The Los Angeles Angels announced on Wednesday that they are bringing back Joe Maddon as their manager. Not many people might have remembered this, but Maddon was actually the manager of the California Angels in 1996 and the Anaheim Angels in 1999, before joining the Tampa Bay Rays as their manager in 2006.
There is no doubt that the Angels are getting one of the top managers in Major League Baseball. The native of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, took a Tampa Bay squad that had a low payroll each and every year and overachieved. In his nine years with the Rays, Maddon had a record of 754 wins and 705 losses for a very respectable winning percentage of .517.
Also during that time when Maddon managed the Rays, Tampa Bay finished above .500 six times and reached the postseason four times. Maddon’s time with Tampa Bay reached its pinnacle in 2008, when the Rays reached the World Series before losing in five games to the Philadelphia Phillies.
After his time with the Rays, Maddon managed the Chicago Cubs over the last five seasons. In 2016, the Cubs won their first World Series since 1908 with Maddon at the helm. Remarkably, even though Maddon was able to accomplish an achievement that no other Cubs manager was able to achieve in over a century, it was not enough to keep his job for 2020. After overachieving with the Rays, the Cubs underachieved in 2019 as they missed the playoffs by finishing third behind the St. Louis Cardinals and Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Central.
