The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  Beneath the humor and the silkscreening T-shirt madness is an actual baseball philosopher who believes deeply in people and questioning conventional wisdom. He has an established track record, not only as a winner but also as a manager with a unique aesthetic. Bits of that aesthetic may sound like slogans, but the expanse of it requires a longer form. Here are the 13 core principles of managing, according to Joe Maddon:

  1. MAKE A PERSONAL CONNECTION FIRST; EVERYTHING ELSE FOLLOWS.

  The greatest responsibility of the manager is to create a positive environment that promotes growth and success. “That’s the most important thing,” he said, “and that’s what everybody overlooks.”

  The key to creating that environment is to first make a connection with your players on a personal level.

  “You want to impart information and knowledge and methods and how-tos,” Maddon said. “And that’s a lot of people’s first thought going into a new moment. For me, my first thought is to get to know you. Then we trust each other. And then we can exchange ideas. Then we can talk about methods and ideologies and whatever you want to call it. We can go there then. But if you try to go there before all this other stuff has been established, a lot of this fertile seasoning lands in bad spots, in infertile areas, and all of a sudden it’s going to go away.”

  How does Maddon create that connection?

  “You do that by conversation, you do that by talking,” Maddon said. “ ‘How is your family? What’s going on? What are you thinking? Where are you from?’ All kinds of personal questions. Just get in there a little bit and try to find some common ground. ‘What makes you light up a little bit? What interests you?’ And as we keep moving along, from that there are going to be these moments and baseball. I’ve got to be brutally honest with the guys. I think over a period of time they know you are being straight up with them, because baseball players want straight up. They don’t want any kind of sugarcoating.

  “When a player finally understands that, if I tell you the truth you may be upset with me for a week to 10 days maybe. But if I lie to you, you are going to hate me forever.

  “What eventually occurs after that is that we have arrived at this point of trust. Now I can be constructively critical, and you are not going to push back. You are not going to think I’m picking on you. And it works both ways. If you are really upset with me I want you to tell me also. And you are going to know that I’m going to accept the constructive criticism also.”

  2. THERE IS ONLY ONE TEAM RULE.

  “Respect 90.” It’s the message Maddon had painted on the grass of practice fields in his first spring training with the Cubs. The “90” refers to the number of feet between bases.

  Shortly after being hired by the Cubs, Maddon recalled a plane trip he took back in the mid-’90s. He was flying from Arizona to Midland, Texas, upset about being passed over for a big league coaching job to serve again as a minor league instructor, and not too happy about being stuck in a middle seat, and not too thrilled that a woman next to him wanted to chat. It was one of those days. But something the woman said rang like a bell within him: “Whatever you put out there will come back to you.”

  It changed his outlook and stuck with him. In deciding on a theme for his first spring camp with the Cubs, he remembered that conversation and chose “Respect 90” because it captured the sentiment that if you give respect you get respect in return.

  If a player respects those 90 feet between bases enough to run hard all the time, good things flow from such an attitude.

  “I ask the players to respect 90 and I ask the pitchers to work on their defense,” Maddon said. “I really like to see the pitchers spending time on getting better, whether it’s holding runners, whether it’s fielding bunts, backing up bases, stuff that’s really important in the moment. If we do that, and if a position player respects 90 feet, I think he’ll play baseball as good as he possibly can.”

  3. FREEDOM IS EMPOWERING.

  Maddon has no other rules besides “Respect 90” because he believes rules inhibit people from reaching their potential.

  “I believe in freedom,” he said. “I don’t believe in overmanaging. I don’t believe in micromanaging. I believe in players being players, players being themselves, playing without restrictions. I never want to coach instincts out of you. I want your instincts to soar.

  “The more you restrict freedom the more you restrict creativity. To restrict creativity—which a lot of people do unknowingly, they don’t even realize they are, they don’t even realize the importance of creativity, they don’t understand the role freedom plays in all this—to restrict that you really are losing out on a tremendous opportunity to find out how good someone actually is. When you attempt to create a contrived version of somebody before permitting that person to show you what they are, you’re automatically setting restrictions. Automatically. You don’t know that you are. But you are.

  “I’ve used that line over the course of a season. If I ever coach instinct out of a player, shame on me, man. Shame on me. That may be the mortal sin of coaching, to limit or inhibit somebody’s intrinsic abilities out of them. That would be awful. And that comes primarily from anger, when you get angry with somebody, when you don’t attempt to understand why they’re doing that and where they’re coming from, or you want to enact your mores on them because you think your way of doing something is the only way to do something, that’s the only way that’s right. That’s dangerous thinking. It’s inhibiting. It’s restrictive. It doesn’t work with baseball teams, it doesn’t work with countries, it doesn’t work in society. It just doesn’t work.

  “So I’m super aware of that. I think growing up when I did in the ’60s and ’70s contributes to that mind-set. At that time my peers were anti-establishment. They did not want to be told what to do all the time. We saw the flaws. We didn’t want to be like them.

