A few short years ago, Joe Maddon was being called a genius. He’d managed the underfunded Tampa Bay Rays to a pair of American East division titles and the 2008 World Series and followed that up by doing the impossible – leading the perennial woebegone Chicago Cubs to a World Series title in 2016, breaking a “curse” that was more than a century old.
After leaving the Cubs following the 2019 season, Maddon returned to his professional baseball roots – the Los Angeles/Anaheim Angels, where he’d been a player, scout, minor league manager and assistant coach for more than three decades. He was hired to manage the Angels before the COVID shortened 2020 season.
Everything pointed to a perfect match.
Then it wasn’t.
Even with two of the very best players in baseball, Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, in his everyday lineup, the Angels never threatened to make the postseason during Maddon’s two plus seasons, ending up a collective 18 games south of .500 during his tenure. He was fired on June 7 during what would end up a 12-game Angels losing streak.
Suddenly, Maddon wasn’t a genius after all.
Then again, the Angels have actually gotten worse, not better, since Maddon left town.
So maybe Joe Maddon wasn’t the problem in Anaheim? Maybe there were (are) bigger issues? And maybe, as Maddon intimated in a recent interview in the Tampa Times, it’s baseball’s new trend toward over reliance on the front office that’s handicapping a whole lot of big league managers these days.
Joe Maddon and Joe Girardi – both high profile and celebrated managerial hires, both fired earlier this season – are examples of old school baseball men who’ve fallen victim to a new school approach that threatens to make even great baseball managers irrelevant and even obsolete.
“The manager has so many voices in the back of his head,” Maddon told the times, that “by the time the game begins, it’s not his game like it had been. It’s absolutely the front office’s game. It’s at the point where some GMs should really just put a uniform on and go down to the dugout.”
There’s no doubt that the hiring trend in MLB for managers and coaches has veered away from the former player and baseball lifer and toward those who are all in on analytics…and are good at being told what to do in the seventh inning two hours before first pitch. It’s probably unfair to call them puppets, but if the strings fit…
“That’s something that should be done,” Maddon continued, pressing for a GM to don a uniform. “Because they try to work this middleman kind of a thing. And what happens is when the performance isn’t what they think it should be, it’s never about the acquisitional process. It’s always about the inability of coaches and managers to get the best out of a player. And that’s where this tremendous disconnect is formed.”
It was 10 seasons ago that the Colorado Rockies made the decision to implant front office exec Bill Geivett in the team’s Coors Field clubhouse, breaking a long standing tradition of separation of powers, as it were. The players and coaches were not happy with the move, and having the front office looking over his shoulder as he was preparing for that night’s game proved to be too much for then Rockies skipper Jim Tracy, who resigned after the season.
Perhaps that move by the Rockies was just a bit ahead of its time? And if so, what does it say about the direction of the National Pastime?
Understanding and the proper usage of analytics is a key quality for all big league managers these days. But so is the ability to use gut instinct, experience and the old fashioned eye test. When those things can’t be in balance, the game is in deep trouble. Baseball needs quality baseball men like Joe Maddon and Joe Girardi. It doesn’t need more Ivy Leaguers.
It will be fascinating to watch the first GM/Manager try to make key decisions on the fly with the outcome hanging in the balance. You know Maddon will be watching and shaking his head.
Check out Mark Knudson and Manny Randhawa of MLB.com on The Park Adjusted Rockies Podcast available on all major Podcast platforms.
More from The Woody Paige Sports Network:
- Woody Paige: That time I played blackjack with Michael Jordan in Monte Carlo
- John Elway’s 7 best moments as General Manager of the Denver Broncos
- Woody Paige: A tribute to the legendary John Madden
- MLB’s labor woes are a long way from being over
- Woody Paige: Will Russell Wilson become the $60 Million Man in Denver?
- Watching and Learning from the great Nolan Ryan
- Will LIV Golf end up more like the AFL…or more like the USFL?
