Manager Joe Maddon won’t be back with Cubs next season
By JAY COHEN AP Sports Writer
From the moment Joe Maddon joined the Chicago Cubs, taking the reins in a Wrigleyville bar five years ago, he talked about winning.
He was the right manager at the right time for a franchise that had experienced mostly terrible timing for more than a century. Right until his time in Chicago ran out.
The Cubs will have a new manager next season after Maddon and president of baseball operations Theo Epstein announced Sunday it was time for a change after three years of declining results since the franchise’s historic World Series championship in 2016.
The situation was finalized when Maddon and Epstein met in Epstein’s hotel room after Saturday’s 8-6 victory at St. Louis, sharing some wine and reminiscing about their wildly successful partnership.
Maddon’s contract expired after Sunday’s season-ending 9-0 loss to the NL Central champion Cardinals.
“Change can help you grow,” Epstein said. “And Joe said this change is going to help him grow and I feel it’s going to help the Cubs grow, too.”
The move begins what could be an active offseason for Chicago, and the 65-year-old Maddon once again becomes one of baseball’s top free agents.
“I want to continue to do this, whatever’s next out there, I want to be able to be on top of that too,” said Maddon, who has used everything from petting zoos to T-shirts with slogans like “Embrace The Target” and “Do Simple Better” to help his teams over the years.
“All of it’s been positive, man, and it’s been interesting, entertaining and quite frankly for this time of year, feeling pretty good, feeling pretty eager about everything, so it’s been a good year.”
While Maddon is out after five seasons, he is tied to Chicago forever after managing the Cubs to the 2016 championship for the franchise’s first title in 108 years.
Chicago also made it to the NL Championship Series in 2015 and 2017, but it lost in the wild-card round last October and tumbled out of the playoff race altogether this year. Weighed down by a puzzling discrepancy between their 51 wins at Wrigley Field and 33 road victories, the Cubs finished third in the NL Central.
“You look at the home and road splits and what we’ve done on the road … I mean these are like some really crazy, hard-to-wrap-your-mind-around things,” Maddon said this month. “I don’t know if somebody’s going to dig deeply enough to really figure it out, but it’s really, just to have your mind try to extrapolate what is going on here, it’s hard to pinpoint anything.”
The Cubs were in position to make the playoffs for much of this season. They had a half-game lead in the NL Central on Aug. 22. They had control of an NL wild card into September.
But a nine-game slide, including five consecutive one-run losses for the first time since 1915, wiped out their postseason chances and sealed Maddon’s fate.
“We just weren’t able to get over the hump,” he said.
Per the Cubs’ request, Maddon employed a more hands-on approach this year, especially on the hitting side, but the lineup was still plagued by inconsistency. There also were surprising fielding and baserunning issues given the Cubs’ strength in those areas since Maddon took over.
With Maddon gone, the focus turns to Epstein, and the club’s continued inability to develop pitching help for the major league roster. Yu Darvish rediscovered his form after it looked as if the Japanese right-hander might have trouble living up to his $126 million, six-year contract, but reliever Brandon Morrow’s $21 million, two-year deal was a costly mistake.
Even with the disappointing finish each of the past two years, Maddon likely will have plenty of suitors. And there will be a ton of interest in the Cubs’ job.
“Oh yeah, I don’t want to wait. I’m ready,” Maddon said.
The last time Maddon was available, Epstein fired Rick Renteria after just one year to create an opening in Chicago.
Maddon’s arrival in November 2014 coincided with the ascent of an impressive wave of prospects. A month after Maddon signed on, Jon Lester joined the Cubs in free agency, and the team took off from there.
Chicago won 103 games on its way to the NL Central title three years ago. After eliminating San Francisco and the Los Angeles Dodgers in the playoffs, the Cubs stopped their championship drought by beating the Cleveland Indians in a memorable Game 7 in the World Series.
“It’s hard to express kind of how (it) feels. You kind of feel like it could be an end of an era,” said veteran utilityman Ben Zobrist, who played for Maddon in Tampa Bay and Chicago. “When I look at my career, he’s at the top. … Joe’s a special person. Those kind of people, let alone managers, don’t come along very often.”
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AP freelance writer Jeff Melnick contributed to this report from St. Louis.
