Rays skipper Maddon doesn't manage by any book

PHILADELPHIA -- So here we are. The jets have landed. The traveling, sleep-deprived circus has moved. The weather has chilled.

'It's worked all year,' Ben Zobrist says of Joe Maddon's moves. (Getty Images)

And as Tampa Bay and the Phillies head for Game 3 on Saturday evening tied 1-1, do you know what's most fascinating of all?

From his current perch somewhere near the top of the baseball world, Rays manager Joe Maddon continues to look through those designer Hugo Boss glasses at a landscape that only he sees.

And as if he doesn't already have every reason (and every right) to swell with pride for what he and his organization have accomplished so far in their worst-to-first run, now he's in a place where he can, peacock-like, really spread his feathers.

He's as close to home as a guy can get while managing not just a major league club, but a real, live World Series squad.

Home for Maddon as a youth was Hazleton, Pa., a hardscrabble town of roughly 23,000 that is 80 miles from Philadelphia. His mother, Beanie, still lives there and works at the Third Base Luncheonette. His first major league experience came in 1964, when his late father, also Joe, took him to Connie Mack Stadium to see his beloved St. Louis Cardinals.

"That was the beginning for me, right there," Maddon says. "I was 10."

And?

"Dad did get a ticket for running a stop sign," he notes.

There rarely is a detail, in baseball or in life, that this guy doesn't notice.

There rarely is a conventional way of doing things that he doesn't challenge.

Maddon is baseball's breath of fresh air, the World Series' Mad Scientist.