The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  “Is there a way I can get Samardzija from you without Russell?” Beane asked.

  “No,” Epstein replied.

  “Well, you don’t have much time, because we’ll go somewhere else to get a pitcher.”

  Beane was deep into discussions with Tampa Bay about trading for David Price.

  Then, on July 1, while the Cubs were playing in Boston, Toronto general manager Alex Anthopolous called Hoyer there.

  “We’re out,” Anthopolous said.

  “What?” Hoyer replied. He couldn’t believe it. The Blue Jays had been in on Samardzija since spring training. Talks had proceeded without hitches.

  “It’s an ownership decision,” Anthopolous said. “We’re out. Totally out.”

  Hoyer quickly called Epstein.

  “Toronto’s out,” he told him. “If you can get Oakland done you’ve got to do it. Toronto was our next best bet and now that’s gone.”

  Epstein accelerated talks with Beane. On July 3 he sweetened the deal by adding another starting pitcher, Jason Hammel. The appeal for Beane was that he could make a playoff run with the addition of two veteran starters, Samardzija and Hammel—and by the end of the month his go-for-broke wheeling and dealing would also net him Jon Lester in a trade from Boston.

  The next day Epstein attended a Fourth of July party with his wife, his son, and his mother. Beane called. Epstein left the party, sneaking behind some bushes for privacy. There he completed the deal: Samardzija and Hammel for Russell, pitcher Dan Straily, and outfield prospect Billy McKinney. The trade was announced the next day.

  “We were ecstatic,” Epstein said. “We were ecstatic because we never felt like we’d be able to get one singular talent like Russell in the deal. You usually have to take a package and get lesser guys you’re hoping on, but we were really convicted on Russell. It was hard to get elite prospects like that in any deals at that time. So we were ecstatic about that.”

  Done. Mission accomplished, at least as far as the mission of acquiring pillars to the building plan was concerned. In two and a half seasons, Epstein had obtained the four high-impact, high-character everyday players he regarded as essential to fielding a championship team by 2016: Rizzo in a 2012 trade, Bryant in the 2013 draft, Schwarber in the 2014 draft, and now Russell in a 2014 trade.

  The 2014 season marked Epstein’s third season running the Cubs, and this would be his third fifth-place team. While Chicago might have offered him a respite from the daily obsession with the standings in Boston, Epstein knew he was testing the patience of Cubs fans. The Cubs still drew between 2.6 million and 2.8 million people in those three years, ranking in the top half of the league despite losing teams on the field.

  “Of course, the whole thrust of the organization, which we were transparent about, was to be single-minded about acquiring young talent at all costs,” Epstein said, “and I said it at my opening press conference. I said, ‘Look, we’re going to do everything we can to build for the future and acquire young talent. That’s number one. We also have a big league team and every season is sacred, but where those two ideas conflict we’re going to side with the future, and with the long term and acquiring talent.’

  “So we put our fans through a lot and we put our big league players through a lot. It was, ‘Oh, good, we’re excited about Andrew Cashner.’ Bang! He’s traded for Rizzo.

  “ ‘Oh, Sean Marshall, he’s one of the few reliable guys we have in our pen.’ Bang! He’s traded for Travis Wood, who was a bit of a buy low. He had come up and pitched great but had kind of a mediocre year after that.

  “It was, ‘Cool, Ryan Dempster, he’s popular and funny, and having a great year.’ Bang! He’s gone for a Low-A ball pitcher who throws 87.

  “ ‘Oh, cool, we signed this Scott Feldman guy. He’s having a great year.’ That was actually a great sign. Bang! He’s gone for a guy with a six-and-a-half [ERA] who’s in Triple-A with the Orioles and a reliever with a seven.

  “ ‘Oh, at least we have Matt Garza. He’s having a great year.’ Bang! He’s gone for two youngsters and two players to be named later.

