The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  It was an idyllic life in its simplicity. Hazleton was a place where doors remained unlocked and so did neighbors’ hearts. Joey Maddon enjoyed the greatest gift a child can know: he was loved. Beanie worked as a bookkeeper and waitress around the corner on Garibaldi Court at the Third Base Lucheonette—so named because it is the “next best place to home.” Joe took Joey to Yankee Stadium for his first major league game in 1962, when Joey was eight years old, to see the Mick and the Yankees play the White Sox. On the way out through centerfield—fans could file out through the field in those days—Joey saw on a merchandise stand a blue Cardinals cap with a red “STL” on the front panel. Little Joey was smitten. Joe bought him the hat, and a Cardinals fan was born. That same year, Joey awoke on Christmas morning to find under the tree a red Flexible Flyer sled with a chrome bumper, still his best Christmas present ever.

  The boy proved to be a skilled athlete. Up Ninth Street, past the cemeteries, Maddon would hit home runs off the water tower in leftfield at the Little League field. In high school he excelled at football, as a quarterback, and baseball, as a pitcher and shortstop. Friends called him “Broad Street Joey,” the Hazleton version of Broadway Joe Namath, his favorite player, or “Termite” because he was small and feisty, or “Monsignor,” because of his clean language.

  “I never cussed,” he said. “My dad would go nuts now.”

  Joey never had slept outside of his own bed in Hazleton until as a senior at Hazleton High School he went on football recruiting trips to Gettysburg and Brown. He felt uncomfortable on both trips. Eventually, he decided to play football for coach Neil Putnam at Lafayette, about 55 miles from home. Joseph and Beanie drove him there in the fall of 1972, dropped him off at Room 123 with a footlocker to hold his belongings, and said good-bye. Three days later Joey walked to a pay phone at the end of the hallway and called Beanie.

  “I’m out of here,” he told her. “I can’t do this. I want to come home and be a plumber just like dad.”

  Beanie knew her son had no interest in plumbing.

  “No, you’re not,” she told him. “You are not coming home, so just put that thought out of your head. Everything is going to be fine.”

  Just two weeks later, after starting well with the freshman football team, Joey decided he never wanted to go home.

  “Lafayette was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Maddon said. “The people that I met, learned some social skills finally—I was really shy. I was painfully shy. So going down there, meeting the people that I did, living under that environment, the educational component, the liberal arts education—all that stuff. I didn’t realize at the time how important it was going to be to me.”

  During freshman football practices, Joe could hear the crack-crack-crack of batting practice on the baseball diamond being played two fields over. Baseball in the fall? The idea was foreign to him. He had never heard of such a thing. But one thing he knew when he heard those sounds: he wanted that. Now that he knew it was possible, he wanted baseball all year round.

  Maddon missed spring football that school year with a badly sprained ankle, though he was still in line to be the varsity starting quarterback come fall. As he packed up his Volvo for the drive to Lafayette to start fall football practice, he felt an ache in his heart. He wanted baseball. He went through football conditioning drills and wanted to throw up. He ran the required six-minute mile and wanted to throw up. That’s when he told the coaches he was done with football. He wanted to play baseball.

  “My dad didn’t talk to me for six months,” he said. “But I had to do it.”

  The coach of the Lafayette baseball team was a man named Norm Gigon, who had signed with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1958 out of Colby College, where he’d earned a degree in history and government. Gigon toiled eight years in the Phillies minor league system. During three of those off-seasons, Gigon earned a master’s degree in history from the University of Rhode Island. He wrote his master’s thesis on British imperialism in East Africa. Veteran Philadelphia manager Gene Mauch once summed up Gigon’s place in the Phillies organization succinctly: “He doesn’t even look like a ballplayer.”

  Convinced the Phillies were not giving him a chance to reach the majors, and wanting nothing of being a career minor leaguer, Gigon was on the verge of quitting. He gave away all his equipment, except his glove. That’s when former major leaguer Pete Reiser, an executive with the Cubs, told him he needed a change of scenery. He promised him Chicago would give him an opportunity. In June 1966 Chicago gave him that opportunity. The Cubs traded for Gigon.

