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Maddon: ‘Now we have the experience’
- Updated: December 3, 2016
LITTLE FALLS, NJ — There’s never a dull moment with Cubs manager Joe Maddon, and Friday night’s program at my grandfather’s museum — the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Little Falls, N.J. — was certainly no exception.
The event began with a cocktail hour, during which 100 lucky guests got to chat and mingle with Maddon and his wife Jaye. A lively and revealing Q&A with the World Series champ followed, moderated by Ken Rosenthal of MLB Network and Fox Sports. The interview was Maddon’s first since winning the World Series on Nov. 2.
Maddon and my Grampa became very close in the last 10 years of Grampa’s life after meeting in 2006 at a dinner organized by their mutual buddy, Don Zimmer. They hit it off immediately. Though Grampa was 30 years Joe’s senior, the two were kindred spirits. With regard to baseball, they were both simultaneously old-school and progressive, sticking to baseball fundamentals while also pushing the on-field envelope. The two would sit on the couch in Maddon’s office and talk about everything from family and friends to the pros and cons of using heavy bats.
The pair worked similarly off the field, too. Both were raised in Italian immigrant families and learned the importance of hard work and family early on. Both grew up to value teamwork, leadership, sportsmanship, respect and dignity, and later in life, both established foundations — Grampa’s Museum and Learning Center and Maddon’s Hazleton Integration Project in his home state of Pennsylvania — to pass those values on to future generations.
Grampa was a chop-buster to the end, and he would have welcomed Maddon to his Museum with a few hearty jabs. I can hear him now: “OK, Joe, you won one World Series, now go win nine more.” But he would have been thrilled to introduce his friend to the full house that heard Maddon wax poetic on the Cubs’ 2016 season. Here are some highlights from the program.
On managing the pressure and expectations of the 2016 season:
“You talk about it. I made that T-shirt, ‘Embrace the Target.’ I was an avid reader, I loved Tom Clancy. In ‘Clear and Present Danger,’ the President’s friend is involved in a drug deal gone bad in the Caribbean. Right away, the spin doctors want to say the President hardly knew him, hadn’t seen him in years. But no, Jack Ryan steps in and says, ‘No, Mr. President, not only should you say he’s your friend, you should say he’s one of your best friends.’ He ran towards the issue to diffuse the issue. I really have my Jack Ryan moments as a manager.
“You have to give the full explanation. We needed to embrace the target, embrace the expectations and embrace the word ‘pressure’ and use them all in a positive way. These are good words. These are good moments to be in. That’s the rhetoric. For me, pressure and expectations should never be a problem, because why would you want to participate in anything that did not have expectations or pressure attached to it? And I wanted my guys to get that. I made a T-shirt with a target on the back. That was the message from Day One. I thought it was important to really throw it out there and be Jack Ryan from Day One.”
On using Aroldis Chapman with a 7-2 lead in the 7th inning of World Series Game 6:
“[The Indians] had two guys on, and I did not like who was coming up to hit. I wanted to get through that with that type of lead. If you don’t, if I had brought someone else in and it diminished at all, I thought the number of pitches Chapman would have had to throw later would be even more impactful. And there was no Game 8. There was no Game 7 yet at that point. We could not afford to lose any more games. Some of the other guys in the bullpen who had been really good in the season had been hurt at the end of the year. [Pedro] Strop had the bad knee and [Hector] Rondon had the bad tricep. We had CJ [Carl Edwards Jr.] and [Mike] Montgomery to utilize also, but we could not lose any more games. So I wanted to keep the game in tow right there. It was the meaty part of the order, and I did not want to entrust it to anyone else. I think everyone who is a Cub fan should be really happy I brought Aroldis in in that moment and did not save him.”
On his Game 7 pitching plan:
“[Kyle] Hendricks, Jonny …
