The Extra 2% (16 page)

Another important part of doing the job right is self-awareness. Sternberg, Silverman, and Friedman made a commitment from the start to track the effectiveness of their decision-making. Draft picks would need to be scrutinized several years out, to see how the scouting staff could have done better. Ditto for trades, business partnerships, ticket sales strategies, and other decisions. Making mistakes was acceptable. Failure to learn from those mistakes was not.

“We’re constantly assessing what we’re doing,” Friedman said. “After we make decisions, we postmortem them at a later date. We keep copious notes on the variables we knew, everything we knew going in. Then we go back and look at it to review the process. It’s something we’re continuing to refine and will be in perpetuity. I hope to never get to the point where we’re content, or we feel great about everything and go into autopilot mode.”

Sternberg, Silverman, and Friedman knew they’d need to find unique individuals to fit into their nonhierarchical, self-reflective
system. Finding a manager of that stripe would be especially difficult. Under Vince Naimoli and Chuck LaMar, the Devil Rays had tried first-timers and crusty old veterans alike in the manager’s chair, only to find that they all held similar old-school beliefs about how to run a team. The new guard wanted someone different.

The club looked at Joe Girardi for the job. A World Series winner during the New York Yankees dynasty of the 1990s, Girardi had long been described as a future manager even while still playing. When he later landed a manager’s job, he carried his detail-oriented approach to that role, wielding a folder with him every game that contained the minutest stats on every player and matchup. Girardi would become known by critics as something of an overmanager, someone with a firm grasp of the little things who would drill decisions down to the tiniest detail and occasionally fail to recognize the more obvious (and often correct) move. That reputation would be earned away from Tampa Bay, though; Girardi signed instead to manage the Florida Marlins, then later the Yankees (where he would win another World Series).

Through a combination of fate and foresight, the Devil Rays ended up with someone else, a manager who fit the organization’s new culture perfectly. It would take a forward-thinking, unconventional mind to do the job, someone open-minded enough to deploy new, analysis-driven methods of making moves, but also caring and astute enough to get through to the young players the team was drafting and developing. It would take Joe Maddon.

There are only a few immutable rules in baseball. Never make the first out at home. Never share a bathroom stall with Jose Canseco. And never, under any circumstances, bring the winning run to the plate in the ninth inning if you don’t have to.

So you can imagine the buzz that rippled through the stadium when Joe Maddon did just that on August 17, 2008. That night the Rays took a 7–2 lead over the Rangers into the bottom of the ninth in Arlington. Texas trimmed the lead to 7–3, then loaded the bases on a Michael Young walk. The potential tying run was now strolling to the plate in the form of none other than Josh Hamilton. Catcher Dioner Navarro squatted, then turned his head for a sign from the dugout. Navarro squinted, shrugged, then popped out of his squat. Joe Maddon was ordering an intentional walk.

The Rays and Rangers broadcast crews were dumbfounded. The fans too. A few in the stands might have recalled Diamondbacks manager Bob Brenly intentionally walking Barry Bonds with the
bases loaded, but Bonds may have been the scariest hitter who ever lived. And it happened just once. This move was far rarer than any other rare baseball event, more unusual even than a perfect game or an unassisted triple play. Hamilton’s free pass would mark just the fifth such intentional walk in a major league game since 1900. It was the first in the American League since 1901, the junior circuit’s first season.

Going strictly by the numbers, Maddon’s decision to walk Hamilton was debatable. Baseball analyst Tom Tango’s research tells us that a team at bat with the bases loaded and two outs scores an average of 0.815 runs. Hamilton’s intentional walk added another run to the Rangers’ ledger, raising the situation’s run expectancy in a typical situation to 1.815 runs. Caveats abound. Tango’s research doesn’t isolate the ninth inning, in which a team can and should opt to score as many runs as needed to win, which is not always the same thing as the most runs possible.

More important in Maddon’s calculus was how likely Hamilton or Marlon Byrd, the on-deck hitter, were to produce a hit that would win, tie, or at least materially alter the outcome of the game. The entire 2008 season had been a big coming-out party for Hamilton, the Rangers’ star center fielder. To that point, nobody in the majors had driven home more runs than Hamilton. Finally fulfilling the potential that had convinced Tampa Bay to make him the very first pick in the amateur draft nine years earlier, Hamilton had crushed homers at a breakneck pace and put on a jaw-dropping show in the Home Run Derby just a month earlier. The righty-swinging Byrd, Maddon figured, was a much lesser threat than left-handed powerhouse Hamilton, especially with righty-erasing relief pitcher Dan Wheeler ready and waiting. Even so, the gap probably wasn’t as large as Maddon imagined. Hamilton was on his way to a monster year, but Byrd was no slouch himself. Even with Wheeler ready to enter the game, there was no guarantee that he’d retire Byrd and save the win for the Rays.

Maddon was violating one of baseball’s unbreakable rules. If the
move backfired and the Rangers won, Maddon would be berated for flouting the conventions of baseball, mocked for thinking he’d found new answers in a game that’s remained stubbornly stagnant for a hundred years.

