The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  “I blame myself for this more than anything.” Epstein said, “I hate it when people blame their environment, because, especially in a leadership position, you’re responsible for how you react to your environment and how you change your environment, and being a positive force to change it for the better if you think something is toxic.

  “I wouldn’t blame anyone else for it or any one person. I know everyone said, ‘Well, it was you and Larry…it was a power struggle.’ It really wasn’t. Our dynamic never really changed. He never got super involved in baseball operations, but he was my boss and always had the right to question me on things and I never really resented that.

  “It wasn’t any one person. It was just the weight of the nine or ten years in Boston.”

  On October 25, 2011, twenty-seven days after the season-ending debacle in Baltimore, and exactly one month from what would have been his ninth anniversary as general manager of the Red Sox, Epstein made his departure official. Ricketts introduced Epstein as the Cubs’ president of baseball operations. Epstein agreed to a five-year contract worth $18.5 million. Hoyer, as executive vice president/general manager, and McLeod, as senior vice president/scouting and player development, both agreed to leave the San Diego Padres to join him.

  “I firmly believe,” Epstein said at his news conference, “that we can preserve the things that make the Cubs so special and over time build a consistent winner, a team that will be playing baseball in October consistently and a team that will ultimately win the World Series.”

  If anything, though, Epstein underestimated the difficulty of the job.

  Theo Epstein knew where to begin with the rebuilding of the Cubs: pour gobs of money into the draft. No one expected the Cubs to contend in 2012, so Epstein concentrated on becoming what he called “a scouting and player development machine”—the same metaphor he had used when he took over in Boston. The first step toward that goal was, as he put it, to take “a huge chunk of the major league payroll, put it into the draft and try to have three drafts in one year.”

  He had worked the system well in Boston. With no hard caps on spending on amateur players, clubs were free to spend as they wished to sign players they drafted. All it took to pull off such a strategy were money and thick skin. The money was needed to convince hard-to-sign players to sign by paying them more than Major League Baseball’s recommended bonus commensurate with that pick—the practice known as “going over slot.” The thick skin was needed to withstand an angry phone call from commissioner Bud Selig for doing so.

  In Boston, Epstein used the hammer of over-slot money to sign Ryan Kalish ($600,000, ninth round, 2006), Will Middlebrooks ($925,000, fifth round, 2007), Anthony Rizzo ($325,000, sixth round, 2007), Mookie Betts ($750,000, fifth round, 2011), and Jackie Bradley Jr. ($1.1 million, supplemental first round, 2011). Such players typically slid lower in the draft than their level of talent because of the “signability” issue.

  The strategy didn’t always yield future big league contributors. Epstein also went over slot for players such as Pete Hissey ($1 million, fourth round, 2008), David Renfroe ($1.4 million, third round, 2009), Madison Younginer ($975,000, seventh round, 2009), and Brandon Jacobs ($750,000, tenth round, 2009), none of whom have played a day in the big leagues with the Red Sox.

  The point of over-slot money, however, was not to hit on every signing, but for a club to buy more chances—more lottery tickets to try to win the jackpot. When a talent like Rizzo, for instance, slides in the draft because of his stated goal to attend Florida Atlantic University, over-slot money allows a team like the Red Sox to take him in the sixth round and change his mind by paying him third-round money.

  Just as Epstein planned to bring the same buying power to Chicago, Major League Baseball took away the hammer. Epstein was on the job just 28 days as president of baseball operations for the Cubs when MLB and the Players Association announced a new collective bargaining agreement, one that significantly curtailed spending in the draft. Each pick would have an assigned value—the so-called slot money—but this time there were teeth in the rules to enforce it, not just Selig’s temper. Each club would have a cap on its spending: the sum of the slot money associated with the picks it held. Any club that exceeded that cap by 5 percent was subject to a 75 percent tax on the overage. Exceeding the cap by more than 5 percent called for the forfeiture of a first-round pick the following year, an onerous penalty that no rational team would dare incur.

