THE BOOK OF JOE

A winning manager reflects on changes in Major League Baseball, many of which devalue managers.

If there’s an unstated theme to this likable memoir, it’s that things happen when they happen, sometimes without rhyme or reason. Maddon worked his way around the field before heading several clubs, including the Chicago Cubs, which he guided to their first World Series win in more than a century. Yet, as sportswriter Verducci (whose previous book, The Cubs Way, covered that win) writes in the preface, Maddon never played a minute of major league ball and “logged twenty years in the minors as a player, manager, and instructor before getting a major league job.” He was working at a liquor store and contemplating a move to play in Italy when the call came from the California Angels to come aboard as a scout. Four decades later, Maddon recalls, what got him there was positive thinking: “I never lost sight of my dreams, and my self-confidence has held up in spite of many obstacles.” Maddon has often found himself swimming against the stream: For one thing, though “an early adopter of the use of computers in baseball,” he resisted the siren call of the quants to let numbers do all the talking, insisting that instinct—“thinking in advance”—be a key component of the manager’s analytical toolset. “Never forget the heartbeat,” he told his players. You can’t argue with Maddon’s wins, but you can also see why he was ground down by a system that came to be almost entirely numerical—not just on the field, but also on the bottom line—and in which risk and daring are forgotten. Near the end of the book, he quips, “you can make all the right decisions in the world, and it can come out wrong.”

Fans of the diamond will find this assembled wisdom to be both pleasing and instructive.