Los Angeles Angels: manager Joe Maddon’s homecoming

Los Angeles Angels: manager Joe Maddon’s homecoming

Maddon spent over three decades in the Angels’ organization, from minor league catcher to minor league coach and manager, to major league coach and Mike Scioscia‘s consigliere on the bench for the team’s most successful era, including their lone World Series triumph.

He can’t exactly deny that the Angels have had more than their share of loss that doesn’t all tie directly to baseball doings and undoings. A lot of it happened before Maddon joined the family:

• Rookie relief pitcher Dick Wantz (dead of a brain tumor, a month after his major league debut, 1965);
• Star reliever Minnie Rojas (saved a franchise-record 27 games in 1967; paralyzed permanently in the 1968 road crash that killed two of his three children);
• Veteran infield backup Chico Ruiz (road accident, 1972);
• Rookie lefthanded pitcher Bruce Heinbechner (road accident, 1974).

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While Maddon began plying his original catching trade, a light-hitting Angels shortstop named Mike Miley was killed in a 1977 road accident. A year after that, the Angels’ first significant signing of the free agency era, outfielder Lyman Bostock, was shot to death in a mistaken-identity crime in Indiana; the crime changed Indiana law to allow a legally insane defendant to be imprisoned regardless after his psychiatric treatment ended.

Maddon was a roving hitting instructor in the organization when haunted Donnie Moore—the relief ace who’d surrendered the fateful home run to Boston’s Dave Henderson that sent the Angels from a strike away from the World Series to extra innings and the eventual 1986 American League Championship Series loss—shot his wife and then killed himself in 1989, after his career was over.

And he had the same job when, in 1992, the chartered bus taking the Angels from the New York area to Baltimore on a road trip careened off the highway, into the woods, and injured thirteen including then-manager Buck Rodgers, who needed elbow surgery as a result.

Surely it made little sense that a team named for spiritual messengers from God should be bedeviled by that much calamity.

Maddon was the Tampa Bay Rays’ pennant-defending manager opening the 2009 season when young Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart was killed by a drunk driver while he was out with friends celebrating his first win of the season. But Adenhart’s death still felt like a death in the family to a Maddon who’d left his heart in southern California after all.

Now he has the Angels’ bridge as the organization continues trying to make sense of the Skaggs tragedy, the happy-go-lucky pitcher dying of a drug overdose at last July’s beginning, turning out to have had an opioid addiction which might have begun after earlier injuries and surgeries, possibly being abetted by at least one and maybe more Angel employees, and his family preparing to take it to court if they don’t get further answers and accountability.

The Cubs’ collapse of 2019 was nothing compared to all that. And it turned out that Maddon and Cub president Theo Epstein agreed mutually that it was time for each to move onward.

Los Angeles Angels: manager Joe Maddon’s homecoming

The announcement came forth before the Cubs’ final game, a 9-0 drubbing by the St. Louis Cardinals, in which the Cardinals jumped the Cubs early enough and often enough that Cardinal starter Jack Flaherty could have pitched from repose in a deep sectional sofa and still beaten them.

Maddon now tells ESPN’s Alden Gonzalez he was thinking about moving onward well enough before the fork could be stuck into the Cubs’ 2019. The apparent motivation was a philosophical parting of the ways with Cubs president Theo Epstein, the man who did in Chicago with Maddon what he’d done previously in Boston with Terry Francona, ending a generations-old, actual or alleged curse.

“Philosophically, Theo needed to do what he needed to do separately,” Maddon says. “At some point, I began to interfere with his train of thought a little bit. And it’s not that I’m hardheaded. I’m inclusive. But when I started there—’15, ’16, ’17—it was pretty much my methods. And then all of a sudden, after ’18 going into ’19, they wanted to change everything.”

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What Maddon no longer liked was the prospect of analytics and the human game falling out of balance with analytics carrying the greater weight. He’s always been analytical, but he doesn’t like to divorce it from the men who play and the people who watch.

“My conclusion is analytics and technology are slightly responsible for putting the game in a position where it’s not as attractive to fans,” he says. He may or may not be right about that.

Statistics and analytics tell you the deep truths about the games you couldn’t get to see and the players you couldn’t get to watch. The deeper you go statistically and analytically, the truer the portrait you get, whether you did see this game or that or whether you only know particular games and players through the histories.

But while analytics tell you what was and might become, technology helps you get particular things right, and too many stubbornly standing thoughts and practices need to go post-haste, subjugating the human game entirely to either or both turns baseball into a brave new world to fear, not the game that holds the romantic, the philosophical, and the poetic. That’s something Maddon has no wish to see.

His Angels come off a season in which they were one of baseball’s best at putting balls into play at the plate, which makes his itch for just a few more sacrifices bunts a little puzzling, considering the value of unsurrendered outs. But the Angels’ most blaring need is pitching that isn’t as prone as the Angels’ has been to injuries the past few seasons.

They landed third baseman Anthony Rendon as a free agent to fortify their lineup and secure the hot corner, and they’ll have Shohei Ohtani back at full power both ways. So far, so good. But they couldn’t land Gerrit Cole or Zack Wheeler among the winter’s free-agent pitchers. Not even with Maddon himself joining the sales force.

Once again, seemingly, the Los Angeles Angels are trying to patch a pitching staff from the backstreets. And, once again, it remains an open question as to whether the Angels will yet have a team their own and baseball’s best all-around player can be proud of. A man as composed as Maddon needs every degree of his composure to guide this ship.

He’ll remind you, though, as he does Gonzalez, that sacrificing the full journey for the sake of a net result is just as liable to portend disaster. “Another phrase that I’ve been telling myself is, ‘Don’t miss it’,” Maddon says. “We speed through everything. You miss the sights, you miss that look . . . See it with first-time eyes, do it with first-time passion, and don’t miss it.”

He spoke specifically about the view down Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach, a view that puts your eyes right upon the fabled Huntington Beach pier in direct sight while you take in the sand and the palms lining it. (I know the view and its beauty well from the years I lived in Huntington Beach.) But Maddon’s point is only too well taken as a metaphor for what Angel baseball needs most.

The Angels can only hope to play from that vantage, one game at a time, the desired net result in view, the miles and stops to get there appreciated and availed equally. It might get even get them back to the postseason years before Mike Trout‘s shelf life expire