  In his office at Wrigley Field, Epstein used magnets with names on them to track prospective Chicago rosters for the next five years. It was an exercise in hope, built on the idea that prospects developed at a steady rate and to the level that could best be expected. Alas, there was only so much hope available in the Chicago system. Epstein looked at the board and knew something very important was missing: he had no impact players. Impact players take the guesswork out of roster building. They are so talented that they provide All-Star-caliber performance that is reliable. They hit at the top or in the middle of a batting order or pitch at the front of the rotation.

  To build a championship team, Epstein knew he needed a minimum of four impact players on that board before entering 2016, the fifth and final year of his contract. He also knew that most drafted players, even the ones drafted in the first round, typically need three to five years of development before they can have an impact in the big leagues. The new draft rules killed his plan for “three drafts in one,” which might have put two or three such impact players in the system right away.

  “The collective bargaining agreement happened like right after we got there,” Epstein said. “That was sobering. There were a lot of sobering moments the first year or so, like how are we going to get enough impact talent? We looked up at the future year rosters on the board, like 2014, 2015, 2016, and said, ‘How are we going to get enough impact talent? There’s not enough drafts. There’s not enough talent.’ ”

  The change in draft rules affected the Cubs immediately. In 2011, Hendry’s last draft, the Cubs spent a franchise-record $12 million on draft picks. In 2012, Epstein’s first year, the Cubs were allotted a pool of $7.9 million to spend. Epstein essentially saw the team’s draft budget slashed by 33 percent as soon as he walked in the door.

  (The Cubs spent $8,273,800 on their picks in 2012, incurring a tax of $280,350. In 2016, with no picks in the first or second rounds as penalties associated with signing free agents John Lackey and Jason Heyward, the Cubs had a draft pool of just $2,245,100, the smallest of all 30 teams. Epstein had spent more on three over-slot, nonimpact players in 2009 than he did in his entire 2016 draft. Building teams quickly through the draft became much more difficult.)

  “There was some…maybe not panic, but we didn’t quite know how we were going to have enough transactions and opportunities to acquire the impact talent we needed in time,” Epstein said. “And we knew we couldn’t do an eight-year rebuild, like the Royals essentially did: eight years to the World Series, nine years to win it. Brilliant job by them dealing with a lot of obstacles we wouldn’t face, but we knew we probably didn’t have eight years. We had five-year contracts and that seemed like an awfully long time in a big market. We knew we had to hit at an awfully high rate and we were desperate to find opportunities to transact.”

  Despite his concern, Epstein knew just where to start: a .141 hitter with the San Diego Padres who had just lost his job there not just once, but twice.

  —

  In the spring of 2007 major league scouts packed the games of Stoneman-Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, to see a catcher named Danny Eliorraga-Matra. One of those scouts was Laz Gutierrez of the Red Sox. Gutierrez, then 31 years old, was a former minor league pitcher from Miami. This was his second year working as a scout for Boston. (He is now the team’s mental skills coordinator.) The more Gutierrez watched Stoneman-Douglas play, the more he liked the team’s first baseman more than he liked the catcher. The first baseman’s name was Anthony Rizzo.

  The more back
ground work Gutierrez did on Rizzo, the more he kept selling him to the front office. He kept using the word “special” to describe the kid’s character. McLeod, Boston’s scouting director, pivoted the team’s attention from Eliorraga-Matra to Rizzo. The world of scouting is filled with subterfuge. Half the trick is finding great players. The other half is making sure the other teams don’t draft them before you do. For instance, in that same spring of 2007 the San Francisco Giants sent their best pitching expert, Dick Tidrow, to follow up on an area scout’s report on a North Carolina high school pitcher named Madison Bumgarner. Teams had mixed reports on Bumgarner because he threw with an unconventional, crossfire delivery.

  Tidrow traveled from San Francisco to North Carolina to see one of Bumgarner’s starts. Suddenly, after just three innings, Tidrow bolted from his seat in the scouts’ section of the stands behind the plate and walked out. A week later an area scout from a rival team told the Giants’ area scout, “I knew it! I knew he wouldn’t like his arm action! He left after three innings.”