  “ ‘Oh, at least we have good old Jeff Samardzija. Maybe they’ll sign him and he’ll be on the mound when they finally make the playoffs.’ Bang! He’s gone. And Hammel, too? The third straight year we’ve traded 40 percent of our rotation leading up to the deadline? Three straight years of 40 percent of the rotation, gone.”

  But, deep down, Epstein knew the Russell trade was a watershed moment. The minute it was completed, he knew the Cubs were entering an entirely new phase. The heavy lifting was over. Like a home builder, he had slogged through building the foundation and the structure. It was time to start the finishing pieces.

  “If we were right about what was emerging,” Epstein said, “that would be the last time that we’d have to trade significant pieces off our big league team for minor league players. And we still hope to make trades like that from time to time. But it was sort of the last piece of the rebuild, the last time we would make a trade that devastated our big league clubhouse and sort of flummoxed or confused a certain cross section of our fan base. It really added to our future.

  “All of a sudden you look [and] it’s not just one future impact talent you’re counting on, it’s not just two or three, we had a whole wave, we had a whole generation of players who were within a year or two of each other age-wise and broke within a year of each other and we started to get really, really excited about the future.”

  Said Hoyer, “I remember that summer being so much fun. We felt like we were in on a secret—a secret about how good we were going to be. Every night in the box we could look up on the internet to see how Schwarber and Bryant and Russell and Baez and Soler, before he came up, and Almora were doing. We had so much young talent playing in the minors. It was like, ‘Man, oh, man, this is starting to come together.’

  “Post-Russell trade at the end of 2014 was exciting. Then we started to get some love nationally and won some big series against contenders. That’s when people could start to see what was happening.”

  Five days after the Cubs acquired Russell, Epstein witnessed another watershed moment. The team was playing the Reds in Cincinnati. Reds closer Aroldis Chapman, pitching the top of the ninth, buzzed fastballs by the heads of Chicago left-handed hitters Nate Schierholtz and John Baker. Rizzo yelled at Chapman from the Chicago dugout.

  After the half inning, as Rizzo walked to his position at first base, he heard somebody in the Cincinnati dugout yell at him. Rizzo threw down his hat and glove and headed toward the dugout, challenging the entire Reds team. The Cubs won the game, 6–4, in 12 innings, though it wasn’t especially the win that struck Epstein as important. It was confirmation about the character and leadership abilities of one of the pillars of his team.

  “Those are two important, transformative events: the Russell trade and Rizzo challenging the other team,” Epstein said. “We didn’t start playing better right away, but like three or four weeks after that I think Baez and Soler had come up and at the time we were excited about [Arismendy] Alcantara. We started playing great. We flashed a lot of exciting talent those last two months.

  “We played pretty well, and one team we played pretty well against was Tampa. That got Joe Maddon’s attention a little bit while he was in here at Wrigley. Meanwhile, Lester was traded to Oakland and for the first time could picture himself out of Boston and also started to think about what was important to him from an organization and city and he didn’t have a great experience out there necessarily. So us playing better in 2014, our young guys breaking in, created a lot of momentum to really try to have an off-season that would help us turn a corner and compete in 2015.”

  The pieces were coming together. Epstein made a bet on the importance of the makeup of the players he acquired, not to replace the edge in analytics he once wielded in Boston, but to enhance it. He made this bet just as baseball teams more and more resembled technology companies. The baseball operations offices swelled with
brilliant people with math and science degrees. The spin rates of pitches and the launch angles of balls hit off bats were being studied with the rigor of major science research projects. Players were donning “wearable” technology to collect data on how hard their bodies were working. Teams were fiercely guarding all kinds of proprietary statistics to find hidden value in players. Catchers were being schooled on how to subtly cradle pitches with their fingers to influence umpires into calling balls as strikes. Baseball teams were obsessed, at unprecedented intellectual and scientific levels, with finding “the next inefficiency,” and Epstein’s belief in neuroscouting stood as just one of the many such endeavors.

