said. “Of course, I think my agent would eventually have said something to me, but I had no idea.”

  Maddon’s first instinct was to work out an extension with the Rays. He gave it two weeks. The top managers in the game were making near $5 million a year. The Rays made an offer. Maddon countered. One source familiar with the talks said Maddon asked for about $14 million over four years. The Rays declined, the source said. When it became obvious that no agreement was in sight, Maddon exercised his opt-out.

  (The Rays filed a complaint of tampering against the Cubs, claiming the club contacted him before the opt-out was official. Major League Baseball investigated the complaint and found no evidence of tampering.)

  At 60 years old, as a dues-paid-in-full-and-then-some, tried-and-true baseball lifer, Maddon at last had reached his time. It was time after all these years—all the bus rides through the Midwest, California, Pioneer, Northwest, and Texas Leagues; all the clinics; all the hours spent crunching numbers on crude software; all the sweat equity invested over nearly a decade in turning Tampa Bay from a joke into an honest rival to the deep-pocketed Red Sox and Yankees—to find out what he was worth.

  “People just see what you do now, and it’s beautiful and that’s the way it should be,” Maddon said. “And I’m not one to pat myself on the back. But when you do take the time to really reflect on it and exactly figure out where it began and how it got here, it’s okay. There was a time when I was not making a whole lot of money and there were many times when it was paycheck to paycheck and it was kind of difficult. So I guess, I’ve always been a late bloomer. I’ve
never wanted something before it was my time. So maybe it was just my time.”

  Epstein thought the timing was just about perfect. He saw Maddon as a critical piece of his rebuild.

  “We’ve tried to create an organization that cultivates the whole player, the whole person,” he said. “We take a holistic approach to player development. We try to be a humanistic organization. But sometimes it’s so hard in baseball not to be impacted by convention and routine, by uniformity and falling in line with the same thing every day when you play 162 games in 183 days. It’s hard to change that.

  “That’s when the leader in uniform becomes the most important person in the whole organization, by his very nature, by leading the life he wants to lead. He turns it on its head. The idea of change becomes instant and inevitable instead of difficult.”

  Epstein knew that, inevitably, the essence of the Cubs would belong to the four pillars: Rizzo, Bryant, Schwarber, and Russell. But until they fully matured, with the wisdom and experience to be true leaders, Epstein needed a willful manager to establish the environment to allow them such personal growth. Epstein’s belief in the importance of the manager represented a quantum leap from how Beane, his rival from the early years of quantitative analysis, cast his manager as little more than a middle manager, who occupied the narrow space of implementing the will from above.

  The timing, Epstein understood, wasn’t entirely perfect. Epstein already had a manager under contract, Renteria, a man he liked and admired. Shortly after talking to Maddon over the phone for the first time, Epstein and Hoyer called Renteria. They were up front with him. They told him they were going to meet with Maddon. They promised him a resolution within a week.

  “As soon as I found out [Maddon] was available, I knew we had to have him. I also just dreaded the situation we were in for Ricky,” Epstein said. “The only way we could handle this with any sense of integrity was to tell Ricky what we were doing. We told Ricky that, and we told him [Maddon] would be the only person we would replace him with, and no matter what happened it would be over as quickly as possible.”

  The next morning Epstein woke up, threw on a pair of his oldest jeans, pulled a Chicago Bears trucker hat low on his head for cover, so as not to be recognized, and headed to the airport to meet Hoyer for their clandestine trip to Pensacola. Upon arriving in Florida, they rented a car and punched in the RV park on Google maps. Just as they were about to drive into the park at 3 p.m., they realized they had forgotten to bring a gift for Joe and his wife, Jaye. They pulled into a Publix supermarket across the street and, knowing Maddon’s love of fine wines, headed for the wine section. They started on the extreme left of the aisle, where the bottles were marked at $2.99. They started walking down the aisle…$3.99, $4.99…by the time they made it to the end of the aisle, they grabbed the most expensive bottle in the house: $9.99. The clerk wrapped it in a plain brown bag.

  Epstein had never before been to an RV park. Given the clandestine nature of the meeting, the location was perfect: Navarre Beach touts itself as “Florida’s Best Kept Secret.” Joe and Jaye were parked in space number one. There was a little pool in the complex. There was just a sliver of beach—a few feet of sand between the RV and the gulf. Theo, Jed, Joe, and Jaye grabbed four lawn chairs and some 16-ounce bottles of Miller Lite out of the RV’s fridge and sat down in the sand and talked. They talked for three or four hours, left to eat dinner at a Mexican restaurant, where they talked some more, and finished up back at the RV park, where they talked some more. In all, they talked for six hours.

  “It was purely, purely philosophical,” Maddon said. “You get to a certain point career-wise, you want to be able to go to work where you want to go to work. And with people you want to work with.”

  The Maddons had deep roots in the Tampa Bay area. They lived in Tampa. Jaye had opened a boxing and fitness studio there. Joe considered his nine years in the Tampa Bay area his “baseball Camelot.”