  Here’s what the scout didn’t know: as soon as Tidrow reached his car that day he told his area scout, “I love him.” He didn’t need to see any more. He left early to hide his team’s interest in Bumgarner. The Giants took Bumgarner with the tenth overall pick that year.

  McLeod had a similar plan in mind to disguise the Red Sox’s interest in Rizzo. When scouts watch hitters, they typically stand on the “open” side of the hitter to see as much of his swing as possible: the third-base side for a left-handed hitter, and the first-base side for a right-handed hitter. McLeod told Gutierrez and his other scouts not to stand on the third-base side when Rizzo was hitting. He didn’t want to tip off other clubs about their interest.

  Anthony Rizzo is the son of John, a bartender and security firm manager, and Laurie, who worked in New York City when the couple lived in Lyndhurst, New Jersey—that is, until a winter’s vacation in Florida convinced them to move there in 1986. The next year their first son, Johnny, was born. Anthony came along two years later. His parents, as they still do, called him “Ant” or “Antnee,” while his friends called him “Little Rizz” in deference to his older brother, a football star. Laurie said she knew that Ant would be a major league ballplayer from a very early age.

  “When he hit a home run in T-ball,” she said, “that’s when I knew. I’m serious. I don’t want to sound like that cocky mom, but he was always better than all the other kids—in any sport. Plus, he’s determined. No matter what he did, he kept going and going until he turned out to be the best at it. He’s competitive with everything.”

  Laurie also saw something at a young age in her son that Gutierrez would see in 2007: people gravitated toward this born leader.

  “He was always the leader,” Laurie said. “He always organized our vacations and, even when he was young, when it came to planning a party or homecoming or anything like that, he’d be the one in charge. Always. He had a lot of friends. Johnny was big and Johnny was a football player with a lot of friends. Everybody would come over to our house, and Anthony would be part of the group and just fit in.”

  Said Anthony, “I think I get it from my parents and then my brother. My brother set the path for me in high school. He’s two years older. Everyone knew me as Little Rizzo. Whenever we would go to football summer practices, my brother was the guy. I was his little brother. So when I was playing baseball, it was one of those things. I don’t know, I try to get along with everyone and hope my work and what I do on the field and outside the field guys could see and gravitate toward.”

  “Laz did a great job,” McLeod said of the background work the Boston scout filed on Rizzo. “He fell in love with the person, not just the player.”

  The difficulty for Epstein and McLeod was deciding when they should draft Rizzo. They were confident that he would not be drafted in the early rounds.

  “He didn’t put up monster numbers,” McLeod said. “He was a thicker-framed kid. You just saw the body structure—a big-boned kid—and you could see he either was going to get really heavy or he would be able to be a big, strong kid. He didn’t show lightning bat speed, not like [Eric] Hosmer. We loved his approach at the plate. He stayed in the middle of the field and we liked the kind of professional way he took batting practice. He wasn’t trying to show you 70 power [on an 80 scale] on every pitch.”

  The first day of the draft, five rounds went by and nobody took Rizzo. The Red Sox scouts and executives reconvened. They held the 20th pick of the sixth round, the first round of the second day of the draft. During the break between the first and second day they heard rumors that the Detroit Tigers, picking 27th in the sixth round, had interest in Rizzo. They knew the Tigers were one of the teams willing to robustly spend over-slot money to convince a player to sign. The Red Sox decided they could no longer afford to wait. They took Rizzo in the sixth round. Two hundred and three players were drafted ahead of Rizzo. Boston gave him third-round money to sign. They sent him to rookie ball in time to play six games there and then to Instructional League in the Dominican Republic.

  “Laz was right,” McLeod said about Rizzo’s leadership skills. “It became quite apparent in his first season. We heard from coaches about the leadership qualities this kid had and how he took to everybody on the team. Latin players, American players…it didn’t matter. They all gravitated toward him. And once you got to meet his parents, you could see why.

