Joe Maddon - The Book of Joe: Trying Not to Suck at Baseball and Life

From his usual perch on the top step of the dugout, Los Angeles Angels manager Joe Maddon watched Shohei Ohtani take his place in the batters box for an at bat not seen in 118 years.

It was late in the afternoon in Anaheim on April 4, 2021, but early in the game. Shadows covered the field while golden sunshine bathed the outfield seats in the last hour of day. Ohtani had just pitched a scoreless top of the first inning for the Angels against the Chicago White Sox in which three of his pitches had been clocked at 100.1, 100.5 and 100.6 miles per hour respectively. Without time to sit down, here he was batting second in Maddons lineup. He placed his left foot on the back line of the batters box, swung his right leg into the box, tapped home plate with his bat, raised his bat parallel to the ground, bounced its barrel once on his shoulder, then tipped the bat upright and high, like a flag bearer announcing his arrival. He took no practice swing. He stood waiting. His leonine posture signaled fearsome readiness. Coiled calm before the pounce.

No Angels pitcher had hit for himself since the implementation of the designated hitter rule in 1973. No pitcher had batted second since September 7, 1903, when Jack Dunleavy did so for St. Louis Cardinals manager Patsy Donovan, who was born in 1865.

The idea had been unthinkable even recently. For three seasons the Angels did not dare allow Ohtani to pitch and hit in the same game. They adhered to the conventional wisdom that the task would be too grueling and subject him to injury. After a discussion with Ohtani in spring training of 2021, however, Maddon blew up such convention. This was the first at bat of the way forward.

Many people around baseball or in the media were skeptical about it, Maddon says. It was not fully embraced. Many people were interested, but not with full faith that it would work.

Three years earlier, as manager of the Cubs, Maddon had commissioned paintings by artist Jason Skeldon to raise money for charity, to promote baseball through art, and to provide visual reinforcement of concepts he taught his players about teamwork and winning baseball. In one of those paintings, Albert Einstein is portrayed as a baseball manager emerging from a cardboard box. Superimposed across his jersey in the handwriting of Maddon is a list of baseball conventions Maddon believes should be challenged, such as:

Take BP every day, even day game after night game.

Dont make the 1st out or 3rd out at 3rd Base.

Batting order should remain the same after a win.

Above Einstein are the words Get out of the Box.

Why Einstein? The greatest scientific mind valued imagination. Einstein personified out of the box thinking.

Accepted beliefs can stifle individuality and instinct, Maddon says. When you adhere to them, you stifle what the player can become. Its important to be uncomfortable. Getting out of the box spurs growth and denies complacency.

Maddon thought out of the box with Ohtani. Validation took only one pitch.

The Chicago pitcher, Dylan Cease, delivered what he thought was a perfect first offering: a ninety-seven-mile-an-hour fastball at the highest border of the strike zone. Ohtani uncoiled. He smashed the pitch into the sun-washed bleachers in right field 451 feet away. In one inning of baseball Ohtani had thrown three pitches clocked at more than 100 miles per hour and hit one clocked at 115.2, the hardest-hit home run at the time by any Angels player in the seven years of such tracking. The Angels won, 74. It was the superhero movie trailer to an extraordinary blockbuster season of pitching and hitting nobody had seen since Babe Ruth.

My first thought was that it would quiet the naysayers, Maddon says. The result of one at bat did not matter to me. Shohei and I were committed to this plan. But I knew it gave us some time to prove this was the best approach. By the end of the season, this method of pitching and hitting looked so normal, and, of course, it was the right thing to do.

To my eyes his swing looked so much better than the year before. More forceful. The sound and carry really stood out. He hits them loud. And the way his hands flip at the end really puts the finishing touches on his exit velocity.

Its weird how the mind jumps in moments like that. I flashed back to Kris Bryant throwing to Anthony Rizzo for the last out of the 2016 World Series. My thought was it took 108 years for the Cubs to win, and now thisa once-in-a-century player. The entire game gave me more confidence we were on the right track.

Joe Maddon never played major league baseball. He logged twenty years in the minors as a player, manager, and instructor before getting a major league job. Despite his late startor, as he tells it, because of ithe joined Joe McCarthy and Jim Leyland, the only other managers with no major league playing experience to manage nineteen seasons and win a World Series. More indelibly, he established himself as one of the great turnaround experts of the modern game. He took over a Tampa Bay team that had never had a winning season and a Chicago team with five straight losing seasons, and within three years at each stop guided them to the World Series. His 2016 Cubs ended the longest championship drought in North American sports.