The Extra 2% (17 page)

“Other teams didn’t know how to handle it,” laughed Forte. “They resented us!”

The boys’ gridiron success spilled over to their high school years. Boasting one of the smallest teams in the region (Forte grew to no more than five-foot-four, 170 pounds at middle linebacker, while Jones excelled as a five-foot-seven, 150-pound running back), underdog Hazleton High became a team of overachievers. As the starting quarterback, Maddon refined many of the same unorthodox plays dreamed up over pocket change, along with a few new ones. He also honed the leadership skills that would serve him well later in life.

“When I played with Joe, I fed off his relentlessly positive attitude,” Jones said. “Sometimes we wouldn’t pull it off, but he always kept that up, that was one of his greatest attributes. There might have been bigger or faster people than Joe. But you knew he was the quarterback, the captain of the baseball team—even when he wasn’t the official captain. He gave you a sense of quiet confidence, a calming effect. That aspect of his personality, you can’t train or coach that.”

Hazleton High’s football team rolled to an 8-2-1 record in the boys’ senior season. Only a handful of seniors graduated from that
team, setting up what appeared to be a strong veteran squad the next season. But the team sorely missed the Three Amigos. The year after Maddon, Forte, and Jones graduated, Hazleton High didn’t win a single game.

Maddon’s intellectual curiosity on the football field spread to other endeavors. He became a voracious reader, consuming great works of literature in his youth, then moving on to volumes on self-help psychology, philosophy, and other subjects as an adult. He excelled in school. He also poured countless hours into thinking about baseball. Hazleton was a couple of hours or more away from in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. On the rare occasion that he got to travel to a big league game, he made the occasion count. At age ten, Maddon’s coach took Joe and Willie to see the Mets (Forte’s favorite team) face the Cardinals (Maddon’s team).

“Bob Gibson was pitching,” Forte recalled, “and Joe was watching every movement he made. He was enjoying the whole game, but you could tell he was just studying Gibson. Joe was like a sponge.”

His father, Joe Sr., encouraged his love of sports every step of the way. Forte recalls the boys plopping down in front of the Maddons’ TV to watch all the sporting greats of the ’60s, Russell and Chamberlain, Unitas and Namath, Gibson and Aaron. The boys would give Joe Sr. the nickname “Howard Cosell,” because he loved to call the action. “So what do ya say, Howard?” they’d ask him after a big play.

Joe Sr. worked as a plumber for C. Maddon & Sons Plumbing and Heating for sixty years, in the same four-family building on East Eleventh Street that housed the extended Maddon clan. Working alongside his father and three brothers, Joe Sr. handled all manner of backbreaking jobs: busted furnaces on ten-degree days, ankle-deep puddles in flooded kitchens, frantic calls in the middle of the night to fix any number of household mishaps. If the exhausting labor bothered him, he never showed it.

“He never had a bad word for anybody,” Dave Mishinski recalled.

“He was the nicest, gentlest man you ever met,” said Forte.

“They gravitated to him always,
always,”
mused Beanie. “He had
patience, lots of patience. They’d never know if he had a bad day. Joe’s now the same way. He doesn’t wear it on his face, nowhere.”

If there was any risk of Joe (or Joey, as he was known as a kid) getting a swelled head from all the attention—star quarterback, captain of the baseball team—Beanie was there to make sure her son stayed grounded. The three Maddon kids outgrew their mom by sixth grade. Yet Beanie commanded respect, corralling Joey, Carmine, and Mark at home and calling out orders at Third Base. Ask any Maddon friend or family member about Joey’s strongest influences and they’ll all say the same thing: his patience, even temperament, and good humor come from his father. The drive and toughness that pushed him through thirty-one years of apprenticeship before landing his dream job with the Rays? That’s all Beanie.

Beyond the impact of parents and loved ones, Hazleton had a way of making every kid fall into line when Maddon was growing up in the ’50s and ’60s. You learned the value of respecting your elders at home, then again in school. There were eyes on every boy and girl everywhere in town. Step out of line and word would get back to your parents before you walked through the door.