  The brilliance of what the Cubs did was to put their faith not just in numbers, but also in the type of people they acquired. The four pillars of the rebuild—Rizzo, Bryant, Schwarber, and Russell—as well as the regime’s first number one draft pick, Almora, all were acquired because the Cubs valued their character, not just their skill.

  “It’s not luck,” Hoyer said. “It’s definitely something you focus on. Having the experience we had in Boston, we knew if we were going to overcome the challenges in a big market—what we needed to overcome in terms of the history and dealing with the media every day—that was definitely a focus.”

  Epstein and Hoyer had come a long way from when they couldn’t wait to tear into a Bill James analytics project for Boston in 2002. This time there was no propriety formula, no algorithm, for acquiring self-motivated, high-character players and creating an environment to allow them to flourish. They never stopped searching to find edges, but they made a fundamental decision early after coming to Chicago that the one edge they could exploit was found in a very old-school resource: people.

  Said Epstein, “Interestingly, during the push for the next competitive advantage and how flat everything’s gotten now and how smart everyone is, and how everyone is using basically the same technology, I feel like I’ve pushed our organization back to the human being. And thankfully so.

  “If we can’t find the next technological breakthrough, well maybe we can be better than anyone else with how we treat our players and how we connect with players and the relationships we develop and how we put them in positions to succeed. Maybe our environment will be the best in the game, maybe our vibe will be the best in the game, maybe our players will be the loosest and maybe they’ll have the most fun and maybe they’ll care the most. It’s impossible to quantify.

  “The Cardinals were, like, teasing us about it. [But] when people do things they weren’t even sure they were capable of, I think it comes back to connection. Connection with teammates. Connection with organization. Feeling like they belong in the environment. I think it’s a human need—the need to feel connected. We don’t live in isolation. Most people don’t like working in isolation—some do, but they typically don’t end up playing Major League Baseball.”

  The four-day summit in the Mesa hotel ballroom before the 2012 spring training produced the road map to the first Cubs championship since 1908. It was Epstein’s opportunity to take everything he learned from Boston and treat it like wet clay. He, Hoyer, and McLeod wanted the input of every scout, coach, manager, and instructor in the Chicago organization.

  “We said, ‘We’re going to meet and we’re going to get it all out there on the table: what we believe about baseball, all of our collective wisdom about baseball, and we’re going to come up with the Cubs Way,’ ” Epstein said. “How we want to play the game, how we’re going to teach the game, what kind of human beings we want in the clubhouse, and what we’re going to stand for as an organization.

  “Obviously, we took some core principles from the Red Sox, the Red Sox way, obviously controlling the strike zone….We weren’t going to come out of that meeting saying, ‘Yep, we’re going to be a free-swinging team.’ Everything was going to revolve around controlling the strike zone. But we were open-minded about a lot of things.”

  It was important to Epstein that he involved everybody in the room. Yes, he opened the summit with a long speech about what was important to him about winning baseball, and his overall vision to turn the Chicago Cubs into an elite franchise with sustained success. But he knew just about everybody in the room had been hired by somebody else, and he wanted to establish the kind of environment in which he and most humans worked best: a collaborative one.

  “There were a lot of people there who thought maybe they would get fired right away,” Epstein said, “or ‘These guys are going to come in from Boston and try to re-create what they did there’ or ‘They have their own ideas.’ But I think it created some buy-in, some sort of collective investment in the vision.

  “So I laid out this big vision for everybody and then I said, ‘Now it’s up to us. That’s the vision. We can all agree on that. Now it’s up to all of us to collectively figure out the strategy. How are we going to get there? What’s the journey going to look like?’ And that’s when we met and talked about the Cubs Way. I think it created a lot of buy-in.”

  The room became a baseball think tank in which no detail was too small to be debated. The people in the room discussed the proper pregame warm-up routine for pitchers, how the uniform should be worn, innings limits for pitchers, curfews, nutrition, cutoffs and relays, clubhouse protocol, strength training programs, pitching and hitting mechanics, mental skills, the proper way to take batting practice, rules about facial hair, bunt defenses, rundowns, the proper way to slide, and much more. The discussions became as precise as determining the proper foot a runner should use when running through first base and for rounding any base.