  A year later Gigon went to major league spring training camp with the Cubs. When third baseman Ron Santo suffered a spike wound that would keep him out 10 days, manager Leo Durocher gave Gigon playing time at third. Gigon, taking advantage of the opportunity, swung a hot bat and made the team. In his first major league start, at the age of 28, he hit a home run at Wrigley Field off Juan Pizarro. He cooled off, though, and hit .171 that season in 34 games at second base, third base, and rightfield. After the season, he quit to take the job at Lafayette.

  Gigon knew what it took to be a professional baseball player. In Maddon Gigon saw a tough, smart kid from Hazleton with a good bat, but one who was not fast and a bit undersized. He called Maddon into his office one day and gave it to him straight: “The only chance you have at playing pro ball is as a backup catcher,” Gigon said. And with that, Maddon became a catcher, a position that literally and figuratively gave him a view of the whole field.

  Like Maddon, Nick Kamzic was born in Pennsylvania with a love for baseball. He moved to Chicago after his father died, and he signed out of high school there to play minor league baseball in the Detroit Tigers organization. His career was interrupted when he was drafted into the army in 1942. He spent four years in Europe, during which time he was shot in France and hit by shrapnel in Germany. When he returned to the states, Kamzic played briefly in the minor league systems of the Cardinals and the Reds before he quit in 1947 to become a scout. Kamzic drove 100,000 miles a year, from Texas to Canada, as a scout for Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and the Angels, where oral history has it that he was the first hire by Angels owner Gene Autry.

  To supplement his meager income from scouting, Kamzic sold car wax and shoes, helped build bridges, and worked in factories. Kamzic became a legend in scouting circles. He helped the Angels sign future big leaguers, such as Jim Fregosi, Doug DeCinces, Jim Abbott, Frank Tanana, and Andy Messersmith. In the summer of 1975 a junior catcher from Lafayette caught his eye. The Angels, on Kamzic’s advice, and with the backing of cross-checking scout Loyd Christopher, signed Maddon.

  Maddon spent the next three years in Class-A ball with the Angels, hitting a respectable .269, but mostly as a backup without much playing time. Then one day, after he hit .261 in just 42 games for Salinas in the California League, a letter on Angels stationery arrived at his tiny apartment in Salinas—“a closet,” Maddon called his pad. The letter was from Mike Port, the Angels’ farm director (and later the Boston Red Sox general manager who would be replaced by Theo Epstein). It was a notice of his release.

  Maddon wasn’t ready to go home. He was 24 years old, did not have a college degree and, most importantly, was convinced that he could still play. He worked out that winter at Horton Junior College in Salinas and called around for a job. After failing to find one in affiliated baseball, he tried out for the Bakersfield Outlaws, an independent team in the Class-A California League. One day Loyd Christopher came walking on the field toward Maddon with a bag filled with small, plastic Wiffle balls.

  A former outfielder, Christopher had played 16 years of professional baseball, but only 16 games in the majors, split among three teams, the Red Sox, the White Sox, and the Cubs. His Cubs career was but a sip of coffee: he spent six weeks with the 1945 Cubs but his entire playing time consisted of just two innings in one game as a defensive replacement. A knee injury forced his retirement from baseball in 1952 (though he tried a brief comeback in 1955). He took
a job selling Chevrolets in Richmond. But in 1957 Christopher began what would be a 35-year run as a scout, bouncing among six teams, right up to his death in 1991.

  Most scouts sit in the same section of seats behind the plate. Christopher was the rare scout who sat by himself at games. He didn’t want to be distracted. He preferred being alone with his thoughts. When he saw Maddon trying out for the 1979 Bakersfield Outlaws, he figured he could help him. Flipping small Wiffle balls to Maddon from 20 feet away—a common drill now, but almost unheard of back then—Christopher retooled Maddon’s swing.

  “That spring I hit the ball as well as I ever hit the ball,” Maddon said. “I made this independent team in Bakersfield, but it didn’t quite work out. That’s the kind of guy Loyd was. He’d come out and work with his guys with a bag of Wiffle balls. He was well ahead of his time. He had his own thoughts. If you get a guy who is not active with his top hand when he was swinging, have him take the batting glove off the bottom hand and just keep it on top to get their top hand active. That was Loyd.”

