After the Northridge earthquake in January 1994, the scoreboard in the outfield at what was then known as Anaheim Stadium collapsed. A Marlboro sign with a dark silhouette of a cowboy leaned dangerously inward, peering over the grass as if he were trying to steal signs from home plate. Much of the signage to either side of the digital video screen was buckling like wet cardboard.
As the California Angels returned to play that season, a riveter was positioned hundreds of feet in the air working on a giant metal A in left center field, securing some of the new pieces of the park’s aesthetic focal point back together. Perhaps emboldened by a thick pair of gloves, the worker shouted down at new Angels outfielder Bo Jackson and asked whether he could throw him a ball. Jackson had yet to warm up but, as legend has it, stopped stretching, took one crow-hop and uncorked an absolute missile of a ball straight at the stunned riveter, nailing him square in the mitt.
Watching was a new major league staffer for the Angels named Joe Maddon. Jackson was in his first year with the club and, entering his age-31 season, his final year of professional baseball. By then, a slew of injuries related to his parallel baseball and football careers had diminished Jackson’s abilities, especially as it pertained to his hips.
Maddon, stunned by what he had seen in the outfield that day, eventually brought up a novel idea to Marcel Lachemann, who took over as manager in the middle of that season: Can we put him in the bullpen? See what that looks like? Can we get him on the mound?
“Of course,” Maddon says today, “that never made it to Bo’s ears.”
He continues: “I mean, no one could [throw a baseball that high]. Nobody. NO-BODY can do that. I wish these guys were around now. I wish I had some more jack back then to push a little harder. I don’t know if Bo would have ever wanted to do it, but I would have loved to see it.”
Maddon also tried to get the Angels’ 1992 second-round pick Deshawn Warren to play designated hitter during his rest days from pitching because he was the fastest player in camp—another suggestion that was passed on due to nerves about how it would look. Warren never made it to the majors.
Fittingly, Maddon would end up being brought back to Anaheim to manage MLB’s first modern day two-way superstar, Shohei Ohtani, in 2020, two years after Ohtani arrived in the States to play baseball. The next season, Maddon oversaw Ohtani’s first MVP campaign, when he hit 46 home runs and pitched to a 3.18 ERA in 23 starts on the mound.
His approach remains relevant as the NFL prepares to inherit its own version of Ohtani, Colorado star Travis Hunter, a Heisman Trophy winner who won both the Chuck Bednarik Award (best collegiate defensive player) and Fred Biletnikoff Award (best collegiate receiver) in 2024. As recently as this week, Hunter—widely expected to be a top-three pick in next week’s draft—said he would rather not play football than be forced to choose one position. This, amid the typical safety net talk of anonymous scouts who see Hunter as a player who should either major as a cornerback or a wide receiver.
Maddon speaks with a breezy tone these days. At 71, his goals are very much in the moment: another round under 80 at the golf course (his current run is three consecutive days). And while it might be a surprise to some that the former manager of the cutting-edge Tampa Bay Rays—one of MLB’s most significant analytical success stories—having taken a meager payroll to the 2008 World Series (as well as having managed the Chicago Cubs to their first World Series victory since 1908), he sees the path to success for Hunter as one of relationships, not overly influenced by data.
Hunter, like Ohtani, is coming to the NFL with a defined purpose: not only to play but to play both ways. Maddon says the team that drafts him needs to resist the urge to suffocate that desire, which would risk getting less out of a player on the field. For reference, Hunter played roughly 1,500 snaps at Colorado last year. A top-tier every-down cornerback (like Patrick Surtain II) plays about 1,100 snaps during an NFL regular season. The three most heavily snapped wide receivers in the NFL last year played a little more than 1,000 total snaps.
“The player is the one who knows how to do this. The rest of us don’t,” Maddon says. “In the world of analytics, there are all kinds of equations and matrices built in order to figure out how often he’ll be able to play, how many hits he can take, how many runs over 20 yards, how fast his speed was, has he lost any of that speed, does he need any rest …
“They’re going to go through all these scenarios to try and figure it out. And that’s insane. Trust the player, talk to the player. You’re doing something that’s never been done before. I mean, it’s a lot of running, so rest him a couple series. If he’s playing defense and it’s three-and-out all runs, why would that bother you? Or, you could take him in and out of games earlier, almost like we do with pitchers now, where we pitch them less in the beginning of the year so we have them at the end of the year.”
