by Tom Verducci
Maddon likes to yell in the dugout, “Score first!” And if the opposing team scores first he will yell, “Score second!” Scoring first in the postseason, with the way teams emphasize hard-throwing specialized bullpens to protect leads, proved to be golden. Entering Game 4, the team that scored first in 2016 was 14–0 in the LCS and World Series, and 23–8 overall.
This time, however, Chicago starting pitcher John Lackey could not make the lead hold up. The Indians would win going away, 7–2. They clipped Lackey for two runs in the second, one facilitated by two throwing errors by Bryant, the second on a slow roller hit by Kluber he threw away in his haste.
“Our biggest deficit is contact on our part at the plate,” Maddon said about the loss. “And we made a couple of mistakes. I can’t believe K.B. threw the second ball. The chopper? Just eat it. I know Kluber was running, but just eat it.”
Cleveland tacked on another run off Lackey in the third, when Jason Kipnis doubled and scored on a single by Francisco Lindor. Cleveland broke open the game in the seventh when Kipnis smashed a three-run homer off Travis Wood into the rightfield bleachers.
In his mind’s eye, ever since he was a boy growing up in Northbrook, Illinois, 21 miles from Wrigley Field, Kipnis had hit hundreds of World Series home runs at the Friendly Confines. A Cubs fan, he was always batting the bottom of the ninth, full count, two outs.
The power of a boy’s dream is one of life’s little miracles, the way it wraps itself around the heart and remains through old age to the last breath. Kipnis’s dream formed in his backyard, through Wiffle ball, softball, “an acorn that just fell off the tree—it didn’t matter. It was anything and everything.” Wood’s pitch was just another acorn, and Kipnis knew just what to do with it.
“When I dreamed them,” he said of his backyard homers, “they went farther.”
The crowd went silent as he floated around the bases.
“Inside,” he said, “I was smiling ear to ear.”
As he floated on, Kipnis raised a hand in salute in the direction of his family and friends. He provided the first three-run World Series homer at Wrigley by a visitor since one of the sport’s most famous homers, the called shot by Babe Ruth in 1932.
It was almost too much for a Cubs fan to bear. Getting beat again was one thing; getting beat by one of your own kind was especially cruel. Kipnis knew all about the “lovable losers” culture of the Cubs. He was 11 years old when Sammy Sosa chased Mark McGwire, and 14 when the Cubs came within one win of the pennant. Between family trips, Cubs’ instructional camps, field trips, and a ticket to Game 2 of the 2003 NLDS, Kipnis visited Wrigley Field a dozen times or so as a boy.
Just down the block from his house lived another Cubs fan who rode the school bus with him when they were small, and who also attended a 2003 Cubs playoff game: Steve Bartman, the fan who gained infamy around Cubs Nation for his attempt to catch a foul ball in 2003 NLCS Game 6.
Goats, black cats, Leon Durham, Steve Bartman, and now cursed by one of their own. What else could possibly go wrong for a Cubs fan?
Perhaps the worst of the news was that Maddon’s fears about the youthfulness of his team were being realized. After Fowler and Rizzo adjusted to Kluber’s two-seam fastball in the first inning, the Cleveland ace countered. He emphasized his slider as his weapon of choice. Kluber increased his usage of the pitch from 31 percent in Game 1 to 43 percent in Game 4. The young Chicago hitters continued to flail at it. Kluber pitched six strong innings again, shutting out the Cubs after the first inning and needing only 81 pitches in all. He became the first pitcher in a generation to start and win Games 1 and 4 of the World Series. José Rijo of the 1990 Cincinnati Reds had been the last such workhorse.
Were the Cubs too young to win the World Series? Were their offensive games not advanced enough to deal with the elite Cleveland pitching? After four games, those remained legitimate questions. The Cubs had scored just seven runs and were hitting .204. Bryant, Russell, Baez, and Contreras—all of them no older than 24—were batting .102, on just six hits in 59 at-bats.
