Maddon leading the cultural revolution
By Howard Bryant
ESPN.com, October 13, 2008

[Excerpts]

A cultural revolution

There is a segment of the baseball establishment willing to listen to Joe Maddon, hungry for a new paradigm, and another segment that seems untrustworthy of the motivational speeches, the references to Sisyphus and the unorthodox methods that appear part Oprah and Dr. Phil, part Vince Lombardi and — given the number of scrapes his team gets in and his baseball lineage — part Leo Durocher.

…Said former big league player and manager and current television broadcaster Buck Martinez…, "It is a total cultural revolution because they’ve never had a culture of winning. That’s what he’s trying to do, and it’s absolutely appropriate."

"The culture here had to be changed," Maddon said. "If you go to a different country, you have to learn to eat different food. You have to learn a different language, different dress, different customs. We had to change all of that. Why did I think it was going to work? I don’t know. I just had a lot of confidence that everything I had thought about could work.

"More than anything else, I’m trying to get us to play the game the way it was played in 1920. I’m a traditionalist," Maddon said. "I want to play in the simplest way. I believe that. I think people are really reading it the wrong way. I want my defense to play catch. I want my pitchers to have command of the fastball first. I want my hitters to have a two-strike mentality.

Maddon believes in psychological construction as much as calisthenics. There was the time during spring training when the military’s traveling baseball team was on a furlough from Iraq and asked Maddon if it could take batting practice with the Rays. Maddon agreed, but went a step further: He asked the soldiers to talk to his team about Iraq, about life when life isn’t about losing a tough game and still earning more than 99 percent of the population, but actually is a game of life and death. After the soldiers, Maddon invited Dick Vitale and Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive coordination Monte Kiffin to speak to his team.

Though the Cardinals have the most successful franchise in the NL, as measured by World Series victories, there have been many periods over the last 50 years when the Cardinals had meager talent on the team. Yet the team’s winning culture over the last half century (and before) is reflected in another record of accomplishment that is unmatched in all of Major League Baseball, in one respect at least, as described by Rick Hummel:

From Rick Hummel, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, 09/28/2008 (excerpts):

Throwing out the strike-shortened year of 1994, when there was no postseason, the Cardinals have not had two consecutive losing seasons in nearly 50 years….

No other team is even close to the Cardinals in the length of time between back-to-back losing (full) seasons.

In the National League, the closest for consistency is Los Angeles, which last had back-to-back losing seasons in 1986-87. Atlanta last had consecutive losing seasons in 1989-90 and Houston in 1990-91.

The Chicago White Sox are the somewhat surprising leaders in the American League. The Sox haven’t had consecutive losing seasons since 1988-89. The New York Yankees are next, last having back-to-back losers in 1991-92.

Perhaps one clue to how the Cardinals have maintained a winning culture for so long is reflected in this observation from Derrick Goold:

From Derrick Goold, St. Louis Post-Dispatch 10.07.2008:

“Every player in the Cardinals’ Organization since 1940 has had contact with George Kissell and they have all been better for it. … Well known for his emphasis on fundamentals, George taught several generations of Redbirds how to play baseball.”

George Kissel, Tony LaRussa, Jose Oquendo, and others on the Cardinal coaching staff seem to have been keys to the continuity in the Cardinal winning culture. Committed ownership also seems to be a vital factor, in the current ownership group and earlier under August Busch. And, of course, the fans seem to be a crucial factor in keeping the focus on “respecting the Game” and “playing the game the right way” and otherwise honoring and supporting sustained motivation and excellence in performance on the field, even among visiting teams and players.

Teams can have losing cultures as well as winning cultures. The Cubs (media and fans at least) have the longest lasting culture of losing in MLB. Dreading defeat is the definitive value and tradition of that culture.

It was difficult to witness the pain on the faces of Cub fans and in the voice of announcer Ron Santo during the team’s shocking defeat in the NLDS (being swept by a Dodger team barely over the .500 mark in the regular season that mustered only one win against the Phillies). Here’s an article from The Hardball Times searching for the causes of the latest Cub failure….

The Corpse on the Dissecting Table
by Chris Jaffe of The Hardball Times
October 13, 2008

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/the-corpse-on-the-dissecting-table/

[Excerpts]

They Cubs have dropped 13 of their last 14 postseason series, but they’ve
never looked as utterly inept as the last two….

With repeated and unprecedented choke jobs, you have to wonder what the
heck is going on. From a perfectly sabermetric point of view, the last two
postseasons can be shrugged off as a quirk of sample size. To hell with the
perfectly sabermetric point of view. Again, it’s the process, not the
result, that sets off the alarm bells….

It’s unduly simplistic to claim a sole cause for the 2007-8 shortcomings,
but some underlying causes can be rooted out. A key one revolves around the
decisions and actions of the team’s manager, Lou Piniella….

Stonewall Jackson once noted that repeated victory will make an army invisible. He meant they’d have more faith in themselves, come to expect victory, and be willing to endure greater costs to achieve their goals than a less proven unit would.

The converse is also true. Repeated loss can make a bunch expect defeat. When the wheels start coming off, the result can be a ghastly sight….

