2019 MLB Season: The Managerial Hot Seat
By Bill Felber
Joe Maddon, Chicago Cubs
He may be the only person since Frank Chance to manage the Cubs to a World Series victory, but that won’t cover Maddon if Chicago breaks badly from the starting gate this season.
The Cubs front office signaled its willingness to make a move over the winter when they refused to open talks about an extension on Maddon’s contract, which ends with the 2019 MLB season. Maddon will make $6 million this season, ranking him alongside San Francisco’s Bruce Bochy at the top of the managerial pecking order.
If the Cubs play well, it may force Theo Epstein’s hand in re-opening those negotiations. If not, however, Maddon will have become a high-profile victim of the changing nature of how teams are run.
As major league teams have swung more toward the use of analytical metrics on which to base personnel judgments and tactical strategies, that very movement has devalued the role of the manager. The game has not gone so far as to deduce that any trained monkey can lead a big league team, but it has collectively moved toward the view that a manager’s prime responsibility is to implement strategies rather than devise them.
That’s bad news for Maddon, who the Cubs hired prior to the 2015 season precisely for his innovative approaches both to strategy and personnel management.
The indictment against him today isn’t so much that he has fallen behind on the innovation scale, or that he opposes some of the new strategic approaches. Rather, it’s the kind of simple cost-benefit analysis that businesses in all fields routinely employ.
The Cubs suspect they can get someone to do what they think needs to be done for less than the $6 million they’ll pay Maddon. In 2018, more than two-thirds of the game’s managers made one-quarter of what Maddon will earn this season.