Sister Suzanne was the kind of doting, tough-love figure who played a big role in Maddon’s development. A seventh-grade teacher at Mother of Grace parochial school, the kindly nun would play ball with the boys every recess. She claimed to be the person who taught Maddon how to play baseball, a slight exaggeration that no one had the heart to refute. Above all, she did teach him the value of respect—giving it and earning it.

“The last time somebody interviewed Joe,” said Beanie, “they asked him, ‘When a player does something wrong, do you ever point at them?’ He said no. He never talked down to anyone. Because Sister Suzanne taught him, she said, ‘Point your finger at somebody and three come back right at you.’ And he remembers things like that. He never forgets. He doesn’t forget where he’s from.”

If family, friends, neighbors, and baseball-teaching nuns weren’t enough, Hazleton had one fail-safe method to keep kids in line, one
word that would strike fear into the hearts of even the hardest cases.

“Kislyn,” said Hazleton mayor Louis Barletta, who grew up playing Little League with Maddon. “It was a home for troubled kids. If you were sent to Kislyn, you did something bad. And our parents used that against us, to their benefit. And it worked, I’m telling ya. As soon as you heard the word ‘Kislyn.’ … There was a sign, with an arrow pointing down this road. You never even wanted to go down that road. It was worse than a haunted house.” Neither Barletta nor Maddon nor anyone in that extended circle knew anyone who’d actually
been
to Kislyn. But they heard the stories.

Maddon’s formative years in Hazleton taught him many lessons. He’s more creative and open-minded in his decision-making thanks to his midget football days. He relates well to young players, following his father’s example of patience and understanding. He draws from childhood friends, attentive nuns, and a hard-driving mother in shepherding an up-and-coming team. If Joe Maddon had grown up in a different place under different circumstances, Josh Hamilton gets his shot to win the game that August night for the Rangers.

However Maddon’s intentional walk for the ages might play out, it didn’t much matter to the Rays’ skipper. Sure, a loss in that situation could have thrown the Rays off course. Criticism of his maybe-too-clever tactics would have exploded. But none of that mattered. Maddon makes decisions one way with one thing in mind: trust the process, don’t sweat the results.

“You’ve got to go with what you think is the right thing in the moment, based on everything that’s presented to you,” Maddon told Yahoo!’s Gordon Edes after the game. “Of course, if it didn’t work out, I would have been skewered, and that would have been fine.”

Duck out of the Third Base Luncheonette, make a left on Ninth, then drive past the cemetery. Rising on the left is the Hazleton
Little League field. That’s where the legend of Joey Maddon first blossomed.

“There’s a huge water tank that sits beyond the fence in left-center field,” said Fred Barletta. “That was the rite of passage, if you could hit the water tank. Joey hit ’em
on top of the water tank
. He was the Mantle, the Mays of Hazleton Little League.”

Thirty-five years later, a sign on a white shack at the entrance to the field reads:
THANK YOU TAMPA BAY RAYS MANAGER JOE MADDON FOR MAKING HAZLETON LITTLE LEAGUE PROUD
.

For all his early baseball exploits, most of the people who knew him figured Maddon would take a shot at a football career. From his early success in punt, pass, and kick competitions to his precocious quarterback play in midget ball to his star turn at quarterback for Hazleton High, Maddon showed extraordinary football talent. Nearby Lafayette College agreed, recruiting him for football—but also baseball. Maddon didn’t take long to decide between the two. Though he loved the physical challenge of football, he figured he’d have a better chance of walking straight in thirty years if he made baseball his career.

To have a shot at a lasting career, though, Maddon realized he’d need to change positions. A shortstop and pitcher in Little League and in high school, he knew he lacked both the agility to play short and the rocket arm to pitch at a high level. Still, Maddon loved analyzing a pitcher’s mechanics and approach, be it Bob Gibson’s or his own. He loved the chess match that went into every pitch. If he couldn’t toe the rubber, Maddon figured, why not crouch behind the plate?

