The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  “As soon as we saw his stuff, I was like, ‘Theo, please God, get him here! Get him here!’ Then I think he had four or five starts there and Theo texted me and said, ‘We’re going to bring Arrieta up.’ I was like, ‘Yes!’ I couldn’t wait. I knew where we were going to go with him. For selfish reasons I wanted to work with him, because I knew he could help the club. The first thing I found out was he didn’t have any warm-up routine.”

  Pitchers are classified in two categories: right-handed and left-handed. But all of them could be split into two camps that are less obvious to the casual fan: their dominant side of the plate. Some pitchers naturally control the baseball to their arm side of the plate and others control it naturally to the glove side of the plate. For instance, former pitcher Tim Hudson, a right-hander, worked the baseball naturally to his arm side with sinkers and splits. He had to learn how to work it to his glove side with sliders. Cubs left-handed pitcher Jon Lester and San Francisco left-handed pitcher Madison Bumgarner have a natural ability to feed the ball to spots on their glove side—that is, on the inside corner to right-handed hitters. Both do so with fastballs and cutters. But each of them reached a higher level of success when they learned how to command the baseball to their arm side—fastballs and breaking balls.

  A champion chess player commands the middle of the board. Pitching is the opposite of chess. It’s about keeping the baseball out of the middle. The areas to get weak contact with the bat or none at all are on the edges of the plate. A baseball is slightly less than three inches in diameter. When you think about how a pitcher can find his greatest success, imagine two “lanes” that are about only six inches wide: the width of two baseballs—one baseball just inside the vertical edge of the strike zone and one just outside it—on each side of the plate.

  When Bosio watched Arrieta throw, he knew he had a glove side–dominant pitcher. Arrieta owned only one of the two six-inch lanes. With the twisting action of his torso, which sometimes caused his head to follow in the same direction, Arrieta easily “pulled” pitches to the glove side of the plate. He was throwing 93 mph with cutting action down and away to right-handers.

  “His stuff was absolutely filthy,” Bosio said.

  But there was a problem. Arrieta’s heavy rotational action caused him inconsistency. His stuff may have been filthy, but he lacked control over it.

  So Bosio had an idea. At the start of every warm-up Bosio would have Arrieta emphasize throwing the ball to his arm side of the plate. The trick would be to calm the rotational torque of his body without losing it altogether and especially to quiet his head, making sure it stayed in line with the plate rather than tilting toward the glove side.

  “As soon as he started doing it, we started to see more consistency,” Bosio said, “and once he found that consistency the confidence started growing.”

  The Orioles wanted Arrieta to throw conventionally with a neutral stride. That is, if you imagine the outline of the pitching mound as a giant clock, with 12 o’clock directly in front of the pitcher, they wanted Arrieta to step with his left foot toward the 12. Arrieta, however, found it more natural to stride toward 1 o’clock. Once his front foot landed, his torso twisted over his front leg, creating that cross-fire action. Bosio didn’t want to take away Arrieta’s natural cross-fire delivery and he didn’t want to take away his cutter. He only wanted to refine his approach.

  “I threw across my body,” Bosio said. “I didn’t see anything wrong with it. He’s a one o’clock, front side, toe-down guy. So when I saw it, I was like, ‘Fine. I don’t see anything wrong with it.’ I was that kind of guy. I was basically a two-pitch guy: fastball and slider. Once we started flipping his thoughts to more arm side, everything started to quiet down.”

  Once Bosio had success emphasizing the arm-side work, he then introduced a visual reminder to Arrieta’s warm-up routine. After Arrieta made four or five pitches, Bosio would draw a rectangle in the dirt of the mound around the footprints from his left spike. He also would draw a circle around the marks left by the ball of his right foot. When Arrieta first starting throwing for Bosio, the rectangle and the circle were fairly large, to accommodate the variations in where his feet landed.

  “At end of 2013,” Arrieta said, “they started to tighten up pretty good. Then in 2014 you basically had a rectangle that was exactly around my foot and a tiny little circle where my toe hit. I landed square in a really good spot. I wasn’t falling to first base or falling toward third base. I tell people, ‘If you’re falling off to the first base side, where is the ball going to go?’ You fall this way the ball is probably going to run or tail.

