Old school or new school, Maddon’s your guy

CLEVELAND — At Joe Maddon’s first news conference of the World Series, the Cubs’ ultra-progressive manager was asked about those who have influenced him most.

The names Maddon rattled off read like a who’s-who of baseball history: Gene Mauch, Bob Clear, Thornton Lee, Carl Hubbell, Al Campanis, Ferguson Jenkins, Glenn Beckert, Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey. Some of those are household names. Others will no doubt drive even diehard fans to a Google search.

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“I’ve talked to all these dudes about the past, and about what’s going on right now,” Maddon said. “Of course, the game is absolutely the same and entirely different. If that makes any sense.”

With Maddon, it does. The bespectacled 62-year-old is widely loved, by his players and fellow coaches, by baseball fans — Cubs and otherwise — and by the media. That feeling comes, in no small part, from Maddon’s ability to simultaneously be both old school and new school, and appeal to every generation of baseball fan.

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In the baseball-is-the-only-thing-since-the-paper-clip-that-hasn’t-changed world in which Maddon exists, he’s revolutionary. He was one of the first to embrace analytics, he nearly singlehandedly resurrected the shift, then scrapped it when it didn’t suit the NL Central, and nearly everyone asked to describe his managerial style uses the term “outside the …

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