Maddon Keeps the Rays Bright

One could argue it’d be worse in Kansas City, more hopeless in Miami, even gloomier in Detroit.

But managing the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, it’s right there with them, at best.

You want their highlight, eight years in?

They finished in fourth place two years ago.

So, a few months on the job, Joe Maddon gathers all his reason and says, “You know what? I like that we’re in the American League East. I’m glad we are.”

Honestly, so does everyone else in the American League East.

Maddon smiles. Doesn’t matter.

This is the very gig he has been waiting for.

They don’t spend money, people don’t come to see them play, their history is more than slightly embarrassing, their caps have winged sea creatures on them, and one of the better managers in the game just spent a couple of million dollars to leave.

Party at Maddon’s place!

God love him, had Joe Maddon been at the Alamo, he would have insisted his guys go first to third on a single to left.

It’s baseball. It’s his team. He loves his new bosses, and they love him back. The players would like to know -- seriously -- if this guy is for real. He is. Soon enough, they’ll see.

In the first week of camp, pitchers were throwing to catchers. A ball in the dirt was smothered by a chest protector, the kind of thing that happens, oh, a thousand times a day. Except Maddon is an ex-catcher, and it’s hot out, and it’s February, and nobody would have minded a lazy backhanded stab this early.

“That’s righteous!” Maddon screamed, turning every head in camp.

Josh Paul, the former Angel and current Devil Ray, chuckled. So perfectly Maddon. Still ...

“Oh, geez,” Paul said. “He said, ‘That’s righteous.’ ”

It is what Maddon is. He doesn’t get down, he doesn’t stop teaching, he doesn’t let up. And he likes it, always has, from fungoes at dawn to secondary leads at dusk.

On another afternoon, Maddon was chatting with organizational baseball men Andrew Friedman and Gerry Hunsicker when a small commotion splashed into their conversation. Seems two buddies from the old neighborhood in Hazleton, Pa., had decided now was the time to come see Joey, and were working their way past a couple of guards.

“They breached security,” Maddon said. “I kind of like that.”

Already, he has worn a Jorge Cantu Team Mexico jersey to one practice, signed off on a Joe Maddon Retro Glasses giveaway for the second home game of the season, and opened Cafe Maddonini, a table and chairs on a concrete slab outside his spring office where he addresses the media while serving beer, chips and salsa.

“What is ‘managerial’?” he asked. “I don’t even know. Who has written up this managerial code of conduct anyhow? If you can’t be yourself, then why even take a job, if you have to change?”

After nudging the Devil Rays a few hours closer to presentable the other day, Maddon recited a telephone number for his mom, Beanie, in Hazleton.

Beanie?

“Beanie,” he said. “B-E-A-N-I-E. Her real name is Albina. Everybody calls her Beanie.”

Even you?

“Beanie, mom, half and half,” he said. “Called her yesterday, ‘Beanie, what’s up?’ ”

Beanie Maddon is 73, sounds 43, and acts 33. She works four or five days a week as a short-order cook at Third Base Luncheonette, not far from the boarded-up high school her children attended and the apartment in which they were raised, where she still lives.

Her schedule is, let’s say, fluid.

“I go in for a few hours just to get aggravated,” she said, “and then go home.”

Her husband, Joe’s father, died going on four years ago, the same year Joe won a World Series title with the Angels. They all got through it the best they could, balancing emotional devastation with delirious joy, hung some World Series mementos on the walls of the diner, and then went back to work.

Now here’s Joe, sitting at Cafe Maddonini, managing something resembling a big-league baseball team.

“He just sets his little goals for himself,” Beanie said. “He always did. And then he’d get what he wanted.”

Already the organization adores him, his energy, the way everything sounds so new coming from him. It believes the folks in Tampa might learn to like him too.

For Joe Maddon Retro Glasses Night, the first 15,000 customers will receive replicas of his signature clunky black specs. That’s a lot of glasses: Their second home game last year drew about 9,000 people, and the fans’ instincts were accurate. The Devil Rays went on to lose 95 games.

By then, Lou Piniella had had just about enough of the $25-million payrolls in a division that spends that on a third baseman. So he forced a buyout, opening the job for Maddon, who, at 51, had spent more than three decades with the Angels.

“He has patience like his father,” Beanie says.

“Not like me, like his father. Like a saint.”

That’ll be important in his new job, of course. He’ll need pitching. And he’ll need the young guys to grow up, and fast. And, someday, he’ll need some money to spend on more players, if, indeed, the Devil Rays ever get close enough to the Yankees and Red Sox and Blue Jays to make it count.

In the meantime, he has his new life in Tampa, in the AL East, the rest of baseball up ahead. Why shouldn’t he be happy?

As Maddon said as the sun disappeared from another day of spring, “It’s all good stuff.”

If it ever became otherwise, which he really doubts, then there’d always be Beanie.

“Maybe,” she said, “I’ll come down and straighten them all out.”

She was kidding. Probably.