Chicago Cubs: Which team has made the best managerial hire so far?

Chicago Cubs: Maddon returns home, ready to win it all

Some things just make sense. Like Joe Maddon returning to the Angels, the team that originally drafted him and with whom he spent over three decades during his career in professional baseball.

I’ll always be a huge Maddon fan – I mean, how can you not be? The guy ended a century of suffering in Chicago and did it with a flair and gusto rarely seen from big league managers. Still, after the 2019 season, it became pretty clear a time for change had come.

For Maddon, there are no hard feelings and he’s clearly embracing his new team with open arms. It’s a homecoming – and he’s preaching a lot of what we heard when he came to Chicago: he’s going to win and he’s going to do it his way.

"“I’m not going to sugarcoat it or pussyfoot around it,” Maddon said at his introductory press conference. “My goal is to be playing [in October]. I don’t like watching this on TV right now. It’s much more fun to be involved. Much more fun to be under the scrutiny, Much more fun to be second-guessed than to not. Never permit the pressure to exceed the pleasure of the moment, ever. When you arrive at that point, that’s when you can really do some special things. That’s what I’m really going to preach this year.”"

The Angels have plenty of holes, to be sure. They’re still reeling with the death of Tyler Skaggs and the subsequent fallout that has cast a cloud over the entire organization. On the field, they have some great talents in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, among others, but they’ll have to fill a ton of holes if they want to compete with Oakland and Houston in the American League West.

As happy as I am for Maddon, I’m not sure this marriage will work out quite like everyone involved hopes. The former Cubs skipper, despite his success in the dugout, struggled at times to address non-baseball questions with the media, namely Addison Russell‘s domestic abuse suspension and everything related to it.

We haven’t heard the last of everything surrounding Skaggs’ death – and Maddon better be ready when that foot falls and the questions come flying.