The Extra 2% (19 page)

Not all of the Rays’ unorthodox moves are Maddon’s creations. In fact, many of the team’s tactics start as data points on a graph pieced together by James Click, Erik Neander, or another front-office number cruncher. Yet that too counts among the advantages the Rays derive from having Maddon at the helm. The manager craves information and is receptive to new ideas. If anything, Maddon can be more skeptical of old baseball traditions than the new ways of looking at the game.

“He’s absolutely the most willing to do something that’s out of the ordinary,” said Hickey. “A lot of managers will do things simply to cover their butt. If it doesn’t go right, well, ‘I did what I was supposed to do.’ But Joe is absolutely willing to totally go against that. Rightfully so too. A lot of the things that are in ‘the book’ are antiquated and no longer fit today’s game.”

A delicate blend of hands-on experience and data application goes into every decision the Rays make, and Maddon’s decisions are no exception. Before a game, you might see him exchanging player acquisition possibilities with Andrew Friedman, poring over reams of data sent in by Click and Neander, digesting copious reports from advance scouts, spitballing ideas with his pitching and hitting
coaches on how to snap players out of slumps, and batting around scenarios with various players.

It’s in that last area, interacting with players, that Maddon receives the most glowing reviews. Soon after taking the manager’s job with the Rays, Maddon posted a series of motivational and philosophical quotes throughout the clubhouse for players to read—a natural progression from his “I Got Loud” catchphrase as a minor league instructor.

To inspire his players and bring them together, Maddon has concocted slogans for every season. His most famous creation has been the “9 = 8” mantra of 2008—a way of urging nine players to play hard for nine innings every game so that the Rays can become one of eight teams to make the postseason. To reward them, he’s arranged for teamwide shipments of Ed Hardy T-shirts, the de rigueur choice for young ballplayers. To keep them loose, he’s created themes for different road trips, including a Johnny Cash theme for which he himself, a trendy, glasses-sporting wine aficionado, added jet-black hair dye to his look. To promote team unity, he joined the likes of B. J. Upton, Jonny Gomes, and others in sporting a Mohawk haircut—a “Ray-hawk,” as it was called during those heady stretch-run days of the 2008 season.

All of Maddon’s interactions with his players, he said, are rooted in positive reinforcement.

“It’s just how I was raised,” said Maddon. “My parents and my father’s side of the family in particular were just a bunch of hard-working
men that never had a bad day. Also psychologically—I mean, I read a lot, and I’ve been influenced somewhat by what I’ve read. I know one thing—the negative method of teaching, for me, it never worked.”

Some outside observers have scratched their heads over Maddon’s methods. They didn’t know what to make of his practice of serving chips, salsa, and beer in his daily meetings with the media. And was he too focused on outside pursuits like fine wines? Was he getting too close to his much-younger players? And what about those funky, horn-rimmed glasses? If the Rays’ youth movement had failed, Maddon would have drawn harsh criticism for his unorthodox ways.

His old friend and colleague Bavasi said that Maddon doesn’t do any of those things to be purposely quirky. His girlfriend bought him the glasses, so he wore them. He likes fine wines, so he drinks them. He reads self-help psychology books and sees the value in motivational quotes, so he shares some of those quotes on the clubhouse wall.

“I remember, in 2007, you’d hear people say, if Joe’s off-the-wall approach doesn’t work pretty quick, he’s out of there,” Bavasi recalled. “But Joe’s never going to sit there and think, ‘What do I have to do to keep my job?’ He sticks to his plan, he’s never scared, he doesn’t waver on things because of nerves. Everything he does is to make sure that a player gets the most out of his ability and that the team gets the most out of him.” (Memo to CEOs and small-business owners out there: hire this guy, or at least someone who thinks like him.)

For a team that seeks to quantify and improve as many parts of the organization as possible, it’s not clear whether Maddon’s efforts to reach his players somehow translate into more wins on the field or whether they’re merely intangible niceties. What is clear is this: if Maddon didn’t earn his players’ trust, they’d tune out his motivational efforts or just laugh him off the plane the first time he showed up wearing a jumpsuit or a cowboy hat for a team flight.

Veteran Rays outfielder Gabe Kapler once took a year off from
playing in the middle of his career to manage in the low minors. If he goes back into managing when his playing days are over, Kapler said, he’ll try to emulate many of Maddon’s best traits.

“I don’t know if you can duplicate it, but his energy,” said Kapler, “and his ability to look you in the eye and smile and make you feel comfortable. I don’t think there are a lot of managers out there like that.”

“When I first got here, I was filled with emotions, wondering what the big leagues were supposed to feel like, what I was doing right or wrong,” recalled Fernando Perez, an outfielder for the Rays who’s also a published poet and
New York Times
blogger. “Joe just told us: ‘Don’t do anything different than what you’ve been doing all along,’ that we should just enjoy it. He didn’t just put me at ease, Joe was able to do that with an entire group of people. As a writer concerned with poetry, when you can do so many things with just a few words of rhetoric, that’s amazing to me.”

