ST. LOUIS — It started one October day in 2014 with lawn chairs and Miller Lites on a beach in Pensacola, Florida.
Joe Maddon and Theo Epstein sipped a couple of cold ones, shot the breeze about baseball and wondered what they might be able to accomplish together if Maddon became the next manager of the Cubs.
A blink of an eye later, Maddon and wife Jaye were in their RV somewhere in Texas. The call came: The job was his if he wanted it.
“I could not have been happier,” Maddon recalled Sunday, his final day as Cubs manager. “And it could not have turned out better.”
Five straight years of winning baseball. Three straight trips to the NLCS. And one World Series title, ending a drought that lasted an eternity and then some.
Cubs fans know the details better than they know the backs of their hands.
But Maddon’s marriage with the Cubs ended, essentially, on the eve of the last day of an unremarkable 2019 season. It ended with bottles of Caymus wine and a breakup in a swanky hotel near Busch Stadium.
Maddon and Epstein sat in the latter’s room and talked about the good times. More than that, they talked about the future. Both say they agreed it was time for Joe to go, time to find a greener pasture, or at least the next one. The veracity of that is open to interpretation given Maddon, who expects to manage again right away, said many times along the way this season that he hoped to be back in 2020.
“As the season’s in progress, and in conversation with Theo, you can feel things between people,” Maddon said. “And it gets to the end like right now and it’s obvious it’s the right thing to do. You all have to agree with that.”
Do we? Is five years ever long enough when it comes to the best manager a team has ever had?
When Dusty Baker hit the road in 2006, all involved agreed he couldn’t disappear fast enough. When Lou Piniella’s time as manager expired in 2010, no one wanted out more than he did. A cavalcade of Cubs managers over the years were chewed up, spit out, reduced to caricatures of themselves.
But not Maddon, who exits no less impressively than he arrived.
When it comes to who the Cubs are and what they stand for, Maddon is the man — more than anyone else — who changed the culture. The culture he stepped into, the one defined by 100-plus years without a World Series title, damn sure never changed him.
It started with cheap beer and ended with expensive wine. In between, there was champagne.
Maddon aged well, too.
“He’s a fantastic manager, a Hall of Fame manager, and accomplished what we wanted to accomplish overall.” Epstein said.
If any of that is what makes this the right time to bid Maddon adieu, well, it’s kind of confusing.
He isn’t the guy the Cubs need in their dugout anymore? One has to believe Maddon, in his heart of hearts, finds that laughable. But the eternal optimist stayed true to himself — “attitude is a decision,” he puts it — until the end. He delivered no low blows, whispered no cheap shots.
“There’s nothing to lament,” he said. “There’s nothing to be upset about. There’s no blame. There’s no finger pointing. It’s just time. It’s just time. That happens.”
Maddon has always known how to mark an occasion. At the team hotel Friday night, he raised a glass to every Cubs player and staff member and toasted them. Isn’t it supposed to work the other way around? Maddon went to each of them — one by one — to express his feelings and offer words of encouragement.
He told Javy Baez to never stop being himself. He told Kris Bryant to lean on him anytime, anywhere, for any reason at all. He told Jon Lester none of this would’ve happened if the veteran pitcher — a bit of a Maddon skeptic — hadn’t come aboard shortly after Maddon was hired.
“I think when you’re on the other side, you think it’s kind of a tired act, like, ‘This is the big leagues. What are we doing? This isn’t a zoo or anything,” with some of the stuff he would do,” Lester said. “But when you’re with him every day and you see the process of how he goes about it, it’s more pro, [more] big-league, than anything I’ve ever seen.”
Anthony Rizzo laughed with Maddon about a conversation they had early in the 2015 season. Rizzo walked into the manager’s office and admitted to having had a few drinks the night before. Maddon told him to swing at the ball in the middle.
“He understands the human element of this game better than anyone I’ve ever been around,” Rizzo said. “That’s what made it so special playing for him.”
Maddon has shrugged off a good bit of criticism since overextending reliever Aroldis Chapman in the 2016 postseason, but he does have his pride. And now that it’s over, he can let his feisty side come out and play awhile, too.
“Anybody that wants to denigrate anything that we’ve done over the last five years, come see me at some point,” he said.
After Year 5, Game 162, he stood against a wall outside the visitors clubhouse at Busch, a bottle of Corona in his hand, and figured the assembled media could use one more good laugh.
“For those that say those [critical] things, if you’re in the other dugout? I will kick your ass,” he said. “That’s pretty much how this whole thing would work out, so just know that. Your ass will be kicked.”
What a closing line. Here’s to five very good years. Salut.
