OK, fine, I’ll be the one to say it:
The White Sox should hire Joe Maddon as their next manager.
The solution for the Sox is right there under their noses. Well, technically, Maddon is hanging out in his hometown of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and soon, when it gets too chilly to golf there, he’ll head out to Mesa, Arizona. But the man has been known to spend some quality time in Chicago.
Your move, Rick Hahn. And Kenny Williams. And Jerry Reinsdorf and whoever else will have a hand in this decision. It’s not really that complicated, is it? Do simple better, embrace the target and — this is important — try not to suck.
Maddon, 68 — oh, stop, that isn’t old — is ready to manage again.
“Once the season’s over, I would anticipate some kind of requests or phone calls,” he told the Sun-Times, “and I’m just going to wait and see what all shows up.”
Maddon does have stipulations he wants to make crystal clear, stemming from his years with the Cubs — particularly toward the end — and his experience with the Angels, who fired him in June. Specifically, he needs to be able to manage his way, with the backing of the front office, and not the other way around. If he isn’t allowed to prepare for a game without the door to his office being used as a turnstile by management and its minions, it’s going to be a problem. If lineup cards are essentially going to be filled out for him, this whole idea is a non-starter.
Yes, this is about analytics. Isn’t it always? Maddon believes in their usefulness, but not to the exclusion of whatever else a skipper who’s been around the block and just might be innately gifted has to offer.
“I don’t like some of the methods incorporated in the game and the fact that analytics has taken over baseball to the point where baseball serves analytics as opposed to analytics serving baseball,” he said. “That’s my rub right now. I’d like to see it actually put in its place, for lack of a better term, and be an aid, not be an end-all, and put baseball in the forefront again and have it be supported.”
Maddon expounds on this in a new book, “The Book of Joe: Trying Not to Suck at Baseball and Life,” which goes on sale Oct. 11. During baseball’s pandemic shutdown in 2020, he recorded 100 hours over nearly as many rides on his bicycle in the Arizona heat. A Sony dictaphone in his pocket and a microphone clipped to his shirt, he went chronologically through his life and his baseball career, uploading the sound daily and sending it to his publisher, his literary agent and co-author Tom Verducci.
“Dig deeper,” they’d tell him, and he would dutifully oblige.
He thought he’d be managing the Angels when the book came out, but a 12-game losing streak to end a 157-172 stint got in the way of that plan. So did the way things worked — or didn’t — with his bosses in Anaheim. It’s for the best, he figures.
“The timing of the book is perfect, if unintentional, because now everybody knows exactly what I feel about things and where I stand,” he said. “So I think the suitors will be sincere, and, if I hear from people, that’s great because they like it. If I don’t, because they didn’t like it, that’s fine, too.”
You know what’s likable? Six straight winning seasons in Tampa and the first four postseason appearances in franchise history, beginning with a run to the World Series in 2008 that included a 3-1 Division Series knockout of the Sox. And 97-, 103-, 92- and 95-win campaigns in the first four of his five years with the Cubs, before then-president Theo Epstein made his World Series-winning skipper a lame duck in 2019.
“In my perspective, it should’ve never happened that way,” Maddon said. “We should’ve been there longer together, and that includes Theo [who left in 2020].”
Maddon’s pennant-winning squad in Tampa had a position-player core of Evan Longoria, Carlos Pena, B.J. Upton, Dioner Navarro and Carl Crawford. By the end there, he was winning with Longoria, James Loney, Ben Zobrist, Desmond Jennings and Yunel Escobar.
Ask yourself: What the heck did they have that Tim Anderson, Luis Robert, Yoan Moncada, Eloy Jimenez and Andrew Vaughn don’t?
Maddon in the dugout, for one. But more talent? More potential? Not a chance.
During the abbreviated 2020 season, Maddon became pretty tight with then-Angels executive Tony La Russa and discovered they see many things about the game similarly. Is that an instant red flag? Not to me. La Russa was, with the Sox, a Hall of Famer who’d lost his fastball. Dismissing him beyond that seems petty and intellectually lazy.
After La Russa, though, it would take guts for the Sox to hire Maddon or, for that matter, anyone else of whom a sizable slice of the fan base would not approve. Then again, Sox fans are conditioned by now to be dubious.
Maddon? He’s older than most. He’s most famous for winning it all with the hated Cubs. He made some funky moves with the North Siders, too, like sending reliever Aroldis Chapman out for a third inning in Game 6 of the World Series.
“I know that was the wrong thing to do,” Maddon says now.
Ooh, so we can cross that off the “cons” list? Nice.
The truth is, it doesn’t leave much to yammer and fret about.
Said Maddon of his friend La Russa, “Regardless of what people might have been saying, he was still going to do what he thought he should do in the moment, which I appreciate.”
That’s all Maddon hopes to do going forward, and the Sox should take keen interest in how that could play out. After all, this is no ordinary Joe.
