Jay Rand

“He did everything, and he did it right,” Carmine Parlatore shared of her brother Joe Maddon’s youth. “Tell him things once and he absorbs it, and finds different angles to make it work a different way.” If you’ve ever watched Maddon take command of a ballgame, you’ve seen different. Obvious bunt situation? Rush Anthony Rizzo and have Ben Zobrist not just eventually cover first for a throw, but actually station him on first base taking pickoff throws from the pitcher not named Jon Lester.  How different was that? So much so that this past summer it was actually deemed an “illegal defense.” So, of course, Joe does the end-around by adorning Zobrist with the oversized first baseman’s glove and newly designated two-bagger Rizzo wears the more Trumpian mitt and plays charging bull. Option 2 (when you have a freak-of-nature manning second): Rizzo stays planted at first, and Javier Baez rushes the dish Insane Bolt style, flying by the pitcher’s mound as the pitch is being thrown. The end result is a baseball potentially coming the way of Baez’s head at a velocity of 100-plus miles per hour. I guess that’s one way to “embrace the target.”  RECOMMENDED: More Chicago Cubs postseason coverage Joe’s younger brother, Mark, however, will tell you that this “mad scientist” act isn’t new to his Chicago days—the result of too many late-night strategy sessions lubricated by Old Style. Recall the Cubs skipper this summer, flipping relievers between left field and the hill, dependent on lefty-r

It’s the morning after Game 4 of the NLDS, and as I nestle in to a work space two blocks from Wrigley, the rain falls steadily outside the second floor window. It’s dark, it’s stormy and it’s beautiful.  That’s because the North Siders triumphed in Game 4. But consider the juxtaposition. What if Javy Baez—the human Gumby, seemingly void of any skeletal system while smothering scalding grounders headed to the outfield—hadn’t delivered the RBI single in the ninth to complete the improbable comeback from a last-at-bat three-run deficit? RECOMMENDED: More postseason Chicago Cubs coverage One can only imagine the anxiety spewing from Cubs fans had they squandered a 2-0 game lead in San Francisco to necessitate a Game 5. And so this rain that fell all throughout Chicago on Wednesday would have provided the fitting lubrication for that 'here we go again' anxiety: “The sky is falling, and it’s raining Bartmans!” Game 5, though, never did happen. Because Javy. And Kris. And Anthony. And Ben. And Willson. (Doesn’t this just feel like a first-name-basis team?). And even Aroldis, with his (non-literal) guns a-blazin’ in the bottom of the ninth to send home Giants fans crushed by their “But only we can win in an even-numbered year” logic-slash-arrogance. (The best sign I saw during the two-game NLDS set at Wrigley: “Hey, Giants: 1908 is an even year, too.”) Instead it’s off to Game 1 of the NLCS Saturday night at Wrigley against the Kershaw-closing Dodgers. So this makes it back-to-back a