The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  Cubs fans were conflicted. Chapman made their team better, but to some people also less likable. Judging by sports talk radio, Epstein had just willingly introduced the first discordant note of the year into what had been a dream season. Epstein himself wrestled with the move. He had spent five years touting the character of the players he brought to the organization, and yet the last piece of his rebuild contradicted that philosophy. Epstein used the conference call with Chapman to settle this internal conflict. The need of the team won out. Epstein did his best to defend the move.

  “We gave that serious, thoughtful, careful consideration over an extended period of time,” Epstein said. “We take the issue of character very seriously and continue to. Obviously, we take the issue of domestic violence very seriously. So it was our responsibility to look into this thoroughly and to look at all the facts. Again, we understand there will be lots of different perspectives on this, that there will be lots of strong feelings about this, and that people are going to feel differently about that. And we understand, and we respect that.

  “In the end, it was our decision, and we decided it was appropriate to trade for a player who has accepted his discipline, who has already been disciplined by Major League Baseball, who expressed his sorrow and his regret for the incident in a statement at the time, in a meaningful statement today, and, even more importantly, to me and Tom directly today over the phone before we were willing to consummate the trade, a player who is active currently in Major League Baseball and pitching for another team.

  “We decided that it was appropriate to trade for that player. It doesn’t mean we’re turning our back on the importance of character at all. I think because we’ve emphasized character and building this core that we have, we have a tremendously strong clubhouse culture. We have great character down there. We think that it will help Aroldis as he moves forward.”

  Not everybody was buying it. Over a picture of Epstein, the back page of the Sun-Times sneered, “Spin City.” Writing in the Tribune, columnist David Haugh ended his take on the Chapman trade with this declaration: “I don’t have to like it. Not with the Cubs making their games easier to win but harder to watch.”

  There could be no debate about Chapman’s ability. He was one of the best closers in baseball, and one of the hardest-throwing pitchers who ever lived. His pitches regularly exceeded 100 miles per hour. For his career, Chapman struck out 42.6 percent of the batters he faced, the highest strikeout rate in baseball history.

  At 6-foot-4 and 215 pounds, Chapman was a physical marvel. His pitching delivery gave off the frightful impression of a freight locomotive screaming down a mountain. Chapman gathered all his long levers and thick musculature into a tuck position, then, as if spring-loaded, exploded in a burst of energy toward the hitter, his arm swinging long and fast behind him and his front leg extending so far forward that his stride measured seven feet, one of the longest recorded strides in baseball. With that stride, which drew him closer to the hitter by the time he released the ball, Chapman shortened the distance his pitches had to travel not by inches but by feet. Distance equals time, and between his outlier measurements in velocity and stride, Chapman gave hitters less time to react to a pitch than any other pitcher who ever lived.

  “He’s incredible,” Maddon said. “The other day I walked up and patted him on the back. Holy shit—it’s wrapped steel. It’s unbelievable. There’s got to be something to throwing a hundred miles an hour, to coordinate all those movements, but he is some kind of strong.”

  When it came to how often and when he pitched, however, Chapman was no Miller. Chapman pitched 59 times in 2016, but only six of them before the ninth inning (all of those in the eighth). He saved 36 games, but only once did he do so by getting more than three outs. As closers go, he was something of a diva: he worked best when he had plenty of time to warm up and started the ninth inning with a lead with nobody on base.

  Maddon was trying to retrain Chapman on the fly in the postseason to be a multiple-inning threat and to drop him into “dirty” innings—situations with runners on. The first time he tried, it was a disaster. Maddon summoned Chapman in Game 3 of the NLDS in San Francisco with a one-run lead, two runners on, and no outs in the eighth inning. He asked Chapman to get six outs for a save, something he had done only once in his career, and that had been three years earlier. The Giants ambushed Chapman for three runs, keyed by a triple by Conor Gillaspie. The next day Chapman was still visibly shaken by his failure. Maddon saw the despair on his face and spoke with him.