  That night Epstein called his wife, Marie Whitney.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “ ‘I think he wants to be a member of the Cubs,’ ” Epstein said, “ ‘but he’s really connected to Tampa—both the organization and the city. I think he really wants it, but he’s not emotionally there yet as far as leaving.’ I recognized it. I had a lot of similar feelings when I left the Red Sox.”

  Maddon would later say that Epstein was right; he wasn’t emotionally ready to leave Tampa. “No, not at all,” he said. He also had other things to worry about: he had to get up the next morning to make it during daylight to Beaumont, Texas, the next stop on his RV trip.

  Another day passed and Joe and Jaye were driving somewhere between Junction, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, when Nero called. The Cubs had made a formal offer: five years, $25 million. Somehow Maddon kept Cousin Eddie on the road. The annual value would put Maddon on par with his former boss, Mike Scioscia of the Angels, as the highest-paid managers in the game at the time.

  “I was like, ‘Whoa!’ ” Maddon said. “It staggered me. I’ll be honest. So you are driving along, driving along, trying to process all this stuff, and of course when someone makes you an offer you can’t refuse, you don’t refuse.”

  He took the job. The trip from Tampa to Long Beach became not only a life-changing one, but also a reflective one.

  “If you are blown away by good fortune,” Maddon said, “and you have the chance to retrospectively look at your life in an RV, maybe it was okay.”

  Epstein was thrilled to get his missing piece, but he knew there was an ugly side to this. Renteria was out. The Cubs would offer him another position in the organization, but Renteria declined.

  “I stayed here [in Chicago] to finish up Joe, and Jed went out to see Ricky,” Epstein said. “It was horrible. I wrote the press release articulating the dilemma, which was basically—I didn’t surgarcoat it—we had to decide whether we were going to be fair to Ricky or fair to our organization, and that was the choice. And there was only one answer.”

  On November 3, 2014, the Cubs introduced Joe Maddon as their new manager, the 52nd person to take a crack at winning the franchise’s first championship since 1908. They held the news conference in a sports bar across from Wrigley Field, the Cubby Bear. The joint was packed. Maddon, taking over this fifth-place team five times running, said he would be talking about making the playoffs from the start of spring training. He used words such as “synergy” and “philosophically,” vowed “I play well in the sandbox,” and quoted a line he wrote on the top of his lineup cards in Tampa Bay: “Don’t ever permit the pressure to exceed the pleasure.” Just when the news conference appeared wrapped up—Epstein, Hoyer, and Maddon rose from their chairs to leave—it suddenly wasn’t. Maddon remembered something, wheeled, and grabbed a microphone.

  “One more thing,” he told the assembled media crowd. “Where’s the bartender? Barkeep? Anywhere? I’ve got the drinks right now. What do I got?”

  Epstein laughed and raised one finger.

  “Theo said I’ve got one round. Actually, I hadn’t thought about that, so…One round’s on me! Please.”

  He put the microphone down, then remembered something else. He grabbed the mic again.

  “That’s a shot and a beer. That’s the Hazleton way. Shot and a beer.”

  Broad Street Joey was the toast of Chicago. Buying the media a round of drinks was pure genius. The news conference was a hit. He immediately changed the “lovable losers” narrative. It was one of his gifts. With the sleight of hand and witty wordplay of a magician, Maddon could comfortably create narratives for the media to run with, which took some of the spotlight off his young players.

  Maddon wore many hats: Renaissance man, polyglot, car enthusiast, polymath, bicyclist, oenophile, Springsteen fan, restaurateur, community activist, humorist, bibliophile, and dugout contrarian. But what Chicagoans saw most in Maddon was the Hazleton in him: a working-class dude with whom you wanted to have a drink. He was genuine, and already he was one of t
heir own.

  —

  It was strange how the 2014 Major League Baseball schedule worked out. It had brought the Rays to Wrigley Field that August for the first time in 11 years, and only the second time in their history. Incredibly, it also had brought Maddon to Wrigley Field for the first time in his life. It was the same place where Babe Ruth hit his “called shot” in the 1932 World Series, and the same place where Norm Gigon, Maddon’s coach at Lafayette, the biggest influence on his baseball life, hit his only major league home run, in 1967.

  The first game of the series was played on a late Friday afternoon in spectacular weather—77 degrees and sunny. By the late innings, as the sun slipped lower in the sky, golden sunbeams poured through the ballpark’s open gap between the third-base field-level seats and the second deck, a phantasm of natural light no longer possible in the fully enclosed modern stadiums. The wonder of it caused Maddon, perched like a great-horned owl at the rail of the first-base dugout, to occasionally divert his gaze from the field.

  My goodness, he thought, it’s cinematic, all this golden light. It’s like the opening scene from Gladiator.

  He considered the place a baseball cathedral. Less than three months later, Epstein would call him with what Maddon joked at his news conference was “a once-in-a-hundred-and-seven-years opportunity.”

  The Angels had never won a World Series until 2002, when Maddon was there in the dugout as bench coach. The Rays had never been to a World Series until 2008, when Maddon was there in the dugout as manager. Chicago was different. Chicago was the Old Testament of droughts. Maddon knew it and felt it, even before he managed his first game for the Cubs.