Down three games to one, and even with their three best starters—Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta, and Kyle Hendricks—lined up and fully rested, the young Cubs hitters were running out of time to get it right. After 206 games stretching from spring training to the World Series, they had no more room for error. One more defeat and their season was over. One more defeat and the curse remained intact and they would have to move on to a 109th try at winning another World Series.
In the bowels underneath Wrigley Field, in a groundskeeper’s storage area used as a press conference room, Maddon grasped for hope.
“More than anything,” Maddon said, “when you’re not hitting like that, the whole vibe’s very difficult to push in that real positive direction. So you’ll continually try to be positive in the dugout during the course of the game. But, you know, it’s difficult. It’s difficult especially this time of year.
“We just need that offensive epiphany somehow to get us pushing in the right direction. And if we do that, I really think, based on what they have left pitching-wise, going back over there and what we have, I kind of like our chances.”
Meanwhile, for a second straight night, there was no party in the Cubs’ clubhouse celebration room. The franchise had waited 71 years to see another World Series at Wrigley Field, and after two nights this was the summation of the reprise: two runs, two losses, too young. Heads bowed, the Cubs retreated to their clubhouse in silence. The feng shui of the room didn’t seem so powerful at a time like this. The mournful quiet suddenly broke when a lone thwack! rang out, the percussive result of one of the frustrated young Cubs firing his glove into the back of his wood locker.
“No, we’re not going to do that!”
Teammates turned toward the voice. The loud admonition came from David Ross, the 39-year-old backup catcher—the eldest of them all. Ross was a .229 hitter for the season and for his career, and the personal catcher for Lester, the team’s starting pitcher for Game 5.
“We’ve got a Game 5 tomorrow at Wrigley Field and Daddy’s playing tomorrow!” Ross said, referring to his nickname, a twist on the Grandpa Rossy nickname started by Rizzo. “We’re fine! Daddy’s in the lineup tomorrow! Don’t you worry. I’ll take care of it!”
It had the perfect tone to it. Ross didn’t want the young players brooding. It smacked of confidence and swagger, but at the same time, as with most things with the self-deprecating catcher, it was laced with the right touch of humor. He knew it was exactly how the Cubs would have to play Game 5: confident and loose. And that is how the comeback began.
Joe Maddon didn’t sleep so well on the night before he addressed the entire Cubs team for the first time as spring training opened in 2015 in Mesa, Arizona.
“It was a little nervioso, absolutely,” he said. “I’d done it before, but this was a little different venue, different scenario, and actually everybody was there—they had scouts there, minor league dudes, everybody. People waiting on your every word. I’m comfortable doing it, but you have to get into the flow. Part of the tough part about spring training is you’ve been off for a while. If I had to do that same thing July 1, you could fill up Wrigley and I’m fine. You’ve done it a hundred times, but you’re in this new situation.”
He remembered his first day as manager of the 2006 Tampa Bay Devil Rays as “daunting.” It was his first major league managing job, and the Devil Rays were still a ragtag, noncompetitive expansion team with no defined culture and players who needed to be weeded out.
“I had done a lot of things up to that point, but I never had my own team,” he said. “There is nothing quite like holding your own baby. So that’s pretty much what it came down to. For all the parents out there, you know the difference. So I got a chance to hold my own baby for the very first time.”
It took two years for Maddon to turn Tampa Bay into a pennant winner. With the Cubs, he knew he had the makings of a good team immediately, even with the team having finished
fifth five years running. To the core group, and with youngsters Kris Bryant, Addison Russell, and Kyle Schwarber knocking on the door, Epstein and Hoyer that off-season added pitchers Jon Lester and Jason Hammel, catchers David Ross and Miguel Montero, and outfielders Dexter Fowler and Chris Denorfia.
“The message is going to be kind of the same,” Maddon said before his speech. “I feel very confident about the message regarding how do you flip a culture, what are the processes, what is the first step? I feel good about that. So when I walk into that meeting in the theater in Mesa I will be more confident in that message than I was even the first day I spoke to the Devil Rays.”
