Los Angeles Angels: manager Joe Maddon’s homecoming

If the Chicago Cubs no longer wanted Maddon on the bridge, he wanted the Angels if they wanted him. They did. He’ll need all his serenity now.

If Joe Maddon wasn’t going to be kept on the Chicago Cubs‘ bridge after the 2019 season, there was only one place he wanted to go from there. Home, assuming home wanted him. Which home actually did.

The Los Angeles Angels fired first-year manager Brad Ausmus after a season of losing in more ways than baseball. And the chance to bring Maddon home to take their bridge may have factored into Ausmus’s execution as much as anything else did.

Maddon didn’t exactly lack for suitors after the Cubs ended their season and his tenure with a blowout loss. The New York Mets (dispatching Mickey Callaway), the Philadelphia Phillies (sending Gabe Kapler to the electric chair), and the San Francisco Giants (after Bruce Bochy retired) had their eyes upon him.

But with the Angels seeking a new skipper, Maddon wouldn’t even think about returning those gazes unless an Angels homecoming proved illusory. It didn’t. And the manager who looks six parts seafaring sailor and half a dozen parts professor of philosophy walked, entirely of his own free will, with his customary serenity, out of the Chicago frying pan and into an Anaheim inferno.

You have to know the depth of Maddon’s baseball life to understand why it doesn’t exactly faze him, not even with the team still coming to terms with the Tyler Skaggs tragedy.