Joe Maddon is in the final season of his $6 million per year contract with the Chicago Cubs. And no matter how things turn out this year, it’s safe to say he’s the best manager in franchise history.
During his first four seasons at the helm, the Cubs have been to the playoffs four times and the National League Championship Series three times, and they won the World Series for the first time in 108 years in 2016.
To put that all into perspective, the Cubs have been to the playoffs in back-to-back years only once since 1906-08 when Frank Chance ran the squad, leading them the last two seasons to win the World Series.
Lou Piniella’s teams in 2007-08 got knocked out in the first round and didn’t win a game.
But if the recent past is precedent, Maddon won’t be back. He’ll go the way of other high-priced veteran managers like Dusty Baker, Joe Girardi, Mike Scioscia, John Gibbons and Bruce Bochy, who has already said he will leave the San Francisco Giants at the end of the season.
Bochy and Maddon are the highest-paid active managers, each earning $6 million. Those kind of salaries are going extinct like the California condor.
To be sure, there are anomalies. Early last month, the Cleveland Indians extended Terry Francona for two years; he was earning $4 million. The Colorado Rockies also re-upped Bud Black for three more years, presumably at a hefty increase above the $1.5 million he was making. Those are the exceptions, though, not the rule.
The Cubs have already won 402 regular-season games under Maddon. So a decision to part ways with the 65-year-old eclectic manager may not be easy or necessarily popular.
Theo Epstein, the club’s president of baseball operations, has said he would not talk extension with Maddon and will re-evaluate that proposition later in 2019.
Of course, if the 15-12 Cubs flounder toward the All-Star break, there’s no guarantee that Maddon will even finish the season. Crazier things have happened.
Meanwhile, Maddon has taken a “what, me worry” approach, claiming he’s having a renaissance this season dealing with the younger players and getting back to his roots as a coach, teaching as well as managing.
As he’s about to open a new restaurant called Maddon’s Post across the street from Wrigley Field, it’s a neat sales job, and Maddon is a master of all that.
“I’ve enjoyed this right now possibly more than I’ve ever enjoyed doing this,” Maddon said this past weekend as his club took two of three from the feisty Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field. “Part of it is this generational concept I’m trying to infuse myself with—the quote, unquote millennial group. My focus is to communicate enough to extrapolate the most out of these guys.”
How many managers sound like that?
There are some unsettled feelings among the Cubs’ hierarchy about the direction to go in. The franchise was recently valued by Forbes at $3.1 billion, the fourth-highest in the major leagues and a 7% increase over 2018, generating $452 million in revenue.
Yet during a strange early-spring-training media conference, Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts was asked why the team didn’t spend more money in the off-season, either to bring in free agents or to re-sign Maddon.
“That’s a pretty easy question to answer,” Ricketts said. “We don’t have any more.”
Sure. The Cubs have a $203 million player payroll this season. But nobody told Epstein to sign Yu Darvish for six years, $126 million or Tyler Chatwood for three years, $38 million. Neither of those deals looks good in the rearview mirror. That happens.
Darvish, plagued by a right elbow injury, has started 14 games and won three times in his little more than a season with the Cubs. Chatwood is 5-6 in 21 starts during the same period and has been relegated this season to the bullpen.
They can’t blame that on Maddon. And 400 wins is 400 wins no matter how you cut it.
“It just means primarily that we have good players,” Maddon said, trying to downplay the accomplishment. “That’s what it primarily means. I’ve been in a good situation from Jump Street, getting this opportunity to begin with. My point of development as a manager was I was very fortunate. I’d like that to continue for several more years. Ah, listen, it’s all about the players.”
But is it? In all due respect to Maddon’s modesty, the Cubs have had plenty of good teams with a variety of very good managers that never went to the promised land as they have under Maddon.
This is an organization that back in the Ernie Banks days changed managers so often under owner Phil Wrigley that it was like unpeeling another wrapper of his famous chewing gum.
Who can forget the infamous “College of Coaches” of the early 1960s when Wrigley changed managers nine times in two seasons, losing 193 games in the bargain?
Leo Durocher was brought in to win the pennant but ran his 1969 team into the ground, playing his eight regulars so much in the heat—and there were only day games then at unlit Wrigley Field—that they wilted to the New York Mets that September after leading the National League East all season. And that team had four eventual Hall of Famers: Banks, Billy Williams, Ferguson Jenkins and Ron Santo.
Good players, name manager, no dice.
Then there was Jim Frey, presiding over the team that blew the 1984 NL Championship Series to the San Diego Padres with another Hall of Famer, second baseman Ryne Sandberg; Don Zimmer leading the 1989 Cubs to an NLCS loss against the Giants with a Hall of Fame pitcher named Greg Maddux; Dusty Baker’s club crumbling to the Florida Marlins in the 2003 NLCS after Steve Bartman interfered with a ball that left fielder Moises Alou might have caught with Mark Prior on the mound.
Jim Riggleman (1998) and the aforementioned Piniella also had their chances.
Thus, Maddon’s modesty doesn’t ring true. He’s the only manager who led a talented team to break the dreaded Curse of the Billy Goat.
And so, it’s not a stretch to call him the greatest manager in Cubs history.
“Well, I appreciate that,” Maddon said. “What I’ve done is pretty much taken what I’ve learned and brought it to Chicago.”
Kudos to Epstein and Ricketts for bringing him there. They better think hard and think twice about who’s going to do any better.
