by Tom Verducci
“The biggest difference so far to me are the fans,” he said a few weeks before his first spring training with the Cubs. “Regardless of the fact that the Cubs have not won in a long time, meaning the World Series, the fan base is incredibly loyal to the group.
“The refrain I keep hearing is there is constant dialogue about their parents or their grandparents and how they tie into the moment today. This is truly a fan base that has been derived from history and previous generations. Everybody today wants to have the Cubs win because of their dad or grandpa or grandma.
“We need to get this straightened out, so all of a sudden they can go out to the gravestone and have a shot and beer with somebody.”
When the World Series returned to Wrigley Field for the first time in 71 years, the big box of a scoreboard in centerfield still was run by hand; vines of ivy, some of it turning umber and crimson in the midautumn evening, still clung to the brick outfield walls; and the subterranean concrete dugouts still threatened the heads of anybody who made the mistake of leaping in excitement.
But Wrigley winked at you. It gave you the impression that, within its brick walls, baseball and time had stood still since 1945. But that picture was an illusion.
First proof was the powering on of the great big arc lights on the roof, installed in 1988, as well as the two state-of-the-art videoboards, one in the rightfield bleachers and its colossal big brother lording over the leftfield bleachers, demanding your attention.
Second, when the World Series returned to Wrigley Field in 1945, following a “drought” of 7 years, it marked the fifth one played there in 17 years.
In 2016 such familiarity had long since faded. The return of the World Series to Wrigley Field was a first-in-a-lifetime event for almost all living fans. All day, hours and hours before the game, people filled the Wrigleyville neighborhood streets, simply milling about, smiling, chatting with strangers, and, whether they held game tickets or not, generally behaving as if the World Series was not merely something to be watched, but to be breathed in through great gulps, coursed through the lungs, and exhaled.
Wrigley was about to get her first-ever World Series close-up on television. Back in 1945, there were only about 5,000 television sets in the country. One poll that year found that a majority of Americans had never even heard of television. The first televised World Series game was still two years away.
Out of sight and out of camera range, underneath Wrigley, was one of the starkest differences between 1945 and 2016 at the ballpark: the home team clubhouse, new for 2016. The old clubhouse had the shape of a shoebox—a shoebox for narrow-width shoes. To get to the manager’s office, you walked to the end of the shoebox, and took a quick left up a very short flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs was a door on the right, which opened to an office the size of a janitorial supply closet. The desk filled half the room.
By contrast, Joe Maddon’s office in the new digs was the equivalent of a studio apartment, replete with a huge desk, two chairs, a sectional sofa, coffee table, bathroom, wine refrigerator, bookshelf, and wood cabinets. On his desk, facing out, was a Hollywood publicity shot of The Munsters, from the 1960s television comedy show, that was signed by Butch Patrick, who played Eddie Munster, as well as bobblehead dolls of four of Maddon’s buddies; a small piece of driftwood engraved with one of his many slogans, “Try not to suck”; and various assorted such tchotchkes. Stacks of hardcover books filled a table behind him.
Maddon looked over his lineup card. Without the use of the designated hitter while playing under National League rules, there was no Kyle Schwarber on it. The previous day, during a workout at Wrigley Field, doctors refused to grant him clearance to play defense on his surgically repaired left knee. He wasn’t even close, they said, to being able to withstand the reactionary starts and stops required of playing the outfield. They said he probably needed at least four weeks for such clearance. Maddon wasn’t surprised—not after watching Schwarber simply stand in leftfield and read balls hit off the bat in batting practice during the workout.
“The doctors said, ‘Don’t do it,’ which really galvanized my thought process,” he said. “I was standing by the batting cage just watching him react in leftfield. No chance. Just watching his first movement, I said, ‘He can’t do that.’ Because he might knock in one or two, but there’s a good chance he lets in more than that.
“It’s not about standing. It’s about the movement to either side. At least running the bases I know I’m going here and I can control all that. If a ball is hit down the line, he has to break and go and I know he’s going to dive. He’s going to do what he does. I don’t think his first movement, as the ball is hit off the bat, it’s just not there. I saw it. For me, standing behind the cage—and he wasn’t really even trying—I said, ‘This is not going to work.’ There’s too much outfield for this guy to cover under those circumstances.”