  “That’s why Pilates is so important to me: body control. Because I can get into positions and I can even do it with my eyes closed and land square almost every time.”

  In nine starts for the Cubs in 2013, Arrieta was 4–2, pitched to a 3.66 ERA, and held opposing hitters to a .185 batting average. Never did he have a nine-start stretch quite like that in Baltimore.

  “It was honestly like starting from scratch,” he said. “I knew I was going to get to Chicago and not be judged based on what I did in the past. I was going to get a fresh start.

  “I was able to come here and not hold anything back or feel like I was judged. People had lost so much faith in me in Baltimore, and rightfully so. I didn’t pitch well. I had a really short leash, and that’s what happens. I knew that was not the guy that I was. And I was ready to change that. I was letting it out as hard as I possibly could in a controlled way—across my body. I felt strong. I felt explosive. I didn’t feel limited. I started to throw my cutter in hitter-friendly counts and get outs. I pitched differently with my fastball. I was just being comfortable with who I was. I pitched two years not being comfortable with anything I was doing. I was trying to be somebody else.”

  Arrieta began to fully flower in 2014. He made a career-high 25 starts and went 10–5 with a 2.53 ERA. It was an impressive season, but nothing like the historic one he crafted the following year. In 2015 Arrieta posted a 1.77 ERA while holding hitters to a .185 batting average. Since the mound was lowered after Bob Gibson’s 1.12 ERA in 1968, only Arrieta and Pedro Martinez of the 2000 Red Sox have dominated hitters with an ERA and batting average that low. His second half was astonishing: a record-low 0.75 ERA in 15 starts. After mid-July more men ran for president of the United States than scored an earned run off Arrieta (nine).

  Flourishing in the Cubs’ culture of individualism for the betterment of the team, Arrieta unlocked the very best from his gifted right arm. With Chicago he learned how to combine extreme velocity and extreme spin with exceptional control.

  “That’s when I was ‘Okay, I trust how much my ball moves,’ ” he said. “I know generally how much it’s going to move, and I can account for that. I can throw it at you this far off the plate and end up black or outer third. And that’s where I kind of went to the next level. I knew what all my pitches were doing and I knew how to account for that.

  “Even in 2014 I didn’t have the ability to do that. I would go fastball away and have the catcher sit in that exact spot, and how many times does the ball wind up exactly where you want it? Especially sinking fastball or the slider. So that was something I really put a lot of time and effort in—set up middle of the plate, and let’s just be down. Down with everything: cutter, slider, fastball, it doesn’t matter.”

  Arrieta threw a career-high 229 innings in the 2015 regular season. He threw a five-hit shutout in the wild card game at Pittsburgh. He threw 52⁄3 innings to beat St. Louis in Game 3 of the NLDS, but he knew even in the days leading up to that game he wasn’t right. Actually, he felt it in the final innings against Pittsburgh. His pitches didn’t have the same explosiveness. His arm didn’t have the same snap.

  The Mets swept the Cubs in the NLCS. Arrieta lost Game 2. He allowed four runs in five innings in one of his worst games of the season. He finished the year with 2482⁄3 innings.

  “I felt like I didn’t have the explosive life at the
very end,” he said. “I felt strong throughout, and I was able to spin the ball, but it was a feeling I didn’t have all year.”

  When Arrieta showed up for spring training in 2016, Maddon told him he would not work him as hard as he had in 2015. The manager told him, “You might not like me for it, but if we have a lead I’m not going to let you finish the game or even go past the seventh inning.” The message was clear: this year the Cubs would be budgeting bullets to last through a seven-month season. They planned for a deep run in October, and Maddon wanted Arrieta to have strength in reserve for that month this time around.

  True to his word, Maddon pushed Arrieta beyond the seventh inning only five times in 2016—half as many times as he had in 2015. Thanks to Chicago sprinting to a big early lead in the standings—they owned a 10-game lead after just 56 games—Maddon enjoyed the luxury of giving him extra rest between starts 19 times, two more times than the previous year. He cut Arrieta’s innings by 312⁄3 and his pitches by 314.