Anthony Rizzo already had talked boldly about the Cubs winning the National League Central, and instructed reporters to make sure they quoted him on it. Maddon talked about aiming to go to the World Series. There was more optimism around the 2015 Cubs than perhaps any other team in history coming off five straight fifth-place finishes. Maddon knew it would take much more than optimism. He knew the first step toward flipping a culture, and it would be the theme of his first-day speech. It was his golden rule of managing: connect, trust, and lead—in that order.
“What you need to understand,” Maddon told the assembled members of the organization, but especially the players, “is that we need to get to know each other. We need to start trusting each other. And then we have to start bouncing ideas off one another without any pushback. In other words, once you’ve trusted me and I’ve trusted you, we can exchange ideas openly without this concern about who’s right. That’s natural. That’s human nature. You’ve got to get beyond the ‘who’s right’ moment.”
He added that he would require only one rule, which they could see painted on the grass beside the baselines of the practice field: “Respect 90,” a title he liked so much he used it for his charitable foundation, which provides support for inner-city youth programs.
“Just remember this: choose right,” he said. “You know the difference between right and wrong. If you choose right, there will be no issues. We’ll all be fine and I won’t have to make any rules.”
Part of choosing right, Maddon told the players, was choosing to work on their mental skills. As Epstein rebuilt the Cubs with an emphasis on developing the whole player, he understood that improving a player’s mental skills deserved as much attention as improving a player’s batting stroke or pitching delivery.
“It’s a huge part of modern baseball,” Epstein said.
During the 2014 season, Epstein conducted a search to upgrade the mental skills program and personnel he had inherited. Just before the 2015 spring training, he announced the creation of a new four-person mental skills department. As director he hired Josh Lifrak, who spent 10 years as mental conditioning consultant at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida. He hired former major league outfielder Darnell McDonald as mental skills coordinator and assigned Rey Fuentes to Latin mental skills coordinator. He also brought in Ken Ravizza, a psychology professor who worked in the kinesiology department at Cal State–Fullerton. Ravizza joined the Cubs on the recommendation of Maddon. They had been friends since 1985, when Maddon was coaching in the Angels minor league system, and Angels pitching coach Marcel Lachemann brought Ravizza in to work with Angels players. Maddon brought Ravizza to the Rays in 2009, after which Ravizza returned to the Angels in 2011.
Ravizza, 68, was around the team throughout spring training. At one point, Ravizza gathered the team around him on a practice field. On the ground he placed a line of 162 baseballs divided by seven bats. Each ball represented one game of the season. The bats represented the months of the baseball season, including October. Beyond the seventh bat were 19 more baseballs, representing the number of games the Cubs might have to play in the postseason to win the World Series. It made for a stark visual reminder of the length of the journey, and how this year the Cubs were preparing not just to get to the playoffs, but also to win them.
Though mental skills coaches such as Ravizza had been around baseball for three decades or more, they still ran up against resistance in the macho world of the clubhouse that questioned their place in the game. Improving your performance through methods like visualization, mindfulness, and proper breathing were resisted by some traditionalists as something between quackery and a service for the weak-minded. In his opening speech, Maddon made sure his players did not think that way.
“If you’re not talking to a mental skills guy to get better, you’re crazy,” Maddon told them. “I do it, you do it, the best players in the game do it. There’s a stigma to not doing it. If you’re not doing it, you’re not trying to get better.”
Said Epstein, “Joe really legitimized it in our big league clubhouse. The vestiges of the stigma that was associated with it 10 to 15 years ago still remained. It’s still a little weird for a guy to talk about it openly. Joe couldn’t be more onboard with mental skills training.”
After Maddon’s opening speech as Chicago manager, the Cubs took the field—actually, a wide swath of grass out in back of their training center—looking like a different team. The best way to measure the immediate change in the Cubs under Maddon was in decibels. As the team began its morning stretch, a huge speaker blasted “Voodoo Child” by Jimi Hendrix. What followed were more tunes from among Maddon’s rock-and-roll favorites, including “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones, “Gimme Three Steps” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, and “Tom Sawyer” by Rush.
