Fuck, yeah!”
It’s a Zen trick, that ability to balance fun and business, looseness and precision, spontaneity and discipline. And the person charged with maintaining that equilibrium on the resurgent Cubs is first-year manager Joe Maddon, who has won over the city and its sportswriters with his old-school baseball intuition, offbeat intellect, and New Agey managerial style almost as well as he’s charmed the players. Meanwhile the Cubs have risen to a winning record and now challenge for a playoff spot for the first time since president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer took control of the team at the end of 2011, deliberately crashed the franchise, and rebuilt from the ashes, drafting prime young talent with the top picks allotted to losers, then waiting for those players to develop and arrive at the big leagues.
With his spiky gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses, the 61-year-old Maddon has the look of a frazzled genius, equal parts Christopher Lloyd’s Doc in Back to the Future and Casey Stengel, the “Ol’ Perfesser” who guided the New York Yankees to several championships. He would most likely be an iconoclast in whatever field he chose to pursue, but he’s especially so in the realm of MLB managers, typically guided by “the book” of baseball strategy and by hard-guy conventions that have ruled the game seemingly since its inception. For there are two types of baseball managers: the hard-ass and the so-called players’ manager, and teams and general managers typically alternate between one and the other to give players a new prevailing attitude, either taking an overly regimented bunch that has forgotten how to enjoy the game and granting them a little freedom, or conversely taking a chaotic bunch and imposing a little much-needed discipline to remind them it is, after all, about execution and winning.
Maddon explained moving Castro down in the batting order during a slump by saying, “I just think he’s overboogeying it a little bit,” that is, thinking too much, a common baseball affliction in that great divide between spontaneity and consideration. Going off on a tangent during a pregame media session about which figures from history he’d invite to his ideal dinner, he immediately identified writers James Michener, Pat Conroy, and Mark Twain, while also throwing in another baseball iconoclast, Branch Rickey, the Cardinals and Dodgers exec who developed the farm system and broke baseball’s color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson.
For good measure, Maddon owns a camper he named Cousin Eddie, where he played host to Epstein and Hoyer last fall out on the road, immediately after the baseball season ended and he’d opted out of an additional year of his contract in Tampa Bay, making him suddenly available to take the Cubs job.
Maddon hasn’t yet had to deal with talk of the curse. That comes only with pennant fever and the approach of the playoffs, whereas for now both players and fans are delighted enough just to have the team winning. Yet Maddon has shown that he has a few new tricks up his sleeve, never more so than when, after a brief rough stretch, he invited a magician to perform in the team’s clubhouse before a game in New York against the Mets at the end of June. Later that same series, Rizzo pulled off his own sleight of hand—or, rather, of foot—when, dead to rights sliding into third base on a steal attempt, he drew his legs in as the third baseman whiffed on a swipe tag, then extended his legs, hit the bag, and popped up before the fielder could actually lay a glove on him. Called safe, Rizzo turned to the Cubs dugout and said, quite clearly to all lip readers, “It’s magic! It’s magic!” The Cubs went on to win the game and alter their fortunes, playing an extended series of taut games so that they entered the All-Star break in mid-July in position to make the playoffs for the first time since Piniella’s last fiasco, in 2008.