  “I still have those old-school Hazleton values. I question methods. Just because something has been done one way for a long period of time doesn’t mean it’s the right way. I don’t question traditions. I question methods. Traditions are solid, whether my Catholic church, within my family, what your grandpop wanted you to do within the family structure—that’s fine. But why can’t you play the infield in in the first inning? That run counts, too. Things like that—why? ‘Well, because Wes Westrum told me that 20 years ago.’ Well, I don’t agree with that.”

  4. NEVER HOLD A TEAM MEETING IN YOUR HOME CLUBHOUSE.

  “It poisons the room,” Maddon said.

  Team meetings are a reaction to negative events, such as too many losses, a lack of effort, or a lack of discipline. Calling out such negativity in what you have strived to create as a positive, physical place is harmful to the environment. The negativity lingers.

  “To show up at home every day and have it be this negative room and a lot of yelling and screaming and throwing of things and name-calling?” Maddon said. “Not good.”

  Maddon said he blew up on one of his teams once as a big league manager. It happened in 2008 after a sloppy win by his Tampa Bay Rays in Kansas City. As he walked back to the clubhouse, a steamed Maddon said to bench coach Dave Martinez, “Get ’em in here. Right now.”

  “We made all kinds of mistakes,” Maddon said. “We weren’t running hard, mental errors…we were doing well so we thought we were hot stuff. I went off.”

  He hates team meetings in general. “Most of them, I’d say 97 percent of them, are not necessary,” he said. “I think a lot of it’s for show. A lot of times when a manager gets upset like that and has to have a meeting, it’s for his own feelings, and also to produce the effect to say, ‘I had a meeting and I got suitably angry because the guys aren’t winning.’ Any time you blow up on your guys publically I think it’s to protect yourself. I refuse to do that.

  “I’ve been on teams when the team meeting happens and I’ll be sitting on the floor as a coach, thinking, This sucks. The players are just giggling inside. They’re going to make fun of it w
hen you’re done. They’ll use it against you. There may be a couple of real rah-rah kids that it’s going to affect a little bit, but there’s no lasting impact of that. None. And the more meetings you have to have, it means you’re pretty bad.

  “I prefer meetings by players, among each other. I prefer that. I like when players talk to one another more than when coaches [address them]. I like my coaches’ meetings when they talk preseries. It’s empowerment, too. But I think if there’s an issue, when it comes to players talking amongst each other I think it’s more impactful.”

  Maddon prefers to hold just three team meetings each year: one at the start of spring training, one just before the All-Star break, and one before the start of the postseason. All of them are planned meetings to project a positive message.

  “I read once a really good line, ‘Praise publically, criticize privately,’ ” he said. “I love that. That’s exactly how you should do it, I think. So I attempt to live by that.”

  5. DO NOT HAVE A FINE SYSTEM.

  Maddon seemed to have a fine system when he began managing in Tampa Bay, but he chose to consider it as an educational and team-building exercise. Maddon would write the names of certain bottles of wine on slips of paper, fold the slips, and place them in a jar that he kept in his office. If a player violated a principle of the game Maddon thought deserved a fine—such as a lack of hustle or missing a sign—he called the player into his office after the game and asked him to pick a piece of paper from the jar. The player would have to buy the bottle listed, and bring it to the clubhouse.

  “Poor Joey Gathright,” Maddon said about an outfielder on his 2006 team. “He always picked the most expensive bottles.

  “I was trying to make a point and make it fun. Because the wine was going right into the [clubhouse] kitchen. So after the game I was trying to teach them wine, about a good glass of wine. The group was way too young in the beginning.

  “I had a victory chalice there. A big wine glass with ‘Victory’ on it and I called it the victory chalice. After we won a series, I would take some of the really good stuff—the whole bottle went in there—I put it in the kitchen. ‘Drink out of the victory chalice!’ They’d put it in their glass, sip out of the chalice. That was so cool.”

  With the Cubs, Maddon no longer uses the wine-in-a-jar system, nor any formal fine system. Martinez, his bench coach, will sometimes fine a player if he misses a sign or doesn’t run out a ball in play he thought was a home run. Often money does not change hands.

  “It’s like they don’t even have to say it,” Maddon said. “They’ll just bring me a bottle of wine. They know they screwed up.”

  6. WEAR WHATEVER YOU THINK MAKES YOU LOOK HOT.

  Dress code? Fuh-gedda-boudit.

  Maddon is famous for arranging themed trips a few times each season on getaway days. He began the tradition in Tampa Bay, where he asked the entire team to dress in costumes to match a theme he picked, such as Miami Vice (all white), Johnny Cash (all black), and varsity lettermen (cardigan sweaters with a “TB” monogram).

  “There were a lot of times guys wouldn’t even dress up,” Maddon said. “They thought it was silly, unprofessional. I never worried about that. That’s fine. You don’t have to do it, then don’t worry about it. But I can promise you the guys that didn’t do it really weren’t the team guys we were looking for. I promise you that.

  “It’s a method where you are building camaraderie, the team-building situation. If we can impact one guy every day, whether it’s by the ‘thought of the day’ or the ‘joke of the day,’ that’s always good. All these little things that you do every day definitely serve the bond bringing people together.”