Listed at catcher on Maddon’s card, batting fifth, was 24-year-old rookie catcher Willson Contreras, who had signed with the Cubs out of Venezuela as a 17-year-old third baseman. Contreras and second baseman Javier Baez were the only two players remaining on the 40-man roster who were there when Epstein arrived after the 2011 season. Right around the same time that Epstein signed, Contreras, while playing on the Cubs’ Instructional League team, saw a set of catcher’s equipment on the floor of the clubhouse. Not in the lineup that day, and with oodles of energy to spare, Contreras simply decided to put on the equipment, walk to the bullpen, and begin warming up pitchers.
“I wanted something to do,” Contreras said. “I thought it would be fun.”
The Cubs’ director of player development, Oneri Fleita, who had been instrumental in signing Contreras, happened to walk by the bullpen. He did a double take.
“Will, what’s up?” Fleita said. “Do you really want to catch?”
“I’ve never caught before,” Contreras said.
“Want to try?”
“Sure.”
Five years later Contreras was catching Kyle Hendricks in the first World Series game at Wrigley Field in seven decades—with an arm unlike anything Maddon had ever seen before. “I’ve never had a weapon like that on one of my teams,” Maddon said. It was Contreras’s second straight start. Game 2, a 5–1 Cubs win, was excruciating in its surfeit of dead time. It took four hours, four minutes, much of it seemingly wasted away by frequent visits to the mound by Contreras to speak with reliever Mike Montgomery, sometimes within the same at-bat.
“Honestly, he was right with Montgomery,” said Maddon, who applauded his young catcher for sticking to the game plan when Montgomery wanted to improvise. “[Montgomery can] take that cutter and stick it you-know-where against righties. And we told him that and Willson’s going out there to tell him, ‘No! Curveball, changeup.’ He did everything right. That was on the pitcher, not on him. He was doing what he’s supposed to do. I was very proud of him. So everybody’s on his ass, [but] he goes out there and he does what he’s supposed to do.
“I like when he works with Chapman, too. They laugh. Him and Baez and Contreras, they laugh. When Chappy’s missing the plate, I like when Javy comes in and makes him laugh.”
On the wall next to Maddon, figuratively looking over his right shoulder, hung the very large color photo of a man in a baseball uniform. The man was sitting, level with the field, on the ledge of a concrete dugout that is obviously not in a major league park. It is the biggest photograph in Maddon’s office. The man in the photo is a middle-aged man with dark, somber eyes—sad even. His eyebrows angle up and the edges of his mouth turn down. With his elbows resting on his thighs, dangling from his hands are a pair of eyeglasses like the kind Vince Lombardi would wear, with black rims atop the lenses. He is wearing a dark windbreaker with no shirt underneath, a dark cap with an Old English “B,” and…are those?…yes, he is wearing black wingtip shoes instead of spikes. There is no identification of who this man is. He is a paradox. He looks at once familiar—an Everyman kind of coach—and als
o broodingly mysterious. Who is this man who occupies such a prominent place in Maddon’s office, if not his life?
“Bauldie Moschetti of the Boulder Collegians,” Maddon said with pride.
Bauldie A. Moschetti was born in Brookside, Colorado, on March 12, 1909—six months after the Cubs’ most recent World Series title until 2016—to Rocco Alfonso Moschetti and Gentina Mary Merlina Moschetti. The family moved to Boulder so Rocco could work at the Black Diamond Mine, and, as it turned out, his son, too. Bauldie started working in a coal mine when he was nine years old, attending to a hoist powered by mules. If strangers happened to wander by, young Bauldie would run and hide because he was too young to work there legally.
The mines gave the Moschettis an income, but they took Bauldie’s father. Rocco died in an accident in 1925. To support the family, the teenage Bauldie bought a small coal trucking company. He started with one truck. Soon he was the boss of 20 people. As the trucking business grew, he invested in real estate and a liquor store, Baseline Liquors, and became a multimillionaire. His real loves were his wife, Sybil, and baseball.
