The Extra 2% (18 page)

Port had spent several days in Idaho Falls a few years earlier with Gomez and minor league pitching instructor and Hall of Famer Warren Spahn, when Maddon was a twenty-seven-year-old rookie
manager. The three men were struck by Maddon’s skill at running workouts. But there was more.

“There was a definite care and concern for his players, for the people he was working with,” Port recalled. “We found several of our young Latin American players had no experience with banking. They’d cash their checks and keep their money under mattresses. Joe took the initiative, he said, ‘Let me help you with this.’ Other people might have said, ‘That’s their problem.’ But Joe’s got a certain interest in people, a certain bent toward being helpful.”

Maddon quickly became known throughout the organization as a progressive thinker. In his early minor league days, he harped on the value of rest and nutrition, mental preparation and handling pressure, at a time when such topics were rarely discussed in baseball spheres. When technology became more prevalent a few years later, Maddon was an early adopter of all the latest gadgets, especially when they helped him gather and organize information.

Bill Bavasi, former general manager for the Angels and Seattle Mariners, started his career with the Angels in 1978, just as Maddon was winding down his playing days. One tight-budget year required Bavasi to tell Maddon he’d get a modest raise, far less than Bavasi felt Maddon deserved. Momentarily perturbed, Maddon’s eyes lit up when he saw the gift Bavasi bought him as a token of thanks and appreciation: a Sharp organizer, an early predecessor to the modern PDA that ran about $500 in those days—big bucks for Bavasi on his $15,000-a-year salary, much less Maddon’s more modest wages. Maddon embraced the new device, using it to organize the growing number of his tasks and to take copious notes on player performance. Years later, when the Angels began allotting funds for portable computer purchases, Bavasi pushed for Maddon to get one of those rudimentary, ten-pound behemoths. Everyone who’d worked with Maddon knew no one would appreciate a portable computer more, make better use of it, or be more willing to lug it around everywhere he went.

Later in his career, Maddon latched on to newer devices, wielding them with the confidence and enthusiasm of a tech-savvy
teenager. He became one of the earliest adopters of customized, small-ball pitching machines. If hitters could track a tennis ball going up to 140 miles per hour, the idea went, they’d have an easier time following a 90-mile-per-hour baseball in game situations. Maddon took the concept and tweaked it. He set the machines to lower heights so as to challenge hitters’ plane of vision. More challenging still, he began marking tennis balls with red and black marks. If hitters could call out “red” or “black” on high-speed pitches, they might gain a better approach to hitting that could yield better pitch selection, more favorable hitters’ counts, and more chances to drive the ball to all fields. Years later, star Rays third baseman Evan Longoria would prove to be a whiz at this exercise, amazing onlookers with his ability to call out pitches on their way to the plate. Did his incredible natural batting eye make Longoria a superstar hitter, or did the machines hone his pitch selection? Mostly the former—but Maddon liked to think a little of the latter too.

Meanwhile, Maddon kept finding new ways to inspire players. His seven-year run as minor league hitting instructor coincided with a big influx of organizational talent—future major league All-Stars Tim Salmon and Jim Edmonds ranked among his top pupils. One of Maddon’s favorite methods in those days was to give out motivational T-shirts.

“His most famous one was,
I GOT LOUD
,” said Bavasi. “It had a ball on it, screaming as it flew through the air, because it’d been hit so hard. What he was trying to do was get guys to forget their statistics and focus on hitting balls hard. If you hit the ball hard and made an out, no problem. When he came to your town, if you got loud, if you hit the ball on the nose a bunch of times, he’d give you this T-shirt. Guys really liked it.”

Maddon moved on to become minor league field coordinator for the Angels, then director of player development. In 1994, he finally got the call: he was headed to the big leagues to serve as the Angels’ bullpen coach. In the next twelve years, he would add the titles of first-base coach and dugout/bench coach to his résumé. By 2005,
Maddon had covered nearly every position in a major league organization other than general manager and batboy.

