I was fortunate enough to spend 20 minutes with Joe Maddon in his Tropicana Field office on Saturday afternoon prior to calling the Yankees-Rays game on FOX Sports 1. 20 minutes is never enough time to spend with Joe Maddon.
I sat there a sponge as he waxed poetic about life, baseball and how much he missed his dear friend Don Zimmer. I immediately became envious that I never had a chance to play for this visionary.
I asked him how he makes it work. How did he create an atmosphere in Tampa Bay that from the outside appears anything goes, yet order seems to be maintained, and success from a baseball team with limited resources is perennial?
"Very simply," he said, "this doesn't work without accountability."
Allowing a player's personality to shine while he is at work is essential for Maddon. In fact, he doesn't understand how more teams don't operate this way. Trying to make a player take on a personality that is not his own is a road block to success in Maddon's eyes. Telling a player he has to wear his hair a certain way or keep quiet and "act professional" in the clubhouse is prohibitive in the Joe Maddon system. In Tampa it is the Facebook office in 2010's, not IBM in the 1980's.
But there is nothing chaotic about how things work in Tampa. Sure, you might dress like The Penguin from Batman on a road trip or you can come to the ballpark in shorts and a hippie T-shirt but the message is the same as every other manager I've ever had: be on time, play hard and you'll never have a problem.
Accountability is the key. Accountability to your teammates, your coaches and to the fans. You will be held accountable for your actions and your performance, just like every other team in the league. The only difference is that you just might wear your pajamas on the team plane along the way.
And when you really think about it, how does how you dress off the field affect how you play on it? It doesn't. If anything, the atypical atmosphere Maddon creates with his team does nothing but help his players unwind and relax. He knows the pressures of trying to play this game at the MLB level, the more he can alleviate that the more he frees his players up to perform.