In 1964, at the age of 55, Bauldie started the Boulder Collegians Baseball Club, an elite, semipro, summer team he populated by recruiting the best college players from around the country, particularly from the West and the Plains. Bauldie’s Boulder Collegians quickly became a national powerhouse. In only their third year, they won the National Baseball Congress World Series, then repeated as champions the next year.
In 1975, after his junior season at Lafayette, Maddon was playing summer ball for the Scranton Red Sox of the Atlantic Coast Baseball League, a college league with teams mostly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In his second summer with the team, he was hitting .358, second in the league, and was selected to the all-star team. Two top college players who were drafted that June and later played in the major leagues, Paul Hartzell of Lehigh and Rick Cerone of Seton Hall, knew Maddon from competing against him in the ACBL and recommended him to Bauldie. Moschetti called Maddon, who had been treated so well by the Scranton team that he was unsure about heading West.
“How many catchers do you have there?” Maddon asked Moschetti.
“Oh, a couple.”
“How many exactly?”
“Three.”
Great, Maddon thought, I’d be leaving to be a fourth catcher.
“Okay, I’ll come play for you,” Maddon told him.
The way Maddon figured it, if he wasn’t any better than the three catchers in Boulder, he didn’t have any business even thinking about playing pro ball, and the sooner he found out the better. He also knew that more scouts spent their time watching players in the West than the East.
He noticed that one of his Lafayette teammates the previous year, infielder Art Fischetti, didn’t get drafted until the 28th round. Maddon thought Fischetti should have been drafted higher, but blamed his low stock on never having played outside the East.
Maddon quickly became the Boulders’ starting catcher. After a 6-for-34 start, Maddon hit better than .350 over the next dozen games. A Boulder writer wrote a column extolling Maddon as a cinch to play pro ball.
During the day Maddon shared groundskeeping duties at Scotty Carpenter Field with Stan Jakubowski, a pitcher from Miami, and Rod Boxberger, a pitcher from USC who later would father a son, Brad, who pitched for Maddon with the 2014 Rays. But Maddon spent much of his time after night games hanging out with Bauldie in the back office of Baseline Liquors.
“He was Italian and he loved me because I was Italian, too,” Maddon said. “He had this real giggle…”
Bauldie would put on his glasses, the ones Maddon swore made him look exactly like the great Lombardi. The two of them would order pizza and swig drinks pulled from the cooler—Maddon would grab himself a beer and Bauldie would shout to him, “Get me a Squirt!”
“God, he loved Squirt,” Maddon said.
They would stay up until three in the morning, just the two of them, talking about baseball, about life, about anything.
The Boulder Collegians won the National Baseball Congress (NBC) World Series again that summer. After the last game in Wichita, players filed in and out of Bauldie’s motel room. He was sitting there in his boxer shorts, peeling off bills from a stack of hundreds.
“I promised you a thousand bucks…two thousand bucks for you…”
Bauldie was making good on the money he’d promised these top players from top programs to come to Boulder for the summer.
Maddon, the kid from Lafayette, walked in.
“Hey, Bauldie? Where’s my money?”
Moschetti just laughed. There would be no money for Maddon. Bauldie was paying him in other ways: with his time and love.
“I didn’t get any money,” Maddon said. “Because he treated me like family. Swear to God. I was like a kid to him, so I didn’t get anything. He was the absolute best. That’s Bauldie.”
Maddon identifies Norm Gigon, his coach at Lafayette, as the biggest influence on his baseball development, the man who turned a freshman quarterback into a minor league catcher. But Bauldie Moschetti holds a special place in Maddon’s heart.
“I wouldn’t be here without him,” Maddon said. “He took a chance on me.”
Because Bauldie invited the kid from Lafayette to play with the big-time Boulder Collegians, Angels scout Nick Kamzic watched Maddon play that summer and recommended him to cross-checking scout Loyd Christopher, which is how Maddon came to join the Angels organization and professional baseball, instead of the plumbing business. It might not have happened if he had remained in Scranton that summer.