Ask him about the thirty-one years he spent in the Angels system and Maddon credits all those stops for helping him accumulate the knowledge and experience he’d later need to become a big league manager. But he saves the biggest accolades for the people who worked alongside him and mentored him on the way. Marcel Lachemann taught him how to handle a pitching staff, everything from knowing when to yank a starter to finding the right reliever for the right situation. Rick Down and Ben Hines influenced his already developed thoughts on hitting. Bobby Knoop and Larry Bowa taught him the subtler points of defense, how shallow to play outfielders in given situations, when to move fielders over, and when to play an occasional, aggressive shift. Terry Collins, Maddon said, was one of the brightest managers he ever met, passing along both tactical advice and suggestions for how to handle the twenty-five players who walk through the clubhouse every day.

Gene Mauch, Maddon said, was the first person to make a big impact on him. Mauch managed the Angels from 1981 to 1982 and again from 1985 to 1987, while Maddon was first cutting his teeth as a minor league manager. Whenever an organizational meeting would come up, Maddon would gravitate toward Mauch, soaking up whatever bits of wisdom the longtime skipper could offer.

“Gene, for me, was the guy that you never thought he was wrong,” Maddon recalled. “Whatever he said, you took it as gospel and it had to be right. I’m kind of inquisitive by nature, but with him, I never—if Gene Mauch said it, it has to be so. And he had a presence about him that I thought was spectacular. He wasn’t a loud, boisterous man at all. He’d throw a spread once in a while, but Gene was pretty much a communicator. The way he ran a game, and his thought process and his simplicity, I always thought he had more common sense than any person I had met to that point in baseball.”

But nobody clicked better with Maddon than Mike Scioscia. When Scioscia took over as the Angels’ manager in 2000, he and
Maddon quickly found common ground. Scioscia grew up in Morton, Pennsylvania, just ninety-eight miles from Hazleton. They liked the same music. Laughed at the same jokes. They agreed 95% of the time and engaged in lively debates the other 5%.

“I really didn’t know Joe [before that],” Scioscia said. “But even during those first conversations with him, you just saw that he has a very gifted baseball mind. He’s really a visionary. He’s about as progressive as anyone I’ve ever been around in the game of baseball.”

More than three decades spent climbing the ladder helped Maddon craft a unique viewpoint as a manager. He took the best that each of his mentors and peers had to offer, melded that knowledge with the kind of thick skin that only places like Idaho Falls and Peoria can impart, and became a manager who wasn’t afraid to fail. Unlike other baseball lifers who took a similar road to the majors, Maddon didn’t settle for conventional wisdom. He believed in his own instincts and brought new coaching methods to the fore. When he finally got his shot, Maddon became a near-overnight success—thirty-one years in the making. Trust the process, Maddon told himself, and success will never be a surprise.

When the Rays invited Maddon to interview for their manager job, they didn’t yet know they’d be sitting face-to-face with a field manager version of themselves. Andrew Friedman, Matt Silverman, and Stuart Sternberg all relied heavily on process-based analysis in their previous roles on Wall Street. They were just getting started in running the Rays’ daily operations, yet already they were using rigorous tools to analyze every aspect of the organization, from marketing and sales to stadium operations to player free agency. The team’s brain trust would be equally thorough when hiring their first manager.

The Rays’ scouting report on Maddon pointed to a promising profile. After three-plus decades in the Angels’ organization and a few short stints as interim manager of the major league club, Maddon
had built an army of supporters and fans within that organization, many of whom lobbied for their man to land a full-time manager’s gig. Those recommendations, combined with Maddon’s interviewing style, had nearly landed him a job with the 2004 Boston Red Sox.

If you’re into what-if scenarios, consider this: What if Joe Maddon, not Terry Francona, had gotten the Red Sox job after Grady Little’s 2003 ouster? Would Terry Francona have won a World Series (or two) elsewhere? Would Maddon have matched Francona’s accomplishments at the helm of a deep, powerful team? For Rays fans, the bigger question is this: Would the Rays’ stable of young talent have come together, gone from worst to first, and become one of the most feared up-and-coming teams in a generation under a manager
not
named Joe Maddon?