  Maddon left the Outlaws before the season started, looking for a more stable place to play.

  “I wanted to still play,” Maddon said. “Of course people thought I couldn’t play anymore. I still thought that I could.”

  He called Joe Gagliardi, the president of the Cal League, which was running a co-op team called the Santa Clara Padres. The Mariners, A’s, Angels, Padres, and Cardinals supplied players to the Santa Clara team. The team wore green, red, gold, and white uniforms designed to honor the many Italian, Mexican, and Portuguese families in the area. Maddon asked Gagliardi for a job with the Santa Clara Padres.

  “We don’t really need you,” Gagliardi said. “We don’t need another catcher.”

  Maddon begged him for a spot.

  “Tell you what,” Gagliardi said. “Two hundred bucks a month. That’s it. Take it or leave it.”

  Maddon took it.

  “I wanted to play so badly I took the two-hunski,” he said. “Listen, I just wanted to put on a uniform and I thought I could still do it.”

  The Santa Clara Padres were supposed to play their home games at Washington Park, which was built in 1935 and featured a wooden grandstand with seating for only 1,000 people. But issues with the field forced the team to play most of its games at San Jose Municipal Stadium, which they shared with another team in the same league, the San Jose Missions.

  The Santa Clara Padres were terrible. They finished in last place with a record of 47–93 and finished last in the league in attendance. Maddon was the fourth-string catcher. He played only 20 games: 11 behind the plate, 5 in the outfield, 2 at third base, and 2 more as a pinch hitter. He hit .250 with no home runs. Most of his starts behind the plate happened because the Padres had a knuckleball pitcher named Tracy Harris, and the three other catchers wanted no part of catching his knuckleball. Maddon had five passed balls in his 11 games.

  One day during that 1979 season his scout friend Loyd Christopher came up to Maddon with some advice.

  “When are you going to stop playing and start coaching and managing?” Christopher asked him.

  Maddon was only 25 years old, still too young to give up on his dreams of the big leagues.

  “I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ ” Maddon said. “I was upset. I was very upset.

  “Obviously, he was right.”

  Maddon began to take stock of his career as a baseball player at that moment. He was living in that closet of an apartment in Salinas and commuting 120 miles round-trip to be the fourth-string catcher on a terrible co-op team in Class-A for the salary of $200 a month, nearly all of which he put toward gas money for his Volkswagen.

  Late in the season, the Santa Clara Padres were playing the Fresno Giants. It was late in the game when Maddon, dressed in the colors of the Italian flag, with an interlocking “SC” on his helmet, took a turn at bat. It was his 579th plate appearance in his 170th career minor league game.

  “And I hit a double down the leftfield line,” Maddon said. “It was my last pro at-bat. And I moved on from there.”

  He tossed aside his dreams and took Christopher’s advice. In 1980 he quit playing and returned to the Angels as a scout, beginning what would be his 25-year run in the organization as a scout, coach, manager, instructor, and personnel director. Maddon earned his first managerial gig the following year, 1981, with the Idaho Falls Angels, a rookie league team. He was 27 years old. The team was miserable. The Idaho Falls Angels went 27–43. The team ERA was 6.37. But Maddon was on his way.

  One day in spring training of 1984, Maddon, then-manager of the Peoria Chiefs, an Angels Class-A team, was throwing batting practice in cage number one at Gene Autry Park in Mesa, Arizona, when an unmistakable man with perfectly coiffed white hair and his warm-up jacket collar standing up on the back of his neck walked up to the netting.

  “C’mere.”

  It was Gene Mauch, the legendary manager and, at the time, the Angels’ director of player personnel.

  Maddon stopped throwing and walked over to him.

  “What’s up, Gene?”

  “You’ve created a great atmosphere here.”

  “Thank you.”

  And just like that, Mauch walked away. Maddon resumed throwing. Coming from an icon like Mauch, the words made an impact on him.