Maddon and Moschetti stayed close friends. Moschetti had terrible allergies that acted up every fall in Colorado, so the two of them would switch homes for a month. Moschetti would move into Maddon’s place in Laguna Beach and Maddon would live in Bauldie’s house in Boulder. Maddon painted the place while he was there and tooled around Boulder in a 1969 Volvo that would not go into reverse. Bauldie, the tough son of a gun, told Maddon he wouldn’t help him cover the cost of a new transmission.
In 1980, after Christopher encouraged Maddon to quit playing and become a coach or a manager, Moschetti offered him a player/coach gig with the Collegians. The team included future major league stars Joe Carter, Spike Owen, Al Newman, Mark Langston, and Tony Gwynn. Maddon once pinch-hit for Carter at the NBC World Series in Wichita. He found the coaching responsibilities to be a great training ground for his next career. The manager Maddon is today first emerged that summer.
It was not until May 17, 1994, that Maddon made it to the big leagues. That was the day Marcel Lachemann hired the guy with the positive outlook to join his Angels coaching staff. The last paragraph of the United Press International story announcing the change included this notation:
“The Angels also announced the addition of Joe Maddon to the coaching staff. Maddon had been the Angels’ director of player development.”
Maddon’s first day in the big leagues came 19 minor league years after Bauldie took a chance on him, the break that made his pro career possible. Six days after Maddon made it to the majors, Bauldie Moschetti died. He was 85 years old.
Bauldie was buried in Canon City, Colorado, with a photographic portrait on his tombstone. In the picture, different from the one on Maddon’s office wall, Bauldie is wearing a blue windbreaker with no shirt underneath, a Boulder Collegians cap, and a dark, mysterious look with arched eyebrows.
Thirteen years later, in June 2007, Maddon’s Rays were playing an interleague series in Denver against the Rockies. Accompanying Maddon on the trip was Jaye Sousoures, his girlfriend. After a game one night, around 10 o’clock, Maddon told Jaye, “C’mon. Let’s take a road trip to Boulder.”
They drove the 30 minutes to Boulder. First Joe took Jaye to the Dark Horse Bar and Grill, which opened in 1975, the year Joe first came to Boulder. They enjoyed burgers, fries, and beer at one of his favorite spots, all the while with Joe keeping his cool. After all, Maddon had an engagement ring in hi
s pocket. His plan was to drive after dinner to Scotty Carpenter Field, the old home of the Boulder Collegians, and propose to Jaye there. It was dark and late, and Joe no longer was as familiar with Boulder as he once had been. He couldn’t find the field. After wandering around a bit, he adjusted his plan. He knew where to go: Baseline Liquors.
It was 1:30 in the morning when Joe dropped to a knee in the parking lot of a liquor store in Boulder, Colorado, and asked Jaye if she would marry him. She said yes. It was perfect.
In 2014 Maddon was poking around online when he came across a slide of Bauldie Moschetti, the one with him seated field-level on the ledge of a dugout. He had to have it. He arranged for two poster-sized photographs of the shot, each of them framed and each without any identification. He hung one of them at Ava, his restaurant in Tampa.
He knew just what to do with the other one when he moved into the beautiful new manager’s office at Wrigley Field.
—
Tom Ricketts knew he needed to do something about the home clubhouse facilities at Wrigley Field as soon as he saw them for the first time. It was right before he closed on the purchase of the team.
“It was terrible,” he said. “I was stunned. It was like a junior high school clubhouse. So that was always a priority for me. We wanted to get a better clubhouse. I give a lot of credit to guys like Anthony Rizzo and Travis Wood, who were around back then, because we would tell them, ‘Hang in there. We’re getting a new clubhouse.’ You can’t tell people you’re a first-class organization and have third-rate facilities. We definitely wanted to get the facilities taken care of as soon as we could.”
In January 2013 the Cubs announced a $575 million renovation of Wrigley Field that would include not only the new clubhouse, but also the new scoreboards, renovation of the bleachers, luxury suites, upgraded wiring and plumbing, and renovations to the press box and visiting clubhouse facilities. The project would occur over four phases of off-season construction. After structural work was done after the 2014 season, Ricketts prioritized the home clubhouse facilities to be completed in time for Opening Day 2016. The new digs covered 30,000 square feet, making it the second-biggest such facility in the majors, behind only the Yankees’ facilities at Yankee Stadium.