Of all the professions a person can pursue in this country, perhaps only one—president of the United States—engenders more criticism and second-guessing than that of baseball manager. But no matter how unpopular a policy he unveils or how spectacularly an initiative fails, the president gets at least four years. Not so for the manager of a major league baseball club. A few high-profile errors or one dramatic, disappointing season can send a skipper to the unemployment line—even if the thinking behind the manager’s decisions was sound. In some cases, all it takes is one colossally bad result. One could surely debate the merits of Red Sox manager Grady Little’s decision to leave a tiring Pedro Martinez in during the eighth inning of Game 7 in the 2003 American League Championship Series. But after Pedro blew Boston’s 5–2 lead and the Red Sox eventually lost the game, Little got the ax. Maddon was among Boston’s top candidates to replace Little. Luckily for the Rays, he didn’t make the cut.

When you step through the door of the Third Base Luncheonette in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, the first thing you notice is the back wall. It’s cotton-candy pink, adorned by a faded green Sealtest sign, the same sign that’s marked that spot since Sealtest Dairy helped open the place in 1949. The Formica countertop shows the strain of tens of thousands of hoagie plates sliding across its surface. It winds its way through two seating areas, offering just enough space to feed the hungry souls who eat elbow to elbow on nineteen well-worn stools. Even the prices look like they come from the ’50s: four bucks for a loaded hoagie that’ll last you through the day. It’s the kind of joint you’d expect to find in an old anthracite town that never lost the coal miners’ mentality of a hundred years ago, where
every street looks the same, decade after decade, except for the cars. Sitting on one of these stools, you half-expect Marty McFly to barge through the front door.

The second thing you notice is the familiarity that permeates the air—that, and the smell of sweet peppers. Clad in a white apron, owner Dave Mishinski tends the grill. He’s cooked so much meat for so many years that he could do it with his eyes closed. Dave’s wife, Tina, flits from patron to patron, pouring coffee, scribbling down orders, nodding at the old-timers as they belly up to the counter. On the other side of the counter, Tina’s sister Charmaine tends to her own lot of hungry customers. When the lunch rush hits, they’re joined by Autumn, Dave and Tina’s daughter. She’s home from college helping out at Third Base, barely old enough to drink but already a seasoned veteran in the family business. When afternoon deliveries pull Dave away from the grill, son Jake steps in, packing on extra onions one minute, extra cheese/no mayo the next. Dave’s aunt Albina—Beanie to everyone who knows her—holds down the fort in back. She’s Third Base’s five-tool player, handling deliveries, sifting through paperwork, filling in on orders when needed. Well into her seventies, Beanie has spent three-quarters of her life at Third Base. This unassuming little luncheonette is run entirely by Joe Maddon’s family. Dave and the rest of the Mishinski clan are Joe’s cousins. Beanie is Joe’s small-in-stature, large-in-influence mother.

When Joe was growing up, it didn’t take Beanie long to realize she was raising an athlete. He was a terror at the plate in Little League. Later he was “Broad Street Joe,” so named for the main drag in Hazleton and Maddon’s admiration for Broadway Joe Namath; he donned flashy white cleats and the number 12 as the star quarterback at the Castle, the old high school turned middle school. He gravitated toward other sports-crazed kids. Joe, along with Jeff Jones and Willie Forte, became “the Three Amigos,” three inseparable best friends who met as kids while playing against each other in baseball and football, then came of age as multi-sport stars at Hazleton High School.

In the ’60’s, there wasn’t much for a young boy growing up in Hazleton to do other than play sports. And no one in town embraced them more heartily than Maddon, Jones, and Forte. By the time they reached high school, the three friends were at Maddon’s house every day, eating Beanie’s food, watching sports on TV, talking sports. During the school year, they played in baseball and football leagues, and later, basketball too. In the summertime, they’d run out in the morning armed with enough sports equipment to open a Foot Locker, not to return until sundown—a quick stop or two at Third Base for refueling aside.

Of course, many boys grew up in the ’60s in small towns playing sports morning till night. But the Amigos’ sports education started early. It was Maddon’s midget football team that first stimulated his analytical mind, setting him on the road to becoming a major league manager.

“We were nine years old,” recalled Forte, the defensive leader of his youth league and high school teams at middle linebacker, while Maddon led the offensive unit on those squads at quarterback. “Joe and I would design these football plays with eleven pennies on one side, eleven nickels or dimes on the other. This was 1963, and we were planning things like four–wide receiver sets, trip receivers on one side. We were asking questions normal kids at our age would never think to ask.”

“Joe thought nothing of calling audibles, even when we were ten, eleven years old,” recalled Jones. “Later on in junior high, coach would call a play, and Joe would say, ‘I don’t like the looks of that.’ Just like that, the play would be changed. It usually worked too.”

The boys’ coaches, Richie Rabbitz and Jack Seiwell, offered inspiration. For four years, they followed Maddon and Forte through the youth football league ranks. The boys would meet for skull sessions at Joe’s house, then bombard the coaches with questions—during games, at practice, and long after all the other kids went home. Rabbitz and Seiwell encouraged their star players’ inquisitive nature. But the questions were so relentless, and so precocious for
boys that age, that it was all the coaches could do to keep from cracking up laughing.

Rabbitz and Seiwell didn’t just listen for the sake of humoring their young players. They implemented those cutting-edge strategies on the field. While other teams ran a few running plays and one or two passing plays featuring one wide receiver, Maddon was running a series of complicated passing sets before he hit puberty. On defense, Forte would call plays featuring a seven-man defensive line, an unheard-of scheme that put a man on every blocker and cleared the way for Forte to stop ball carriers in their tracks, often behind the line of scrimmage. From pennies and nickels, the boys created innovative, real-life plays that worked again and again. You could count the number of games Maddon and Forte lost from ages nine to thirteen on one hand.