Rather than cite the dry academic evidence objective, verifiable research, I will post the much more colorful and entertaining evidence subjective opinions that can be found in articles by baseball writers and reporterspeople who have a vested interest in meaningless and, at times, false narratives.

Interesting. Maybe it is just that they have won? Maybe this is all circular logic? Outside of the Cubs, the teams that probably have the biggest reputations as long time losers are the Red Sox, Rays, and White Sox, and they have all experienced a good measure of success lately. Did they just have a sudden change of culture? Or did they just start winning game, and then playoff series?

I feel like I could say that the Cubs lose because they play too many day games, and that would be as strong an argument. The Rays don’t play as many day games and look at them – they are in the WS. The Red Sox don’t play as many either, and they have won a couple. In fact, everybody else plays fewer day games, and everybody else has won more titles. I rest my case – the Cubs lose because they play too many day games.

So Maddon lays into people that loaf. That’s good, but Lou Pinella tore Fukudome a new one several times this year. He’s put people in their place more than a few times. Whatever the Cubs problem is, it is not that Lou Pinella is too much of a softie. I am pretty confident in that.

You cite Gerry Fraley…so do I. He thinks Frank Thomas and Ryan Howard aren’t that good, saying that Howard killed the lineup with strikeouts…mind you, this was right after he’d posted a .976 OPS…and that Thomas caused the Jays to have an “unsuitable” lineup…mind you, right after his release he went on to post a .916 OPS over about 150 PA’s, probably due to the fact that he’s a really good hitter in a funk, and those types of people usually rebound. He thought that after 2007 the Yankees should have unloaded A-Rod and Mariano Rivera. Good source, I’d say.

How did the Rays’ culture make Carlos Pena, B.J. Upton, Evan Longoria, Dioner Navarro, and Carl Crawford good at playing baseball? How did it make James Shields and Scott Kazmir good at throwing them? Maddon has been there for 3 years now. How come the Rays didn’t win earlier? Presumably, Maddon was still trying to put his culture in place over that time. Was it possibly because the Rays players developed into good players, and they bolstered their roster with guys like Pena (a career underachiever), Iwamura (a solid glove who posts decent OBPs), and Matt Garza (a guy they picked up b/c they dealt perhaps their most talented kid)? Is it that they were a better team skill-wise this season then in the past?

Why is it that you insist on carrying these arguments well beyond their terminus? We had this discussion not 3 weeks ago. It does no good to kick the same topics around again and again, and it pushes other topics off of the board. I respect your right to post this…however, that right does not exclude you from criticism.

I certainly do believe people like George Kissell and Red Schoendienst were carriers of a sort of “Cardinal way.” But I don’t think the culture extends much beyond spring training, preparation and perhaps some managerial expectations. The culture of, say, the University of Michigan football team—as rich as any in the country—did not help it last week when the Illini pasted them on their own turf. It didn’t help the Yankees or the Red Sox (enough) this year, etc.

Yes, I think players can play up to expectations sometimes. But I think the effect is marginal most of the time. Sportswriters are quite good at misattributing cause and effect and drawing inferences from ridiculously small sample sizes. I don’t think we really need to do that at VEB. There are enough supportable theses to present without advancing nebulous theories to explain what is nothing more than a largely well-run and supported franchise.

Memphis finally broke a string of losing seasons with a 75-67 mark in 2008. Despite all the losing seasons the AAA Redbirds have had, a ton of Memphis guys have gone to St. Louis to contribute. Ryan Ludwick, Adam Wainwright, Yadier Molina, Skip Schumacher, and Rick Ankiel start the list. At the end of 2000, when the Redbirds won the PCL, they had some guy named Pujols. Maybe, Memphis can finally get back to the playoffs in 2009 with players like Brett Wallace coming up from Springfield.

Every team and every organization has a culture.

But a lot of you guys seem to believe that culture has no effect whatsoever on winning or losing. Your dogma seems to be that you can quantify talent with statistical data, so talent is the only factor that counts in winning and losing; or at least that anything that cannot be quantified isn’t worthy of being consider a factor at all.

Evidently, then, you presume that the Rays went from worst to best in one year entirely on the basis of talent. Right… Your presumption must be that the Rays had a massive, sudden influx of new talent or an astounding rise in the skill curve for existing players. Right…. Likewise, the Tigers had the best talent in the AL last year, virtually every baseball analyst agreed, yet they got off to a miserable start and finished out of the running. I guess their players just lost their talent all of a sudden. That would be your presumption no doubt. Right….

Hey, it’s not my problem if you don’t get it. The manager of the World Series team for the AL and those around him definitely get it.

“The culture here had to be changed,” Maddon said.

I trust his judgment in the matter far more than I trust the judgment of you who sit on the sidelines with your blind faith that the only thing that counts in team performance is what YOU count….

Rather than cite the dry academic evidence, I will post the much more colorful and entertaining evidence that can be found in articles by baseball writers and reporters.

I didn’t know you could scoop a pile of turds out of the grass and call them “evidence.” College would have been a lot easier if I’d known that!