He hit well enough at Lafayette—.280/.351/.387 in a power-starved environment—but that wasn’t enough to generate heavy attention from scouts.

Still, the California Angels were intrigued, especially after hearing the positive reports on Maddon’s ability to call a game, and signed him as an undrafted free agent. From there, Maddon roamed the Single A landscape, playing in Salinas, Santa Clara, and Quad Cities. The bus rides were long, the accommodations spare,
the pay just enough to get by. By conventional measures he struggled, never hitting enough to pressure the Angels into bumping him up the ladder. Only Maddon didn’t see those bush league experiences as a failure.

“I met Joe at a Domino’s Pizza on the Illinois side of Quad Cities, I remember it perfectly,” said Forte. The two childhood friends hadn’t seen each other in a while, Maddon embarking on his baseball journey while Forte pursued a music career that eventually led him to join the B Street Band, a Bruce Springsteen cover group that he’s now fronted for more than thirty years.

“He told me he was quitting playing, that he would become a scout, or maybe a coach,” Forte recalled. “He said, ‘I love this game, I really have a feel for it,’ even if it wasn’t going to happen for him as a player. He found out he had a real desire for coaching, because parts of the game clicked for him. He had a good relationship with other players since he’s soft-spoken and has such an easy demeanor. But he also loved the intricacies of the game. To get on a school bus, driving all over with twenty players—being in A-ball was pretty rough back then. You had to be either crazy or so in love with the game you couldn’t leave if you wanted to be an A-ball coach.”

Maddon wasn’t thinking about long bus rides, crummy per diems, or doubleheaders in the sweltering summer heat of the Midwest. The wheels were already turning in his head. He was visualizing ways for batters to make better contact, for pitchers to make smoother hip rotations, for the Angels to do a better job of developing future major leaguers. Maddon approached the Angels about staying on after his playing days ended, and the organization agreed. Thus began a three-decade journey up the ranks.

If the lessons handed down from his father hadn’t adequately taught him the value of patience and a positive attitude, those first few years navigating baseball’s backwaters surely did. After a brief stint as a scout, Maddon became manager of the rookie-league Idaho Falls team at age twenty-seven. From a distance, it looked like an inauspicious debut, with the team going 27-43 on the year. But just as he had in his playing days—and would in his future
major league managing days—Maddon wasn’t stressing over lumpy results. Sure, he wanted to win, just as he wished he’d hit .350 at A-ball. But learning the intricacies of the game remained his biggest focus.

The wins and losses didn’t improve much as the years ticked by. Trekking from Idaho Falls to Salem, from Peoria to Midland, Maddon never once earned a winning record in six years of minor league managing. Others saw past the losses, though. Outmanned in his first year at Salem, Maddon still guided his team into the playoffs with a 34-36 record, then rolled through the postseason, winning the league championship and Manager of the Year Award in the process.

Moreover, a minor league manager’s success is defined—by smart teams anyway—as much by the players he elevates and the lessons he instills as by his record. The Angels liked the way players responded to Maddon’s mentorship, how Maddon interacted with coaches and instructors, and how he prepared for a game. They routed talented but raw prospects to Maddon’s teams, sending steady, productive minor league lifers elsewhere. That longstanding practice let Maddon manage the team’s most promising young talents, while hurting the records of the teams he managed. It was a huge vote of confidence for a young manager on the rise.

“Preston Gomez was my right-hand man, one of the most astute baseball people I’ve ever met,” said Mike Port, the Angels’ director of player development from 1978 to 1984 and general manager for the ensuing seven years. “Preston did not volunteer compliments lightly. In 1986, he went to see Joe’s Midland club play, in Double A. He came back and said, ‘I’m going to tell you right now, this man will manage in the major leagues.’ In the thirty-some years I worked with Preston, only one other time did he say that, and that was about [former Milwaukee Brewers and Oakland A’s manager] Ken Macha. So he was two for two.”