The Value of Joe Maddon

Under pretty much all circumstances, relative to people involved in the game, we the public have a lesser amount of information. Sometimes, it’s close, like when it comes to specific player valuation — we have access to almost as much as the teams and executives do. But sometimes we’re bringing a straw to a knife fight. There’s perhaps nothing we understand less than the value of a manager. Analysts have tried to dig in deep, and within our heads we have ideas of which guys are better than others, but ultimately we’re always guessing on the impact. What are we supposed to do with charisma and leadership? The attempted evaluation of managers causes many people to just throw up their hands. Why even bother?

So, from the outside, we can barely say anything. We simply don’t know. And maybe teams don’t know much, either. Maybe they’re guessing almost as much as we are. But we can at least evaluate market behavior as an indirect reflection of a guy’s perceived value. And the market has responded strongly to Joe Maddon’s sudden and unanticipated free agency. The Cubs are going to hire Maddon, officially, maybe before I’m done writing this post. It’s pretty clear, then, how highly Maddon is thought of.

No one expected Maddon to become available. Maddon himself didn’t remember he had an opt-out clause, so few teams were prepared for this. Still, as news spread that Maddon was leaving the Rays, we heard his agent was already in contact with at least ten different organizations. There was interest in Maddon coming from everywhere, a level of interest we didn’t see with, say, Buck Showalter, or Terry Francona. Immediately, it looked like Maddon would follow his friend Andrew Friedman to Los Angeles, but then came the Cubs rumors. As a reminder, here’s what the Cubs said about manager Rick Renteria at the end of September:

Theo Epstein held his season ending press conference Tuesday afternoon. And the first line of business for the day was to announce Rick Renteria and a majority of his coaching staff will return for the 2015 season.
[…]
“Coaching staff, by in large, I thought did a really nice job this year,” Epstein said. “The coaching staff did a really nice job of establishing the culture that we were looking for here.”

The Cubs aren’t doing this because they conveniently had a managerial vacancy. The Cubs are creating a managerial vacancy in order to make room for Joe Maddon. They’re making themselves look bad in attempting to upgrade, and word is Maddon will receive an enormous contract, similar to although smaller than Mike Scioscia’s. So, Maddon generated broad interest, and a team is going back on its own words in order to pay him rather handsomely. Things wouldn’t happen like this if Maddon weren’t perceived to be a game-changer. While we can’t put a number on his value, it’s indicated rather clearly that Maddon is seen as one of the very top leaders in the sport, and it’s indicated that teams value that characteristic.

Of course, it all feels a little weird and unseemly. The Cubs are, in essence, leaving a partnership with Renteria for a partnership with Maddon, without first breaking the former off. It feels like cheating. But the goal is to win, in Chicago especially, and emotion can play only a limited role. It wouldn’t feel nearly so dirty if these were players instead of coaches. The Royals have Omar Infante under contract, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have interest in a hypothetically available Chase Utley who really wanted to play for them. And if the Royals pulled that off, they’d be praised for their navigating, even though it would mean bad news for Infante. The goal’s always to make a roster as good as possible, so the same should extend to the coaching staff. We can’t evaluate a coaching staff, but the Cubs obviously believe very strongly that Maddon will be more valuable to them than Renteria could ever be.

So it’s hard to fault anyone. It’s hard to fault Maddon, because he’s just looking out for himself. And it’s hard to fault the Cubs, because they’re just looking out for themselves, and they didn’t anticipate this. Obviously, Maddon seems like a beyond-perfect fit. The team he inherited in Tampa Bay was bad with incredible upside, and they won big in his third year. The Cubs’ young talent, meanwhile, is hyped like no one else’s, and Maddon’s experienced in helping a team like this transition from losing a lot to winning a lot. Maddon managed to build and sustain a warm, positive, and welcoming clubhouse atmosphere, that even embraced Yunel Escobar. Maddon has countless times over demonstrated his leadership, and being among the early adopters of common shifting, he’s doubtlessly open-minded to new ideas. Maddon has an analytical brain that also allows him to communicate, and he has a background of working well and closely with a front office not too different from the one in Chicago. To whatever extent we can evaluate managerial fits, this seems like a good managerial fit. The Cubs agree.

After all, who wouldn’t want a piece of what’s been a team-building miracle in Tampa Bay? There are risks, as there always are. Maybe players in Chicago won’t respond as well. Maybe Maddon is just less motivated than he’s been in the past, or maybe there was more to the atmosphere that developed with the Rays than just Maddon himself. Maybe the atmosphere was good because the Rays won, and Maddon wasn’t actually that important. Again, manager. We don’t know much. But the rumored average annual salary of his new deal is around $5 million. Last year Edinson Volquez signed for $5 million. Erisbel Arruebarrena signed for five years and $25 million. The commitment here is big money, especially for a coach, but it’s not franchise-altering money, for a potentially franchise-altering man. You can understand the roll of the dice.

What of the Rays? Alex Cobb figures they’ll be fine.

“But I think inside the clubhouse, it sounds rough to say, but I don’t think the impact that those guys had on us on a day-to-day basis is going to affect us as much as a lot of people are speculating.

“I don’t mean to take away from what Andrew and Joe do, but the people that win ball games are the people that are in between the lines every single day, and that’s who’s going to continue to win ball games. I know for a fact that the guys in the clubhouse, the connection between everybody is strong enough to withstand something of this nature.”

Talent has already been put in place, by Andrew Friedman. Players have already been developed, and ideas have already been instilled, by Joe Maddon. Not all that much will be lost or forgotten, at least for 2015, so the Rays ought to be all right. Maddon’s taking his personality with him, but he built a clubhouse that can function without him.

Now it’s his turn to do something similar in Chicago, and based on the pursuit and investment, it’s obvious the Cubs think of Maddon as a genuine difference-maker. It’s obvious they’re not the only ones — they’re just the most willing to do what it takes in this instance. How many wins is a manager worth? I couldn’t tell you. But the Cubs don’t seem to think any manager’s worth more than Joe Maddon. Certainly not the manager they already had.