Cubs' Maddon hopes latest clubhouse art will keep players off cellphones

CHICAGO – The Cubs returned home to Wrigley Field last week to find a painting outside the clubhouse depicting manager Joe Maddon holding a stick of dynamite up to a cellphone.

It was the latest edition of Mad[don] Magazine.

Maddon – always looking for new ways to inspire his players – has been on an art kick in 2018 after reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci over the offseason.

Maddon has teamed up with a Tampa, Florida, area artist, Jason Skeldon, to create pieces that would present his themes to the 2018 Cubs, and also to raise money for Maddon’s foundation, Respect 90.

The latest painting takes aim at cellphones. Maddon said that when the Cubs were in Cleveland last month, he walked out of the hotel elevator and found three of his players sitting together, each looking at his phone, not saying a word to one another.

“They’re sitting there by themselves, right next to one another, and they’re all on their devices; nobody is saying anything to anyone,” Maddon said. “Wow, we’re just promoting that method. The more you promote that method, the worse it’s going to get.”

The dynamite in the painting also is blowing up 10 negative concepts, including apathy, victim’s complex and selfishness, among others.

The painting includes a number of phrases, including, “How ’bout some noise reduction?”

“Cellphones, to me, the last thing they’re utilized for is to call somebody,” Maddon said. “Even the texting is not so bad. I really hate the camera component. I wish they didn’t invent that.

“In general, this whole world, socially, you conduct your whole life through this device.”

It’s especially fitting that this message from Maddon came at a time when the rumor mill already has picked up with talk of Manny Machado being a potential target for the Cubs in trade discussions. Machado and the Baltimore Orioles were in town last week playing the White Sox.

More than two months before the trade deadline, the Cubs and Machado had to answer questions from the media about the possibility of a trade.

In the era of 24-hour news cycles and up-to-the-minute news notifications, it seems as if the MLB rumor mill is starting earlier and earlier every season. Last year, the Cubs made their biggest splash, trading for pitcher Jose Quintana, weeks before the deadline.

Players say they don’t pay any attention to the rumor mill, but it would be hard to open up a cellphone and not hear about it – whether from a tweet, a headline or a text from friends and family.

Walk into any clubhouse across baseball – as in almost any room in America – and there is a player scrolling through his cellphone at his locker. Maddon wants his players engaged with one another, and to stay off the devices as much as possible.

“What [people] do instead is they stay in their rooms and they talk to one another via their thumbs,” Maddon said. “It makes no sense. It’s a cowardly way of communication.

“There’s nothing eyeball to eyeball, there’s no voice. There’s no understanding the intonation of the voice. None of that applies.”