Friedman and company had no need to ponder such hypotheticals, not after hiring Maddon on November 15, 2005. A few years earlier, Michael Lewis’s best-seller
Moneyball
suggested that a baseball manager should serve as a sort of middle manager, cheerfully taking instructions and loyally implementing the strategies cooked up by the smart guys upstairs. Maddon would be damned if he was going to spend thirty-one years toiling away for his shot at the big job, only to serve as a mindless vessel for his bosses. Fortunately, Friedman also saw the manager’s role as being much broader and more interactive than the Art Howe caricature portrayed in
Moneyball
.

“When we sat down with Joe and went through the interview process, it was apparent that his thought process was similar to ours in a lot of respects, in terms of being very inquisitive and trying to view things differently than maybe is conventional,” said Friedman. “He fit in exactly with what we were looking for. And we view him as part of the management team. That was something that was important to us in hiring a manager.”

In Maddon, Friedman and the Rays brass found a manager who was both an extension of themselves and an independent thinker. From the start, Maddon’s creativity and bold decision-making
shone through. He once had speedy outfielder B. J. Upton steal second and third base in the sixth inning of a game against the Indians—
while trailing 9–0
. He took the super-utility role to new levels with Ben Zobrist, slotting the switch-hitter at seven different positions in 2009, against the strong objections of several local media members. Zobrist put up MVP-caliber numbers that year, both offensively and with the glove. Under Maddon, the Rays tossed out old conventions about righty versus righty and lefty versus lefty matchups. Facing starting pitcher Mike Mussina, a right-hander who fared better against left-handed hitters, Maddon stuffed his lineup with eight righty swingers. The Rays took a similar tack against righty Tim Wakefield, even ordering switch-hitters to bat right-handed against the knuckleballer.

Maddon faced perhaps the most scrutiny in his handling of Rays bullpens. He often eschewed the traditional closer role, opting instead to use his best relief pitchers in the highest-leverage situations. When J. P. Howell served as the Rays’ nominal closer, it wasn’t unusual to see him come into, say, a tie game with the bases loaded in the eighth inning—a far cry from the cushy two- or three-run lead, bases-empty, start-of-the-ninth chances given to most closers.

Even starting pitchers occasionally entered the bullpen mix. In a span of two and a half weeks during the summer of 2010, the Rays sent James Shields and then Matt Garza into the late innings of close games, as relief pitchers. In a June game against the Marlins, Maddon tapped Shields to hold the line in the tenth inning. He summoned Garza in the ninth inning of a game against the Red Sox. In both cases, the manager’s hyper-aggressive style of relief usage had prompted the move. Against Florida, Maddon had burned most of his pen earlier in the game, trotting out four different relievers to cover a single inning. Rather than go to one of his two weakest relievers in the tenth inning, he sent out Shields. Against Boston, the Rays had worked top bullpen arms Joaquin Benoit and Rafael Soriano hard in the prior few days, leaving a spent bullpen that needed a lift. Beyond mere situational
matchups, though, Maddon and pitching coach Jim Hickey used a strategy that was achingly simple, yet rarely deployed by other teams: starting pitchers usually throw off a bullpen mound halfway between two starts to keep their arms strong and limber and avoid atrophy. Rather than have Shields and Garza waste those pitches against imaginary hitters, the Rays sent both straight into the fire. The strategy worked: Shields pitched a scoreless tenth for the win against the Fish, while Garza slammed the door in the ninth against the Sox.

“You talk about ‘thinking outside of the box,’ I think that expression was made for Joe,” said Scioscia. “Joe would’ve been an incredible engineer if he wasn’t in baseball, because he has that type of mind. He could look at parts of an organization, parts of a team, and in imaginative ways, just based on sound common sense, make an organization better, make people better, make a team better.”