  “He was upset with himself,” Maddon said. “He was upset with himself when Gillaspie got that knock. He wasn’t upset about being in the game. He told me he couldn’t sleep that night because he was upset about giving up the hit. He and I have discussed all these scenarios. During the season, the objective was not to use him for more than three outs. Postseason, anything goes.”

  One of the problems in trying to retrain Chapman is that, unlike Miller, Chapman needs to go through a detailed routine in order to get himself ready to pitch. Disruptions to that routine risk failure. In the fifth game of the NLCS in Los Angeles, Maddon warmed Chapman in the top of the eighth inning with a 3–1 lead. He anticipated asking Chapman to get six outs again. The Cubs blew open the game with five runs in the eighth. Chapman sat down. Then Maddon asked him to warm again to pitch the ninth inning of an 8–2 game. A sloppy Chapman allowed two runs and did not strike out any of the six batters he faced.

  “That was our fault,” Maddon said. “He had to warm up. He was coming in for two innings, and then all of a sudden we score all those runs and it became one inning, then he had to warm up, sit down, warm up, sit down. So that was part of all that. He threw too much in the bullpen and that’s my fault.”

  World Series Game 5 would begin with Bauer and Lester, the starting pitchers, but, given the tenor of the postseason, it might swing on how each manager deployed his best reliever. Francona already had proved he wasn’t shy about inserting Miller into the middle of games for multiple innings—Miller threw 27 pitches over two innings in Game 4. Maddon held a rested Chapman—he did not pitch in Game 4—but when Chapman could pitch and for how long were still abiding questions with the left-hander.

  “He’s just got to be ready-ready,” Maddon said. “Just ride it from there. With him it’s so different because he has this absolute routine. Oh, my God. First of all, he has to start throwing the heavy ball. Then if you warm him up and sit him down, it’s no bueno, man. If I have to warm him up and sit him down once, okay, but if it’s more than once, he ain’t going to pitch well. It’s not going to happen.”

  Maddon made sure to talk to Chapman before the game.

  “I may need you as early as the seventh inning,” he told him. “Could you be ready that early?”

  “I’m ready,” Chapman responded. “I’m ready to pitch for as long as you want me.”

  Even facing elimination, down three games to one, Maddon saw a clear path for the Cubs to win the World Series. In potential Games 6 and 7 in Cleveland, he liked his fully rested starting pitchers, Jake Arrieta and Kyle Hendricks, over Cleveland starters Josh Tomlin and Corey Kluber, both of whom would be working on short rest. But just to get it there, Maddon would have to ride Lester, push Chapman out of his comfort zone, and hope Game 5 didn’t get to Miller with an Indians lead.

  “This is obviously very important tonight,” Maddon said. “If we get it back to Cleveland, I like it a lot. Grabbing a lead and holding on is big. I don’t know how aggressive they will be with Miller tonight. I think they will still. But for him to be that effective as often as he has been is unbelievable. We need to get into the underbelly of the bullpen. If we do, we have a good shot. Their guy, Bauer, hopefully he’s missing the zone again and we get to him. And Jon being Jon—that’s what we’ve got to rely on tonight.”

  The Indians were in command of the series, but they had their own demons to conquer. The franchise’s last World Series championship occurred in 1948. It was so
long ago only one player remained alive from that team, Eddie Robinson, the 95-year-old former first baseman. Robinson made his major league debut September 9, 1942, against the Philadelphia A’s. The manager of the opposing team that day was Connie Mack, who was born in 1862. Since their last championship, the Indians had burned through 28 managers in 68 years.

  Francona knew that to end that kind of history he had to put the game into the hands of his bullpen. He used only three starters in the series—Bauer was pitching on short rest in Game 5—because of injuries to pitchers Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar. “We would have done it differently if we had our guys,” Francona said before Game 5. “When I get Miller up is when I get him in. If you do this with your bullpen during the season, it would last about 10 days before guys start breaking down. But there’s adrenaline this time of year and there’s no series after this one.”

  The formula had worked perfectly. Nobody had dented the Indians’ bullpen yet in October. His relievers were 4–0 in the postseason with a 1.69 ERA while throwing almost half of the team’s innings, 45 percent. The Cubs would face an elimination game knowing it was a baseball version of Beat the Clock: they had to have a lead by midgame, when Francona was sure to go to his lockdown bullpen.

