When a team is not playing to its potential, do you want a manager giving you the truth or leading a pep rally?
It’s a question that applies to the Cubs’ Joe Maddon right now. Through good times and bad, through thick and thin, through sun and rain, it’s always the same message from the team’s skipper: Everything is wonderful.
Maddon is a long way from losing his audience. The Cubs are still in first place in the National League Central by a wide margin. But they have been struggling.
If Maddon isn’t careful, he’s going to turn into The Boy Who Cried Wolf in reverse. If you preach that everything is great when it clearly isn’t, people eventually will start tuning you out. Even the truest of true believers can see that right fielder Jason Heyward isn’t nearly the player Maddon claims he is. And you’d have to have your head in the infield dirt not to see that there is something wrong with ace Jake Arrieta. But Maddon stands by his men, holding pompoms.
There’s no doubt that president of baseball operations Theo Epstein hired him for, among many other things, his ability to get players to believe in themselves. Maddon did that in 2011, when he called a meeting to inform the Rays that they were going to make the playoffs, despite the fact that they were, at that point, 0-6. And they did make the playoffs.
What isn’t mentioned, of course, is the likelihood that he always tells his players they’re going to make the playoffs, no matter how dire the circumstances. But we don’t hear about all the speeches that didn’t work.
Maddon is a lot of fun to watch and, judging by his players’ loyalty, a lot of fun to play for. But everyone yearns for a helping of honesty now and then. Most of us, especially in Chicago, know the truth when it’s staring us in the face. And managers need to have more than one message. To put it in baseball terms, you can’t throw one pitch all the time. You have to mix it up.
If Maddon keeps sugarcoating things, police are going to put out an all-points bulletin for a man behind a curtain.
