Within a couple of days last autumn, the perception of Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon's baseball intellect plunged from Einstein level to Einstein bagel level.

In baseball terms, Maddon started the week as a rich man's Tony La Russa and 48 hours later was a poor man's Mike Quade.

All the while, Maddon was on his way to becoming a World Series champion.

Imagine if the Cleveland Indians wound up beating the Cubs in Game 7: A couple of maddening Maddon moves would have stamped him as unfit to manage a shoeless shoe store.

As it is, some still view Maddon as the worst manager to win a World Series since Royals manager Ned Yost all the way back a year earlier.

Five months after Maddon befuddled fans and analysts, the Cubs are reassembling in spring training and Maddon still is questioned about his decisions of five months earlier.

Here's the best way to view all this: Joe Maddon messed up, the Cubs won the World Series anyway, move on.

OK, don't move on.

Every time Maddon makes a move in a game that the Cubs lose this season, go grumble, "You see, I told you during the World Series that he's a bad game manager."

Never mind that the Cubs wouldn't be better off with any other manager as they begin the pursuit of a second straight championship.

Being smarter than any manager is what most of us consider ourselves. We have long memories. Our scars remain after our wounds heal.

The way to view 2016 is that Maddon motivated his players to within a few steps of the finish line and they carried him over it.

The only concern would be if Cubs players begin shaking their heads as much as fans will over some Maddon moves.

But they probably won't, at least not in public.

"This is a special group," Maddon said last autumn. "It's pretty easy when you want to have kids act like kids. But you see them on the field. We play hard. I think we play it right. We're pretty fundamentally sound. Normally we play a good game of baseball on a daily basis."

Expect that the Cubs will continue to buy into Maddon's methods, into the slogan he'll settle on for 2017 and the unfashionable theme trips and all the other gimmicks his active imagination concocts.

But some season, as the young Cubs grow up, Maddon's motivational methods might grow old and a bit childish to them.

Seriously, they might think, Onesies out in public with cameras clicking?

Then again, these are men playing a kids' game so far removed from the normal workplace that Maddon might never have to change.

"There's a power in letting the guys be free and play kind of without any restraints and thinking about things," Cubs catcher David Ross said in October.

Remember, Ross was the Cubs' most veteran of veterans last season.

Maddon, he added, "wants you to kind of just play the game almost like in Little League."

All the way to a Big League championship last season for the Cubs' first in 108 years … and possibly to another this season for their first in 12 months.

Believe it or not, Joe Maddon is a good game manager, and even if he weren't his ability to create a winning culture would rank him as one of the game's best managers.

That doesn't mean we can't amuse ourselves by doubting a World Series champion's decisions.

mimrem@dailyherald.com

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