  They may not have had the edge in the series, but the Cubs did have Anthony Rizzo. Five seasons before, Epstein had made Rizzo the first of his four pillars, trading for the first baseman with the .141 batting average in large part because he believed in his character. Rizzo rewarded that faith, not only with his big bat but also with the leadership Epstein envisioned.

  Ross called Rizzo “probably the most important player we have on the team, just as far as his attitude and how he’s able to get along with everybody and gets to know everybody.

  “Every time you’re around him, whether you’re on the field or out to dinner or any place, he wants everybody to have a good time. He’s more worried about everybody else having a good time and puts himself second. And I see his personality over everything in baseball. Whether it’s his at-bats, batting practice, or anything, he’s quick to take a back seat to others. That’s unusual for a superstar.”

  Rizzo came through again in the last hour before Game 5. Rizzo stripped down to nothing, jumped on a couch in the clubhouse, and began quoting every great cinematic motivational line he could think of, from Any Given Sunday (“Either we heal now as a team, or we will die as individuals!”) to Rocky (“Adrian, it’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up!”). The theme from Rocky blared over the clubhouse speakers. “We’re going the distance!” he shouted. The room cracked up, laughing. Here it was, on the nerve-jangling edge of Game 5 of the World Series, and the Cubs looked like they were deep into a karaoke party. The tone was set. If the young Cubs were going to stare the end of their season straight in the eye, they would do it with a smile on their faces.

  —

  The clock ticked down with every out.

  Three innings—nine outs—had passed for the Cubs and the old scoreboard in centerfield showed them with no runs and one inconsequential single off Bauer. The Indians held the lead, 1–0, because of a home run José Ramírez slammed off Lester in the second inning.

  Tick, tick, tick went the outs. With just six more ticks, Francona would be able to put the lead and the World Series championship in the hands of his undefeated bullpen. Bryant, held to one hit in his 15 at-bats in the series, was the first hitter of the fourth inning for Chicago. Following the Cleveland blueprint, Bauer had whiffed Bryant in the first inning—starting and finishing him with curveballs.

  “I feel like, as a team, guys are throwing us more curveballs,” Bryant said. “I don’t know. I don’t look into the stats. I don’t know if we hit curveballs well, but if they keep throwing them, obviously we don’t.”

  No one was throwing in the Cleveland bullpen yet, but the hour was nigh.

  “Not a crazy sense of urgency,” Bryant said about his thought process as he walked to the plate, “but certainly we want to get some runs there so that they’re not going to go to Miller and Allen with the lead there. So for me I wasn’t going out there trying to hit a homer or anything like that.”

  This time Bauer started Bryant with a four-seam fastball. It missed for a ball, high. More tellingly, it was clocked at 91.7 miles per hour, well below his average four-seam fastball in the regular season, 94.6 miles per hour. He came back with a cut fastball, well located down and away. Bryant took it for a strike.

  No batter in the major leagues in 2016 rated better against both four- and two-seam fastballs than Bryant. He hit .341 against fastballs, including 27 of his 39 home runs. Bauer wouldn’t dare throw him a 1-and-1 fastball for a strike, not to the best fastball hitter in the majors, not with the way Cleveland had throttled Chicago with breaking balls. But he did. He threw a belt-high, 91.5-mph, two-seam fastball on the inside half of the plate. Bryant, as if gleeful to be finally liberated from his weeklong curveball quarantine, smashed it into the leftfield bleachers.

  The game was tied. Wrigley was rocking. The clock stopped.

  Bauer is considered one of the game’s eccentric personalities, a reputation galvanized during the 2016 American League Championship Series when the propeller of one of his drones sliced open the pinky of his pitching hand. The wound was stitched and bandaged, but when he returned to the mound in Toronto, and by rule could not pitch with a bandage, the gash opened. Blood oozed and dripped-dripped-dripped out of the wound like a faucet leaking crimson, creating one of the more grotesque visuals in postseason history.

