Try Not to Suck: The Exceptional, Extraordinary Baseball Life of Joe Maddon

Sports journalists Chastain (100 Things Jets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die) and Rogers offer a breezy but detailed look at the life and career of Joe Maddon, the manager who led the Chicago Cubs to victory in the 2016 World Series. The authors follow Maddon from his youth in Hazleton, Pa., through his undergraduate years as a baseball player at Lafayette College, and into a short career playing for the California Angels, an organization that emphasized “the lost process of apprenticeship” and that encouraged Maddon to develop his talent for coaching. The authors convincingly illustrate how Maddon combined his knowledge of baseball fundamentals with “the analytics of the game way in advance of analytics driving the game as they later would,” which helped establish his reputation as a loose, freewheeling coach who, as one player put it, “was talking millennially before it became the way to talk to guys.” While the authors discuss Maddon’s more controversial moments, such as his pitching decisions in games six and seven of the Cubs World Series games, the book is more hagiographic than critical (“Not only did he have athletic ability, he had a natural curiosity”). This is a perceptive look at an exciting baseball manager, but one that will be of most interest to die-hard Cubs fans. (Mar.)