The Chicago Cubs had a terrible exhibition game early last March, a game typical of how they had played in the years leading up to the hiring of Joe Maddon, filled with mental mistakes. The folks in the Cubs' front office were nothing less than thrilled.
They wanted Maddon to see the collection of Cubs at their absolute worst so that he could see first-hand what needed correcting, and so he could immediately raise the bar of expectations. The next day, Maddon strolled to the middle of Sloan Park, the Cubs' sparkling spring-training field in Mesa, Arizona, and with a smile he talked about how fixes were necessary. More to the point, Maddon explained that the fixes would be made, not the sort of words often uttered by a manager of the Cubs over the last century.
Not only did the team clean up the mistakes, they finished the 2015 season with 97 wins, more than all but two other teams in the majors, and advanced past St. Louis into the National League Championship Series. That Maddon won NL Manager of the Year was a foregone conclusion. The real question now is whether some artist should start designing a statue for him, given his immediate popularity in Chicago and the club's 24-win improvement over the 2014 season.
The Cubs' front office is fluent in analytics, overflowing with numbers, and conventional wisdom among the spawn of Moneyball has been that managers aren't really as important as we had always thought. More and more, they have been marginalized.
By the end of the 2015 season, however, Cubs staffers were reassessing that assumption because of the difference they believed that Maddon made. Place the same group of players in the hands of most other managers, they agreed, and the team simply wouldn't have won as many games. "Not even close," one coach said.
Mike Borzello, part of Maddon's staff, had been a bullpen catcher with the Yankees when Joe Torre managed that team in New York. As he listened to Maddon work with the players all season, bringing in a magic act, zoo animals, and catering a meal before a workout, Borzello came to believe that Maddon was like some combination of Torre and Phil Jackson because of how he affected the players.
"Has he raised the level of urgency?" I asked Borzello once.
"No," Borzello said, smiling. "In fact, he's lowered it."
By putting the players at ease, Borzello thought, by relaxing them and reducing the busy work a lot of teams tend to do over the course of a long season, Maddon was able to reduce the physical and emotional pressure the players put on themselves. By season's end, the Cubs had a 21-year-old shortstop in Addison Russell and a rookie third baseman in Kris Bryant, and they had moved All-Star shortstop Starlin Castro to second base on the fly. Incredibly, it all worked. Maddon made it all work.
After the Cubs were swept by the Mets in the NLCS, Maddon emerged from the home dugout at Wrigley Field to walk to the postgame news conference. He bore the same smile that he had in March, seemingly the same cheery confidence. Cubs fans who had lingered in the stands stood and cheered him, and Maddon offered an affectionate wave of thanks. You couldn't help but think this was only a first step, and that eventually, Maddon and the Cubs would fix it and get October right.