The Chicago Cubs may have come up short of their ultimate goal in the postseason, but for leading them to the playoffs Joe Maddon was voted as 2015 National League Manager of the Year, the Baseball Writers Association of America announced on Tuesday.
NL Manager of the Year award goes to the Cubs’ Joe Maddon
Jerry Lai-USA TODAY Sports
Maddon received 18 of 30 first-place votes. He is the first Cubs skipper to win Manager of the Year since Lou Piniella in 2008, which is also the last year the Cubs were in the playoffs.
Mike Matheny of the St. Louis Cardinals finished in second place, while Terry Collins of the New York Mets was third.
Maddon took over at the helm of a young and talented team in Chicago after spending nine years in Tampa Bay. The Cubs won 97 games, the sixth time in the last eight seasons a Maddon-led team has won at least 90 games. The 24-win improvement over 2014 came after a streak of five straight years under .500, during which the team averaged 93 losses per season.
The 97 wins got the Cubs into the NL Wild Card Game, where they beat the 98-win Pittsburgh Pirates, then beat the 100-win Cardinals in the Division Series before falling to the Mets in the NLCS.
Matheny has made the playoffs in each of his four seasons as Cardinals manager, but guiding his 2015 team to 100 wins might have been his finest performance to date. St. Louis lost ace Adam Wainwright for five months after surgery to repair a torn Achilles, then Jaime Garcia went down for the year in July with thoracic outlet surgery. Slugger Matt Holliday also missed over half the season with injuries to his quad.
St. Louis won the National League Central, the first division in MLB history with three teams winning at least 97 games, then lost in the NL Division Series to Maddon’s Cubs.
Matheny finished fourth in NL Manager of the Year voting in 2013 and 2014, and was fifth in 2012.
Maddon won AL Manager of the Year with the Rays in both 2008 and 2011.
Collins made the playoffs for the first time in his 11 seasons as manager and guided the Mets all the way to the World Series, where they fell in five games to the Kansas City Royals. The Mets, in their fifth season under Collins, were 49-48 after a loss on July 24, but they finished the season on a 41-24 run to win 90 games and capture the National League East. It was an 11-game improvement over 2014.
Collins' previous high in Manager of the Year balloting was third place, both in 1994 with the Houston Astros and again in 1998 with the Angels.
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