Maddon remembers the hesitancy across baseball when Ohtani was going through the bidding process. Because some teams were so married to their various data sets that red-flagged a hitter skipping batting practices to focus on pitching or vice versa (not to mention a player who would have to be extremely cautious about muscular overload), there were clubs—even the Angels—who feared signing the generational player would be more trouble than it was worth. The potential embarrassment of Ohtani flaming out and sustaining some kind of irreversible damage to his body was part of the equation.
“We all worry about people getting injured,” Maddon says. “Listen, people get injured. Sports are tough, and I don’t get the analytical concepts behind protecting a player from being injured.”
When he was managing, Maddon was part of an early group of coaches and executives privy to player-tracking data, which measured how far someone ran, how often they slid, how fast, how much exertion came from the run and how often that player was active on the basepaths. From that data, there was an attempt to create an equation that determined when a player needed a rest day.
“It’s crap,” Maddon says. “It’s not worth the time spent on it. There’s no—I mean, these NFL coaches know. Baseball people know. We know when a guy needs a rest. We can see it in his eyes. We just have to develop a relationship where we get honesty in return.
“It’s like a relief pitcher. They really monitor the amount of times you can use a relief pitcher in a month. But to me, it’s about the guy. Some guys are more resilient than others. Some guys pitch better on Day 3 than Day 2. Some starters, 110 pitches don’t bother them nearly as much as 90 pitches may bother someone else. It’s so different and they try and create this one-size-fits-all method which isn’t true. But they’re convincing players it is true, and you’re robbing the sport of charismatic, dynamic players because everything is being monitored.”
Maddon cautions that, while he finds numbers useful, much of the way he handled his relationship with Ohtani involved a few simple tenets.
• Agreeing to the parameters with the player and select decision-makers beforehand.
“Philosophically, everyone has to be on board,” he says. “You need synergy. Everyone has to be in agreement and, while you’re setting it up, not everyone is going to be in agreement. But after the arguing is done, everyone needs to have everyone else’s back. That’s really, really important. If people start going rogue, even behind someone’s back, it’s going to blow up. Whoever belongs in the group, have them in the group.”
• Appreciate the newness of the situation and allow for trial and error based on the player’s own self-assessment.
“I told Shohei, the rules are that there are no rules,” Maddon says. “I told him that he had to be very, very honest with me. And that I would be honest with him in return. We would communicate daily and that’s it.”
Maddon says that, while he would develop a feel for each of his players individually—for example, he would pull a pitcher immediately if, after being asked how he’s feeling, the pitcher said fine but monitor me the next inning, knowing that the player was pushing past his limits—Ohtani always took the directive to heart. He was always up front about his level of fatigue.
• Get comfortable with the idea that one player is going to be treated somewhat differently and be up front in addressing that with others.
Ohtani, Maddon says, was like a punter or a placekicker who had his own unique schedule and was not always within the team’s orbit on a moment-to-moment basis.
“And I was good with that. Some people started complaining and I was like, ‘Are you crazy? What are we complaining about here? Can you do what he does? Can you be the Cy Young award winner and an MVP-level hitter? No? O.K., then stop. There’s always innate jealousies and I’m sure there will be some hazing at the NFL level. But it sounds like the kid can handle it. And when he goes out on the field and performs, he’ll shut everyone up. With Shohei, everyone shut up. And that was going to happen.”
Maddon doesn’t want to paint himself as anti-analytics altogether. Especially when he was with the Rays, he found that departments’s particular weight on players in the acquisition process was helpful, among other useful tidbits. But in talking about Ohtani’s ability to silence a group of professional cynics with awe, when placing us in left center field as Jackson catapulted a baseball into space, he is trying to reclaim the idea of personal magic. He is trying to empower someone who has already done something special and would like to continue doing something special.
The beauty of the situation is that, when approaching it that way a team can give itself some grace. There is always a caveat in the plan that allows for change if it clearly isn’t working. But there is nothing worse, nothing more disappointing, than allowing someone like Jackson to disappear from baseball without even toeing the mound. There is nothing sadder than the idea of telling Hunter what he can and cannot do just because numbers on a page red-flag our own fears and insecurities—ones the player clearly doesn’t possess.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Joe Maddon’s Advice to NFL Coaches: Let Travis Hunter Do Something Special.