  Alas, Arrieta’s 2015 season had been so sublime—the true height of his powers—that even with Maddon easing his burden he was fated to fall short of such excellence. By any other measure, Arrieta pitched well in 2016. His regular-season numbers (18–8, 3.10 ERA, 190 strikeouts) bore resemblance to the numbers that won the Cy Young Award for Brandon Webb just 10 years earlier (16–8, 3.10, 178).

  The worst starting pitcher in Baltimore Orioles history also continued to place himself among the best starting pitchers in Chicago Cubs history. There have been 279 pitchers in the live ball era (since 1920) who have started as few as five games for the Cubs. Arrieta has the lowest ERA among them all (2.52). His .720 winning percentage is the best in franchise history for all those pitchers who started more than 60 times for the Cubs.

  Something was missing, however, in 2016: the same laserlike command of his cutter. The pitch is one of the great wonders in baseball, one that defies easy classification. Arrieta can change the velocity on the pitch from as slow as 84 miles per hour, when it has a bigger break and more resembles a slider, to 93 miles per hour, when it resembles a fastball with a bad attitude, darting away from a hitter’s barrel in the last five feet before the plate.

  Though the pitch appears violent in its speed and spin, Arrieta does not torque his wrist when he throws it. He takes an off-center grip on the baseball—looking from behind on release, his pointer and middle fingers are slightly on the eastern hemisphere on the baseball—and throws it like a fastball with one major thought upon release: to get his middle finger on the front side of the baseball, which emphasizes extension and a loose wrist. If he wants to slow down the pitch to create a bigger angle of break, he simply offsets his fingers slightly more. Everything else about how he throws it remains exactly the same.

  In 2015 Arrieta threw 969 cutter/sliders that held hitters to a .188 batting average. In 2016, after seeing so many of them, hitters adjusted to that pitch. Realizing that the Arrieta cutter was both hard to hit and often destined to wind up outside the strike zone with its late movement, they more often passed on swinging at it. And the more they took the pitch for a ball (35 percent of the time in 2016, up from 30 percent in 2015), the less Arrieta threw it. He threw only 556 cutter/sliders in the regular season, and the batting average against it rose to .221.

  Force, in overabundance, is the enemy of artistry. When the level of effort begins to redline, whether flooring a four-cylinder engine, swinging for the fences, or reaching back for extra velocity, the results tend to worsen. As Arrieta’s cutter elicited fewer swings and fewer strikes, he tried even harder to get the results he had obtained in 2015. And the more force he applied, the worse the pitch became.

  The increased effort prompted two mechanical problems. It caused Arrieta to swing his arm farther behind him, which began to bring back the overrotational problem he endured in Baltimore. It also caused his body to jump more quickly toward the hitter, causing his arm to lag behind him, which resulted in a duller, flatter cutter. Maddon had talked to him late in the year about adjusting his prepitch setup to get himself into better position.

  By the time the World Series began, however, Arrieta believed he had rediscovered some of the magic in his signature pitch.

  “I’m so close,” he said on the eve of the World Series. “I know what I have to do. If I just stay on my back leg a little longer—just get a little deeper into my back leg over the rubber—I’ll be on time. That’s the whole key. Then I can get to here”—he displayed that extended release point, with his middle finger just coming over the front of the baseball—“on time.”

  Timing, as historians, comedians, and pitching coaches like to say, is everything. Once he stopped forcing it, Arrieta rediscovered the magic. He would throw 41 cutter/sliders in his two World Series starts. The Indians would get only one hit off the pitch. The Beast would be unbeatable.

  Money and hope. The pockets of Theo Epstein overflowed with both resources as he sat across a conference table from free agent pitcher Jon Lester and his wife, Farrah, on November 18, 2014, in the “recruiting room” at the team’s offices on North Clark Street in Chicago. The wood-paneled room was decorated with memorabilia and historical Cubs photographs. What Epstein could not offer Lester was on-field success in his time as president of the Cubs. In three years running the team, Epstein fielded teams that lost 289 games and finished a combined 84 games out of first place. Without success, and with a rebuilding plan that now banked entirely on somehow getting two front-of-the-rotation pitchers, Epstein had to dig deep into his reservoirs of money and hope. The meeting would last all day.