  His eccentricity distracted from the quality of his stuff and the depth of his effort to improve. Bauer purchased a TrackMan system and super slow-motion video cameras for his house to learn more about the spin rates and movement of his pitches. The TrackMan system, which runs about $30,000, uses military-grade, 3-D Doppler radar technology to track 20,000 measurements per second of a baseball. With TrackMan’s help, Bauer tweaked the spin rate and spin axis of his curveball.

  With the help of the slow-motion video, Bauer adjusted the way the curveball leaves his hand. Like most right-handed pitchers, Bauer throws the curveball with his index and pointer fingers coming off the baseball on the side facing third base. But the slow-motion video taught him that he could generate more spin if, as his fingers came off the side of the ball, his wrist turned in the opposite direction, or pronated. It’s the same concept as throwing a tight spiral with a football.

  By 2016 Bauer had developed such confidence in his curveball that he threw it nearly twice as often as he had in past years. He increased his usage of the pitch from 12 percent in 2015 to 20 percent in 2016. Left-handed hitters, in particular, had little clue about how to hit the pitch. Bauer threw them 300 curves in the regular season, only 7 of which resulted in a hit.

  So where was the curveball?

  After Bryant smacked a fastball for a home run, Rizzo was up next, a left-handed hitter, not to mention the famed clubhouse singer and thespian. The fans hadn’t even settled back into their seats when Rizzo crushed the next pitch from Bauer: it was another fastball—another elevated two-seam fastball. The ball whistled to rightfield until it smacked against the ivy on the wall. Rizzo hustled into second base with a double.

  Bauer needed to get back to the script after getting two fastballs whacked. He tried a curveball to Ben Zobrist, but missed, low and in. He missed, too, with his next two pitches, a fastball and a changeup. With the count 3-and-0, Bauer knew he could groove a cookie of a fastball to Zobrist. The Cleveland scouting report made note that Zobrist virtually never swings at a 3-and-0 pitch—he takes the pitch 97.3 percent of the time, to be exact. He had seen 413 pitches in his career at 3-and-0 and swung at only 11 of them, only 5 of which he actually put into play. He had not had a hit on a 3-and-0 count since September 27, 2013, more than three years before.

  So Bauer followed along and played the percentages. He grooved a 92.7-mph, four-seam fastball right down the middle. Lo and
behold, Zobrist swung at it, and ripped it so hard into centerfield for a single that Rizzo had to stop at third.

  If you wanted to affix a brass marker to commemorate the exact spot where the series flipped, you would place it on that three-batter sequence in the fourth inning of the fifth game. The Indians were six outs away from handing a lead to their expert bullpen. The Cubs could do almost nothing against the deluge of Cleveland breaking balls thrown their way the entire series.

  And suddenly this happened: home run, double, single on consecutive swings—every one of them against a fastball.

  This was the “offensive epiphany” Maddon beseeched.

  “He came out really good,” Francona said about Bauer. “I mean, really good. And the two pitches—back to back Bryant and Rizzo jumped on fastballs that caught too much of the plate. They were down, but too much of the plate. And Zobrist had a really good at-bat. That was the damage. It’s just they got some fastballs they could handle and they whacked them pretty good.”

  The turning of fortunes was confirmed when the next batter, Addison Russell, mis-hit a curveball and wound up with an RBI infield single to score Rizzo, giving the Cubs a 2–1 lead. After Jason Heyward struck out, Javier Baez, riding a streak of 13 straight at-bats without a hit, swallowed his pride and smartly dropped a bunt for a hit. Ross followed with a deep fly ball to score another run, pushing the lead to 3–1.

  Francona lifted Bauer after the inning, and, as if to underscore the importance of the ticking clock, his bullpen allowed Chicago nothing over the rest of the game.

  Lester would not squander the lead. He wobbled a bit in the sixth, when his troubles against the running game surfaced again. The Indians needed only two singles to score, because in between the hits by Rajai Davis and Francisco Lindor, Davis swiped second base. But when Lindor tried the same thievery, Lester’s battery mate, Ross, covered for him by throwing a strike to second base to nab Lindor.