  “That fall in the Instructional League in the Dominican Republic was an eye-opening experience for him, to see where those kids came from and how little they had. I’ll never forget Anthony talking to his parents and saying, ’Is there anything we can do for these guys? How can we help?’ Immediately a lot of us took notice. Here was a 17-year-old kid looking to do whatever he could to help these people he’d never met before.”

  The following season, 2008, Boston assigned Rizzo to Class-A Greenville. He was the third-youngest player on the team, and yet he was one of the team’s best hitters. He hit .373 in 21 games. But something wasn’t right. He gained 15 pounds in a matter of days. His legs and feet were swollen. Rizzo didn’t want to say anything; he was 18 years old and hitting well. But team officials finally noticed the swelling and sent him to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for tests. They speculated that he might be suffering from a kidney infection.

  It was far worse. Laurie was at his bedside and John was on the telephone when doctors broke the news to him: he had cancer. It was Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The doctors found two tumors, one on each side of his pelvis.

  “Am I going to die?” Anthony asked them through tears.

  Doctors told him the good news: they’d caught the cancer early and the success rate for treating it was 97 percent.

  “Can I play baseball?” he asked.

  No, they told him, he would need a six-month regimen of chemotherapy, and then they would reassess his condition.

  “I didn’t know what anything was,” Rizzo said. “I didn’t know what chemotherapy was. I thought chemotherapy was cancer. I had no idea. So they explained it and explained what they had to do and I was like, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ It was obviously tough. I’m an emotional person. There were tears. But there was never a doubt. I truly believed after my first treatment I was all better. You still had to go through the process. It was six months.”

  Said Laurie, “It was shocking, devastating. But we had a lot of support at the hospital. And once he got a hold of himself, it was, ‘Let’s do this. I want to get this out of my body.’ ”

  Rizzo underwent treatment in Boston. On May 16, Epstein invited Rizzo to visit Fenway Park. Epstein was rattled by the news of Rizzo’s illness, but when Rizzo arrived at the ballpark the general manager was blown away by how easily this 18-year-old kid with cancer was calming everyone else around him. Epstein arranged for Rizzo to meet Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester, who had fought and won his own battle with lymphoma just a year earlier.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lester told Rizzo. “There are
little things that are going to happen…”

  And just then Rizzo fainted right in front of him, falling to the ground. When Rizzo came to, he and Lester spoke for nearly an hour. Three days later, in his next start, Lester threw a no-hitter.

  “Going through the sickness, not being able to play any sport was the hardest part,” Rizzo said. “You do something 18 years and then not to be able to do anything but watch the different highlight shows, it’s like, that was the hardest part for me.

  “Afterward, it validates everything my parents ever preached to me: live up every moment that you can because you never know. That’s what we do. I feel like when I do things I do them to the best I possibly can. I don’t shortchange anything.”

  After six of months of treatment, Rizzo received word that he was in remission. The tumors were gone. Rizzo returned to baseball, and went back to crushing the ball. He climbed from Greenville to Salem, in High-A ball, in 2009, then from Salem to Portland, in Double-A, in 2010. He hit 20 home runs in Double-A ball at age 20, which put him on the fast track to the big leagues. But Rizzo was one level behind another left-handed-hitting first baseman in the Boston system, Lars Anderson, who in 2009 was rated as the 17th best prospect in baseball, according to Baseball America. Rizzo had not yet begun to show up on such “hot stocks” lists.

  Meanwhile, the 2010 season had gone badly for Boston. The Red Sox won 89 games, the second fewest in Epstein’s decade with the club, and missed the playoffs. That winter, as Epstein admitted, is when he abandoned his core principles of development and “took the easy way out.” It was the winter he traded for Adrian Gonzalez and signed Carl Crawford, two players who cost $296 million. There was an additional cost: one of the players Epstein traded to get Gonzalez was Rizzo.