Former MLB manager Joe Maddon went on KNBR and said he considered the San Francisco Giants hiring Tony Vitello to be “insulting.” Current broadcaster Duane Kuiper said he found Maddon’s insulting comments,
well, insulting.
Joe Maddon won the World Series with the Chicago Cubs in 2016 and reached the 2008 series with the Tampa Bay Rays, while being a relentless advocate for hipster glasses and hoodies in major league dugouts. But at age 71, the formerly fun-loving manager who used to dress up in costumes, hire magicians to entertain players in the clubhouse, and once brought a 20-foot python to work has decided that his main priority is telling these damn kids to get the hell off his lawn.
Tuesday, Maddon went on the “Murph and Markus” show, where he said he felt “insulted” that the Giants hired their new manager out of the college ranks, instead of someone who worked their way up through the system for decades, like, well, Joe Maddon.
To be clear, Maddon eventually wished Vitello well in San Francisco. But before that, he said this:
“Quite frankly, I’m using the word ‘insulting’ only from the perspective that you don’t have to have any kind of experience on a professional level to do this job anymore. Because when I was coming up … you had to go through the minor leagues, you had to ride your buses. I was a scout, I started in 1981, I finally get a managerial job in 2006 … So to think somebody can just do what you took 20-some years to be considered qualified to, it is kind of insulting.”
Maddon is correct that Vitello doesn’t have any professional managerial or scouting experience, though he’s coached a number of players who are currently in the professional ranks. However, he’s been coaching at the college level for 23 years, which isn’t exactly the same as riding buses in the minor leagues, but he’s still been on plenty of buses. Maddon got his first major league managing job at age 51; Vitello is 47.
In case anyone was holding back their reflex response of, “OK Boomer,” Maddon went on to complain about another entitled whippersnapper taking a job without experience: Zohran Mamdani.
“I guess the overarching point is … even jobs like the mayor job of New York City now, it doesn’t require the years of experience that you may have had to have gone through in the past,” Maddon added.
So Maddon is pro-Andrew Cuomo, and anti-Tony Vitello. He honestly might simply not like younger people winning anything, as demonstrated by going 104-114 managing a team that had both Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani.
He’s probably anti-Duane Kuiper now, too, after the Giants broadcaster teasingly responded to Maddon’s critiques. For the record, Kuiper paid his dues doing the KNBR postgame show and announcing games with Joe Morgan on pay-per-view GiantsVision before landing his current gig, so he’s rode his buses.
“I was insulted by him being insulted,” Kuiper said in his own “Murph & Markus” appearance. “‘Insulted’ is a really strong word. And maybe he wanted to get the job, who knows. It kind of got him a lot of publicity, and maybe that’s what he wanted. But ‘insulted’ to me, bothers me.”
There’s a constant risk of upsetting traditional thinking when it comes to baseball, whether it’s Gabe Kapler opening games with relief pitchers or Gabe Kapler burning sage in the batting cage to un-curse the Giants’ bats. Maddon used to be more an unconventional thinker, not averse to putting a penguin in his own manager’s chair.
He now seems stodgy, maybe because he’s been out of work for three years, or maybe because he sees himself in every longtime minor league manager who the Giants didn’t hire. In fact, you could call Maddon the “Insulted of Swat.”
But since we had Maddon feeling insulted Tuesday and Kuiper feeling insulted he was insulted Wednesday, this could go on in perpetuity. Thursday, Tony La Russa can describe how insulted he felt hearing Kuiper’s comments the day before. Mike Krukow can describe how insulting he found La Russa’s thoughts about the insultingness of Kuiper’s cricisim of Maddon’s insultedness. Two weeks from now, they’ll have Grady Little debating Hunter Pence on a MUNI bus to settle the issue once and for all.
The whole thing is frankly insulting to the entire McCovey Chronicles staff.