  “You,” Epstein told Lester, “are a key piece to everything we are doing here. You can be for us what Curt Schilling was for us in Boston in 2004.”

  The Cubs’ recruitment of Lester officially began two weeks earlier with the first day of free agency. An overnight package arrived at the suburban Atlanta home of the Lesters and their two sons, Hudson, then 4, and Walker, then 14 months old. Inside was a boatload of Cubs swag, including Cubs hats and shirts in camouflage style, and bottles of fine wine. The contents indicated how well Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer already knew Lester, and his tastes for hunting and wine, from their eight years together with the Red Sox.

  The key item in the box, however, was a 15-minute DVD. Lester popped it into his DVD player and pushed “play.” Epstein had commissioned the DVD to explain why the Cubs were close to winning and why Chicago was a great place to live and play. Former Cubs pitchers Kerry Wood and Ryan Dempster, both of whom had become advisors to Epstein, were among those who gave a players’ perspective on the unique opportunities of playing for the Cubs. The recruitment video was slickly produced, never more so than in its concluding segment.

  Epstein had hired special-effects masters from Hollywood and producers from the gaming industry to make a lifelike movie of the Cubs hosting and winning the World Series. He didn’t want Lester to just imagine what it would be like to win the World Series in a Cubs uniform, he also wanted him to see what it would look like.

  The movie showed the World Series logo on the iconic hand-operated scoreboard in centerfield at century-old Wrigley Field. It cut to a shot of the ballpark’s famous art deco marquee that faced the corner of Addison and Clark. Across the electronic message board part of the marquee scrolled this message: “Cubs vs. Yankees. Game 7. Lester vs. Pineda.”

  Then, with an appropriately epic orchestral soundtrack playing over it, and from a vantage point at the top of the third-base grandstand, the movie showed Lester on the mound getting the last out of the World Series, the Cubs rushing to dogpile in the middle of the field, and “live” news reports from the mass jubilation on Waveland Avenue.

  When Lester saw Epstein in person at the November 18 meeting, he complimented him on the production of the DVD, telling him, “That was a bad-ass video.”

  Epstein’s next mission was to hyper-target his sales pitch to Jon and Farrah. They got up from the conference table and walked into an adjoining
room. In the middle of the room on a large table, and occupying most of the room’s space, was a huge architectural model of a fully renovated Wrigley Field. Epstein explained what the Cubs were calling “The 1060 Project,” which borrowed from the ballpark’s Addison Street address and would include $575 million worth of renovations over four off-seasons, the first of which was about to begin. The Cubs’ home clubhouse and training facilities were among the worst and most cramped in all of baseball, and would not be remediated until after the 2015 season. But Epstein even managed to use the outdated quarters as a selling point.

  “It’s good that you’ll have the old facilities for a year,” Epstein said. “You’ll get to appreciate the history, but in another year you will truly appreciate how far we’ve come.”

  Then a Cubs community relations staff member picked up the presentation, emphasizing how the Cubs would get behind the Lesters’ Never Quit Foundation, which is dedicated to fighting pediatric cancer, how the Cubs fly the fewest miles in baseball over the course of a regular season, and how a home schedule heavily tilted toward day games would allow the Lesters to have breakfast with their kids and tuck them in at night on 63 game days. The Lesters heard about the designs of a new family room at Wrigley Field, about dedicated security personnel in the family section of the ballpark, and how a doctor, a nurse, and security personnel would be on round-the-clock call to families whenever the team was on the road. Team owner Tom Ricketts stopped by and engaged in a long discussion with Lester about hunting.

  For their part, Epstein and Hoyer sold Lester on the young talent in the Chicago system. They specifically mentioned first baseman Anthony Rizzo; infielders Starlin Castro, Kris Bryant, Javier Baez, and Addison Russell; and catcher Kyle Schwarber.