  Maddon brought the themed trip tradition to Chicago. In 2015 he pulled off the pajama trip, the shorts trip, and the Blackhawks jersey trip. In 2016 he cooked up the “minimalist zany suit” trip, the basketball warm-up suit trip, and the football jersey trip, on which the first-year Cubs players had to wear female cheerleader’s outfits. Maddon arranges the trips not just as a team-bonding exercise, but also for the sheer fun of it—not to mention to give a poke in the eye to old-school rules that players adhere to a formal dress code.

  On an everyday basis Maddon has no rules at all about how players should dress. He really does tell them in spring training that they should wear “whatever you think makes you look hot.”

  “I’ve had guys come up to me in the past and say, ‘Do you see how he’s dressed on the road?’ ” Maddon said. “I’ll say, ‘So? So? Listen, you saw it. To me I would have never noticed that because to me it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. So if you want to inhibit him and his development mentally and how he is as a person and on this field, then go ahead and bust his balls about the way he’s dressing. But it doesn’t matter. You’re attempting to enforce your mores on him based on how you were taught. Doesn’t make it right. It’s just that’s what you heard from some old dude that wore polyester. It doesn’t mean it’s right. So go. Go do what you’ve got to do, but just understand I don’t care.’ ”

  7. EMPOWER YOUR COACHES.

  “Empowering the coaching staff is huge,” Maddon said, “because I had been in a situation where the coaching staff was not empowered. I never felt not empowered myself. I think that’s something you feel if you lack self-confidence, the fact that you’ve not been empowered by somebody. But if you have self-confidence, nobody can ever take that power away from you.

  “But I’ve been around guys I know who felt a lack of power because the manager would not give them specific things to do or they felt they were not being listened to. And that never bothered me. Never. Because I was always very confident in what I did and my opinions. But I listened. And getting in that position I never wanted to be that guy who made my coaching staff feel like they couldn’t say what was on their mind.

  “My thought was, any time anybody shows up to work they need to feel as though they can make an impact. And if they feel like they can make an impact and they feel a part of this thing, then when things don’t go well, they can’t jump ship and can’t do the infamous backstabbing. They can’t do that because they’ve been part of the planning.

  “Now if you exclude them from the planning, and you have these moments when things don’t go so well, that’s when guys jump ship. So this was all obvious to me coming up. All this stuff I’ve been doing since ’81, and I have strong opinions about how to do it and how not to do it based on people I thought did it well and more importantly people I thought didn’t do it well.”

  8. BUT DON’T ALLOW YOUR COACHES—OR VETERANS—TO BE HARSH ON YOUNG PLAYERS.

  “I saw it when I first got to the big leagues,” Maddon said. “I thought some young players’ abilities were being negatively impacted by veteran players, managers, and coaches. They were kind of subduing the personalities of these young guys, whether by making fun of the way they dressed, being hyper-angry at mistakes, intolerant of mistakes. Definitely young players had a big target on their back. The more veteran players had a small target on their back.

  “The way the rookie mistake was treated always bothered me. I saw guys who had been playing for seven years making the same mistake, but when it’s a rookie mistake, people think it requires a heavier hand than the guy who’s been doing it for seven years. It bothered me. If you want these young guys to play as well as they can quickly, then you’ve got to change your approach with how you deal with them. You have to permit them to be themselves, and, of course, like everybody else, if they mess up they have to be told about it. But you don’t have to get hyper-angry at them or send them back [to the minors], or explain it to them in a way that absolutely fractures their self-confidence. And I have seen it.”

  Maddon had a small problem in 2016 with one of his veterans on the Cubs. The veteran was riding one of the young players about making mistakes. Maddon thought the veteran was overly severe. He called the veteran into his office.

  “I get where you’re coming from with that,” Maddon told
the veteran, whom he declined to name, “but don’t you think you’re being a little bit harsh, a little bit over the top in your explanation and how you went about it?”

  The veteran quickly agreed to tone it down.

  “By the end of the season these guys had the best relationship in the world,” Maddon said. “But you just can’t give the veterans a free wheel regarding how they interact with these guys and instruction.

  “I don’t like when guys get in other guys’ heads. A veteran may see this guy coming at his position, and he may want to start creating doubt in this young guy’s head. I’ve seen it. This group? No. Absolutely not. But I’ve seen it. Just because a guy is a veteran doesn’t mean he’s going to have good influence. Just because the back of his baseball card reads well doesn’t mean he’s a leader. Just means he’s been playing seven or eight years. You can have leaders that absolutely take it the wrong way. You can have coaching staffs that take it the wrong way.

  “That’s why, as a manager, you’ve got to coach the coaches on top of that and not permit them to carry a message that’s not your message.”

  9. QUESTION DATA WITH FEEL.

  You never will find Maddon managing a game from the bench. He needs to be standing near the rail of the dugout. He needs to be as physically close to the game as possible because he needs to “feel” and sense the vibe of the game.