  When the meeting was over, Epstein collected all the wisdom and the best of everything he had learned about baseball and put down on paper exactly what he wanted the Cubs to be. This was the 259-page, spiral-bound road map known as The Cubs Way, the 2012 player development manual. Shortstop Starlin Castro was featured on the cover.

  The first chapter of the manual was titled, “Departmental Principles.” It began, “The Chicago Cubs are committed to building and maintaining the best Scouting & Player Development system in Major League Baseball.” It went on to list the six core principles on which the organization would be built:

  1. We will treat the development of every player as if we were making a personal investment in him.

  2. We will stay objective in evaluating the player’s strengths and weaknesses in order to devise the most precise and thorough Individual Player Development Plan.

  3. We will continually challenge ourselves to better communicate our method of teaching.

  4. We will put the organization’s goals ahead of our personal ambitions always.

  5. We will embrace the cultures and backgrounds of all of our players, foreign and domestic, as we recognize the growth we can achieve as an organization from this experience.

  6. At all times we will keep this in mind: Our mission is to help the Chicago Cubs win a World Championship!

  Emphasis on personal character and conduct rang out loudly in the manual. The book included a Minor League Code of Conduct that held development staffers to the same code as the players, reasoning, “If we ask our players to act a certain way, it is critical that we do the same.” The code included 10 promises by which a Cubs minor leaguer must abide. Among them was the recognition that “I am viewed as a ‘role model’ and as such, assume the responsibility to demonstrate a professional demeanor in word and deed, on and off the field.”

  Another one of the 10 standards of conduct required every player to “make a commitment to team spirit by maintaining a positive attitude, treating my coaching staff and fellow teammates with dignity and respect while appreciating individual differences.”

  Forming the bulk of the manual were the highly detailed expectations for playing baseball the Cubs way, with chapters on pitching, hitting, bunting, team fundamentals, infield play, outfield play, catching, baserunning, base stealing, strength and conditioning, the mental skills program, and the rehabilitation program. Th
ose expectations included details as fine as the exact sequence and number of pitches in the proper pregame warm-up (exactly 38 pitches) and the answers to the discussions on how to touch first base while running through it (“always hit the front edge of the bag with the left foot”) and how to touch all bases while rounding them (“always hit the front corner of the bag with the right foot”).

  (The first page of the manual noted, however, that “rather than a ‘how to’ reference guide,” it should be considered “a living, breathing document that will change over time as we continually challenge the status quo.” Indeed, later editions of The Cubs Way removed the preferences to touching bases with a certain foot. The instructions were modified to allow a runner to touch a base with either foot; what was more important was that a runner not break stride while doing so.)

  A key component to The Cubs Way was what Epstein called Individual Player Development Plans. The germ of the idea began in 2006 when Epstein hired former major league infielder Gary DiSarcina in Boston as a baseball operations consultant. Sitting around the office one day, Epstein suggested, just for fun, that they look up the old carbon copy scouting reports on the young DiSarcina that were buried in the Boston files. The scouting reports included a notation that DiSarcina was slow at turning double plays.

  “Why didn’t anybody tell me I needed to work on my turns?” DiSarcina erupted. “I would have gotten to the big leagues so much quicker!”

  The reaction impacted Epstein. It caused the second big a-ha! moment in his career when it came to dealing with players. The first such moment occurred in San Diego back in 1996, when Epstein, then 22, was working only his second full-time year in professional baseball. Epstein was chatting with Padres infielder Craig Shipley near the batting cage when Shipley told him, “Theo, don’t you understand every single player in Major League Baseball at one point or another has been flat-out lied to by somebody in the front office?” Recalled Epstein, “That defines how players look at the business of baseball. It was really powerful. I’ve always remembered that, and because of that I feel like I’ve bent over backwards to be honest with players.”