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Jay Cohen can be reached at https://twitter.com/jcohenap
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Elliott wins playoff race at Charlotte in scorching heat
By JENNA FRYER AP Auto Racing Writer
CONCORD, N.C. (AP) — Chase Elliott overcame a costly mistake that nearly wrecked his car to win a sloppy race in scorching temperatures on The Roval at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
The Sunday showcase was the first elimination race in NASCAR’s playoffs and attention was focused on which four drivers would be cut from 16-driver championship field. Elliott recovered from an earlier gaffe when he was leading on a restart, locked his tires headed into the first turn and drove directly into a tire barrier.
“I couldn’t believe I did that. That was just so stupid,” Elliott said. “I don’t know that you could have done anything more stupid leading this race than what I did right there. Luckily our car wasn’t too bad … fast enough to drive up through there, got the cautions at the right time, and just didn’t quit.
“If there’s ever a lesson to not quit, today was the example.”
Behind him, the race was for the final spot in the second round of the playoffs with Elliott’s teammate, Alex Bowman, desperately trying to hang on to the 12th slot. He finished second in the race — in a backup car because he crashed in final practice — but his fate was out of his control because he trailed Ryan Newman in the playoff standings.
But Newman, racing Aric Almirola over the final few laps for a shot at advancing, missed a chicane with two laps remaining and the error cost him his shot at advancing. The point difference swung to Bowman, who slumped to the ground next to his car after the race as medical attendants tried to help him recover from heat-related issues.
As Bowman was sitting there, Bubba Wallace approached him for Bowman deliberately spinning him in the race. Bowman had said when he spun Wallace that Wallace had been flipping him the middle finger for several laps and the contact was his retaliation.
They exchanged brief words and Bowman appeared to laugh at Wallace right before Wallace angrily splashed his bottle of water in Bowman’s face. Bowman was later taken to the infield care center for further treatment.
It was that kind of messy day on the hybrid road course/oval at Charlotte, where the championship chances ended for Newman, Almirola, Kurt Busch and Erik Jones.
A late caution led NASCAR to stop the race for a cleanup and the drivers had to sit inside their cockpits, where temperatures hovered around 120 degrees. NASCAR officials went car-to-car handing out water bottles, and Newman was among the many who radioed their crew asking for bags of ice to be waiting for him when the race ended.
Kyle Busch decided he wasn’t going to sit in the heat and drove his car to the garage, calling it a race with seven laps remaining. He was three laps down at the time and already locked into the second round of the playoffs.
Kevin Harvick finished third and was followed by Stewart-Haas Racing teammate Clint Bowyer, who was in danger of being eliminated from the playoffs but advanced with his fourth-place finish.
Brad Keselowski was fifth and followed by pole-sitter William Byron, Martin Truex Jr. and Ryan Blaney as playoff drivers claimed the top eight spots.
The track, typically a standard NASCAR oval, was modified for this playoff race for the second consecutive year into a 17-turn, 2.28-mile circuit that uses both the road course through the infield and the oval. The twists and turns around the circuit are marked with chicanes on the backstretch and frontstretch to slow the cars, and, potentially increase passing on the oval portion of the track. An added wrinkle from last year is an overhauled backstretch chicane revamped to make it a braking and passing zone.
NASCAR made it very clear in every communication with teams that skipping a chicane would be penalized, and Newman was one of many drivers to miss it and suffer a costly setback.
JONES FIRST OUT
Erik Jones was the first driver eliminated from the playoffs after a horrible opening round.
He had a mechanical issue at Las Vegas, but rallied last week at Richmond to finish fourth in a 1-2-3-4 sweep for Joe Gibbs Racing. Then NASCAR said Jones’ car had failed post-race inspection, and the 42-point penalty dropped him to last in the playoff field.
Jones was in a must-win situation at Charlotte to advance into the second round of the playoffs, but he went to the garage with damage to his Toyota at the end of the first stage and finished last. It officially knocked him out of the playoffs while the race was still going on.
“It’s frustrating not to even have a chance throughout the whole race, you know?” said Jones. “It’s unfortunate. We just had three really bad weeks and it’s some of our own doing and some not our own doing. I’d love to be moving forward here and challenging for the championship. I thought we could have went pretty deep this year, but it’s just the nature of the playoffs.”
BUSCH BAKES
Kyle Busch decided not to finish the race when NASCAR stopped it with seven laps remaining to clean up debris on the track. Busch was three laps down at the time and temperatures in the cars were hovering around 120 degrees during the stoppage.
With nothing to gain when the race resumed, Busch threw in the towel and pulled off the track.
UP NEXT
The opening race of the second round of the playoffs, Sunday at Dover International Speedway. Chase Elliott won last year.
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