  “I remember going home that night, going, ‘What is he talking about?’ ” Maddon said. “[Angels pitching coach] Marcel Lachemann, right around the same time, told me how positive I was. I had never thought about it. Never knew that about myself. He made me think about being positive, and Gene made think about creating atmosphere, in a good way.

  “So my next thought was, What are they talking about? I had to understand first what Gene was talking about, because my concern was, What if I can’t do this again next year? What am I doing? How do I do this again? I thought it started with communication. I really did.”

  Mauch affirmed Maddon’s natural inclination to create a positive working environment by creating trust with his players, which he believed began with honest, open communication. Maddon, though, still was learning how to manage. Two years later, managing the 1986 Double-A Midland Angels, another bad team, he flipped out after another languid loss. He ran to a newspaper stand and bought all kinds of newspapers. He grabbed a pair of scissors and cut out the classified ads, then taped them all over the clubhouse, including on the back of the bathroom stalls so that the players could read the HELP WANTED notices when they used the toilet. He threatened them.

  “If you’re not going to play baseball hard and you’re not going to play baseball well, these are your alternatives!” he told his players.

  Said Maddon, “I thought this was a great idea because I was so upset over what I perceived to be a lack of caring and a lack of effort, and I did not have a good team and I resorted to my lowest level ever.”

  The lesson Maddon learned from his Midland gimmick stayed with him: there was no room for negativity in a clubhouse. He told himself he would never forget that lesson if he ever had the chance to run a big league team.

  Maddon had been managing in the minors for six years—all without a winning team. Bill Bavasi, the general manager, reassigned him to serve the minors as a roving instructor.

  “He got me into roving because I was probably getting too intense,” Maddon said. “And the best thing that ever happened was I became a rover because I got to see everybody—go to town for five or six days, you saw both teams’ styles; your team, the other team—and you learn what you like and you really learn what you didn’t like. I loved that. Roving is the best minor league job.

  “I was hitting coach, catching coach, field coordinator, baserunning coach, eventually I did outfield, and I always consulted with the pitching coaches because I love pitching. I pretty much was involved in everything. At that time you had to wear several hats. There wasn’t a specific guy for each one.”

  The education of a future big league manager continued in Eur
ope. Maddon signed on as an advisor for a company that sold pitching machines, a role that included staging clinics across the country and, after the 1993 season, in Europe. Maddon gave one-hour presentations on nine different topics between a Friday afternoon and Sunday morning. Before he left on the trip, Maddon wrote an outline on nine different facets of baseball—he still has the papers today. The preparation and the teaching emboldened him.

  “You will remember 75 percent of what you write down,” Maddon said. “And you will remember 90 percent of what you teach. So I wrote it down and then I taught it. And of course I was always open to amending, but the clinical work really helped me learn my stuff, to the point when I get on the field to teach, I feel a hundred percent comfortable with what I’m saying and how I’m saying it. I still do.

  “I like to empower the coaches and not overpower their message, but if I don’t like it I’ve got to jump in there once in a while, and I will. I’m very confident in that.”

  Maddon finally earned a big league job in 1994. Lachemann, then the pitching coach for the Marlins, was hired as manager of the Angels in May. From his days as the Angels’ pitching coach, Lachemann remembered the minor league manager with the positive outlook. He hired Maddon as his bullpen coach. Maddon ran the Angels’ next spring training, using a laptop to organize and print out the daily schedule. The old-school baseball men around the Angels would see him bent over his laptop, tap-tap-tapping away, and mock him.

  “There’s no place in baseball for computers,” they’d cackle.

  “If you criticize me for using a computer,” Maddon would retort, “don’t turn on your air conditioner in the car on the way home.”

  Maddon began using his computer to log hitting spray charts to customize the Angels’ defense. During games, another Angels coach, Bobby Knoop, would chart by hand where balls were hit and on what pitches they were hit. After the game he would sit with a tall beer and classical music and input the information into a laptop. Maddon would then take the data and convert it into charts that he printed out: two for every hitter on the opposing team, one against left-handed pitchers and one against right-handed pitchers, with notations on where the defense should be positioned. He would copy the charts, staple them together, and place them on players’ chairs in the clubhouse. It required four hours of work before the first game of every series. Some of that work had to be done after a late flight into the next city.