“I’m a product of the ’60s and ’70s,” he told his new team. “You’ll have to put up with that.”
The idea behind the loud music, Maddon explained later, was to “get the blood flowing” at the start of the day. Yes, sir, these were not your older brother’s Cubs, never mind your grandfather’s Cubs. Maddon looked like something of an oddity himself, or some kind of interloper, because he patrolled the fields wearing uniform number 70. It was such a strange number that nobody in franchise history ever wore it before he arrived. Maddon’s preferred baseball number was always 20, which he wore in the Angels organization as a player and minor league manager. Then one day in September 1985 he saw a jersey with number 70 hanging in his locker. Equipment manager Leonard Garcia randomly gave him the number after the club traded for pitcher Don Sutton, the future Hall of Famer, who was accustomed to wearing 20 and had the seniority to claim it in Anaheim. Maddon, never wanting to have a number seized again, vowed that day he would always wear 70, such an unpopular number that only five players, all of them journeyman relievers since 2009, have worn it for more than one season in the big leagues. The guy with the white hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and number 70 on his back grabbed the Cubs’ attention and confidence from day one.
“I went in, as someone playing on the opposite side against him, thinking this guy was about trickery and gimmicks,” Ross said about his expectations for Maddon. “One of the things you feel right away is the genuineness when he talks. He’s just talking about the fundamentals of baseball. He wants to be fundamentally sound. I remember thinking, Wait a minute. This guy reminds me of Bobby Cox—how he teaches, how he talks, how he doesn’t have a lot of rules, how he builds a foundation on just doing the right thing. He establishes an atmosphere where you have a choice between right and wrong, and you choose right. You don’t need rules for that.”
It didn’t take long for the Cubs to understand that Maddon, the old minor league roving instructor, would be a stickler for playing the game the right way. Just a few days into camp, the Cubs were practicing relays and cutoffs when Maddon suddenly stopped the drill. He was appalled that the Cubs were going through the motions, flipping balls casually with a halfhearted effort. He called it the “only time I blew up” at his team in his first two years managing the Cubs.
“Because I felt they didn’t get it,” he said. “They were a bunch of young guys in the major leagues going through the motions. ‘Okay, we’ve got to do this today and move on.’ I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.
“I was yelling a little bit, making sure they underst
ood I didn’t like it. That’s not how you win. I told them, ‘We need to do things like this better. You’ve got to care about stuff like this. This is a separator: you have the group that cares about something like this and the group that doesn’t.’ I made them do it over.”
To hammer home his point, Maddon integrated a drill over the next few days that normally is used with Little Leaguers. He split players in lines of five, spread across the outfield. The players would throw the ball to the next man in line, who would catch, turn, and throw to the next in line, and so on, with the ball passed back and forth.
“It was like I was going back to instructional league, like what I did in the early ’80s,” Maddon said. “A lot of them felt in a way slighted or they were being babied, or ‘How dare you have us do this?’ But then there were some who got it, and a bunch of them were veterans that liked it. Honestly, it paid off. We might have blown one relay in 2015, maybe two at the most. We were nails. And we were nails again last year.
“It’s the fundamental itself. I want your best effort when you go through it, when you go through a fundamental. Whether it’s cutoffs and relays, rundowns, first and third defense, bunt defense is big—I just want them to give the drill their full attention until we move on.”
Maddon never forgot the mantra from the football coaches at Lafayette he heard over and over as a freshman quarterback: “zero defects.” Run the drill, and keep running the drill until you get it right. The ratio of practice time to game time in football is far greater than in baseball, so the importance of drilling is a deep part of the football culture.
“Baseball players, man, they don’t get it. They didn’t play football,” Maddon said. “Too many times on a major league level major leaguers are permitted to do it wrong—by bad habits or you don’t call their attention to it in drills. Because some coaches are intimidated. What’s the most important attribute a major league coach has? He’s fearless. He knows his stuff. He’s been doing it for a while. He has this opportunity. But a major league coach if he’s not afraid to call BS is a really good major league coach. They’re my favorite ones.”