When a manager connects with his players and earns the trust of management, he starts earning increased job security. Silverman notes that many managers would have been looking over their shoulders after two losing seasons like the Rays had in Maddon’s first two years at the helm. But the front office preached patience, liked how the team’s player development was going, and liked the job Maddon was doing with his young charges. When the Rays notched their first winning season, first playoff berth, first division title, and first AL pennant in 2008, Maddon earned more security, eventually inking a contract extension to keep him with the Rays through 2012.

When self-confidence, an even-keeled personality, a nose for analysis, and job security come together, you get coaches and managers willing to make decisions that fly in the face of conventional wisdom. The masses hated New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick’s 2009 decision to go for it on fourth-and-2 from his own 28-yard line with 2:08 to go against the archrival Colts. But Belichick firmly believed that the surest way to beat the Colts and Peyton Manning was to get one more first down, thus keeping the bal
out of Manning’s hands. The decision was disastrous. The Colts stopped the Patriots on fourth down, then quickly drove for the winning touchdown on a short field. The loss was tough. But the Patriots’ coach didn’t second-guess himself (not publicly anyway). Trust the process, the three-time Super Bowl champion coach believed, and the results will take care of themselves.

Moments after the kid from Hazleton ordered a bases-loaded intentional walk, standing a century’s worth of baseball wisdom on its head, Dan Wheeler struck out Marlon Byrd to win the game. This was merely a bonus in a season full of happy endings.

David Pinto was in trouble. He’d dealt with high-pressure situations before, compiling cutting-edge data for STATS Inc., doing research for ESPN’s
Baseball Tonight
, and scraping to make a living with Baseball Musings, one of the first baseball blogs ever to gain traction with readers. But never before had the president of a major league team sent him a letter accusing him of a grave misdeed.

The note, sent by Rays president Matt Silverman, detailed to Pinto the steps taken by the team to rid itself of its old name. The newly christened Rays spent thousands of man-hours and big bucks brainstorming over a new name and logo. They fined any employee for using the old Devil Rays name, with the proceeds going to charity. Now, thanks to the team’s elaborate network of spies, they’d nailed Pinto in the act. The penalty for this egregious act? One dollar. Pinto paid the fine, times ten.

The Rays hit several other baseball writers with fines that off-season, drumming up publicity for their “Drop the Devil” campaign. It was a rare display of cheeky humor in an industry where those in charge often take themselves too seriously. But Silverman and the rest of the front office had bigger ideas than just drawing a few chuckles. For eight seasons, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were the butt of everyone’s jokes, poisoned by the mishaps of Vince Naimoli. The franchise made better decisions after Naimoli’s ouster, but kept losing. Other teams’ fans saw the name change as a con, as window-dressing for a team that still stunk. Erasing all of this team’s bad karma would require more than a little fine-tuning. It would take massive changes in Tampa Bay’s on-field performance … and a full-blown exorcism.

“It gave everyone an excuse to start fresh and separate themselves from the Devil Rays and everything associated with the name,” Silverman said.

The new regime’s quest to change the team’s brand and reputation began more than two years before the official name change. One of Silverman’s first hires would be the man in charge of ramping up customer service and fan entertainment at the Trop.

Darcy Raymond worked as a brand manager for Procter & Gamble, then as a marketing VP for
Mamma.com
, a search engine
company based in Raymond’s hometown of Montreal. Mamma’s business model was to build a meta-search product that could combine ten to twelve engines at a time. The idea was better than the execution, though. Mamma’s core product wasn’t very good, and the company was being run by twenty-somethings with limited business experience. The firm had reeled in $27 million in venture capital at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, failed to cash out before the bubble burst, then struggled. By hiring Raymond, Mamma’s brass hoped it could find someone who would drive traffic to the site, which could eventually lead to that most elusive of Internet start-up goals: real profits. The hire proved to be a bad fit.

“He was spending money and driving traffic to the site,” said Jeremy Wiseman, Mamma’s former director of business development. “But the CEO didn’t understand that if you spend $1 million on marketing, you won’t get it back, at least not for a long time. Darcy’s approach was right for consumer goods, but a Web search company was a different model. We didn’t have the patience to try and build a brand. A baseball team could be more conducive to that type of brand-building. In baseball you’re trying to sell tickets, but also to go beyond that, to build a brand, get some buzz behind it, and build for the long term.”

Raymond left Mamma, eventually landing at Harvard Business School. When he and classmate Brian Auld graduated in 2005, both went looking for new career paths. Auld had worked as a teacher at East Palo Alto Charter School, a K-8 school that gained renown for its teaching standards in a community that was rife with unemployment and vastly different from the neighboring enclaves of Palo Alto and Menlo Park. This time, he opted for a different direction, signing on with the Devil Rays. Auld quickly reached out to Raymond, inviting him to do some marketing consulting for the team. Auld would ascend to the role of senior vice president of business operations, while Raymond eventually took over as VP of branding and fan experience.

Raymond’s experience at P&G would guide the rebranding of
the Devil Rays. He urged the team to emphasize the elements that get people excited about the game. Get people looking forward to the day in February when pitchers and catchers would report by marketing the team during the off-season. Play up the game’s history and its heroes. Appeal to its status as a piece of Americana. Even raise the stakes for catching a ball hit into the stands: the D-Rays installed a new policy that enabled any fan who caught a home run hit by a Rays player to get it autographed before leaving the ballpark—a unique promotion.