The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  “Our strikeout totals were so high,” coach Mike Borzello said, “and he was really getting frustrated watching our at-bats and the two-strike approaches. So he called everybody together to talk about a good two-strike approach. He showed with a fungo bat the way to move the baseball with two strikes and especially the mind-set you have to have with two strikes.

  “I’ll never forget it. He said, ‘We have to start taking our “B” hack.’ ”

  A “B” hack is a swing with reduced length and effort as compared to a hitter’s most powerful swing, or “A” hack. With two strikes, for instance, a hitter might choke up on the bat and place a greater priority simply on making contact.

  “That became our rallying cry: ‘B hack ’em!’ It became who we were,” Borzello said. “That became a major point. We started approaching our at-bats differently. ‘B hack ’em! B hack ’em to death!’ You heard it all year long in the dugout whenever anybody got two strikes on them.”

  In 2015 the Cubs struck out in 24.5 percent of their plate appearances, the worst rate in the major leagues. In 2016, armed with their B hacks, they cut that rate to 21.1 percent, right at league average.

  —

  One of the quieter developments in the entertaining 2016 camp was the frame of mind of Jon Lester. The Cubs immediately saw a better, more relaxed pitcher than the one who had showed up in 2015 trying too hard to prove that he deserved his $155 million contract. Lester was energized by the addition of Lackey, his hunting partner, former teammate in Boston, and alter ego. Lackey is a gruff, no-nonsense extrovert who likes to boast, “In between the lines, I don’t care what anybody thinks of me. I’m there to win.”

  “John Lackey will be great for Jon Lester,” pitching coach Chris Bosio said in Arizona. “Jon is quiet and focused, and Lack brings out the beast in him. He’ll push him. John Lackey is a great addition because he can pitch, but also because he makes Jon Lester better.”

  The relationship between the two pitchers was so symbiotic that the Cubs arranged for Lackey and Lester to hold their opening spring training news conferences together. Like a comedy team, they ribbed one another, completed each other’s sentences, and challenged one another about which pitcher would wind up with the most hits.

  “When you know people as well as we know each other, you can definitely talk to each other a little bit differently than you talk to anybody else,” Lester said. “There’s no sugarcoating anything around us. You probably don’t want to be in a lot of conversations around us.

  “It’s good having him. It’s always good when you have friends on the team. It’s nice having guys that don’t sugarcoat things and you know exactly what they’re going to bring and what exactly they’re going to do for you and what you can do for them to make you better.”

  Maddon came up with his unique way of describing the combination of Lackey and Lester, observing after just a couple of days into spring training that they were “vibrating on the same level right now.” The manager reflected on what it would mean to have Lackey joining Ross in the support group around a more relaxed Lester.

  “Jon Lester likes to have people around him that he’s familiar with,” Maddon said. “I think Lackey’s the perfect foil, in a sense. Lack’s going to tell Jon Lester exactly what he thinks all the time and that’s good. I think together, the combination of Lackey and David has the opportunity to bring out the best in Jon Lester.”

  With Lackey in the same rotation, Ross catching him, and the strain of trying to prove that he deserved his contract behind him, Lester, the notoriously slow starter who complained he needed 100 innings to feel right, opened 2016 with the best April of his career. In five starts he went 2–1 with a 1.83 ERA. It jump-started what was the best year of his career. Lester tied a career high with 19 wins and posted career lows with an ERA of 2.44 and a WHIP of 1.016. The Cubs were 24–8 when he started, including 12–2 in the second half.

  Lester reached lofty Triple Crown pitching numbers—19 wins, 2.44 ERA, and 197 strikeouts—that only three pitchers ever had reached before in franchise history: Arrieta in 2015, Greg Maddux in 1992, and Orval Overall in 1909.

  —

  It took only a month or so of the 2016 season before the Cubs began drawing comparisons to the 1984 Tigers, the 1927 Yankees, the 1902 Pirates, and some of the best teams of all time out of the gate. Chicago won its first three games before its first loss, a defeat that left it one game behind 4–0 Pittsburgh in the National League Central. It would be the only day all season the Cubs were not in first place. They finished April 17–5. They didn’t lose back-to-back games until the middle of May.

  The Cubs weren’t just beating teams; they were annihilating them. The 2015 Cubs team that won 97 games needed the entire 162-game season to outscore their opponents by 81 runs; this team did it in just their first 24 games. After only 29 games, the Cubs had outscored opponents by 100 runs, becoming the first team to wipe out the competition by so much so fast since the 1902 Pirates.

  The Cubs were 25–6 after 31 games, the fastest-starting team since the 1984 Detroit Tigers. They owned a 9-game lead after only 35 games. The division race was effectively over before school let out.

  On and on they rolled. They reached the last day of June with a record of 51–27 and a lead in the division of 11 games. Something really historic happened that day: Joe’s mom, Beanie, worked her last day at the Third Base Luncheonette in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, after working there for 46 years. She retired at age 83.

  “I just talked to her,” Maddon said before a game in New York. “I said, ‘How did it go today?’ She said, ‘Oh, good.’ ‘Big party?’ ‘No, just some cake and some balloons. And a lot of the customers were really nice.’

  “Talking to her on the phone she sounded really good. Excited. I was always concerned—my dad passed away in 2002—and this absolutely gives her identity, keeps her busy. I always thought it was good for her. But I never heard her as happy as she sounded today. So I do believe she has other things that will fill up her day. So I do believe it’s going to work out. That’s a big moment.”

  The Cubs lost that night, 4–3, the first defeat of a four-game sweep by the Mets. After a 47–20 start, Chicago played dull baseball for three weeks. The Cubs would lose 15 of 20 games in their only slump of the year. Maddon knew exactly what was happening: his team simply couldn’t maintain the incredible pace and energy it had played with since spring training began.

  On Saturday, July 9, before a game that night in Pittsburgh, Maddon gathered his team for the second of his three annual meetings. He pulled out his iPad Pro and drew from the same speech he gave in spring training—delivering the key points word for word.

  “I reemphasized the spring training message, all this stuff on the back of that T-shirt,” he said. “I just reminded them about all that stuff. I said, ‘I can see we’re tired. I get it. Everybody’s tired. I see it. We’re going to get through this. And while we’re getting through this, don’t forget about the target, don’t forget about pressure, don’t forget about expectations, and those are good things, and when we catch our breath and come back on the other side of the [All-Star] break, get back to where we had been.’

  “All it was was a rehashing of what we had talked about. They did not forget about it, because I thought it was so on point and worked so well. We just got away from it because we were tired. That’s it. There was no other reason. None.”

  The Cubs sent seven players to the All-Star Game, a game that featured a whopping 11 players who had been acquired by Epstein: Anthony Rizzo, Jon Lester, Mookie Betts, David Ortiz, Jackie Bradley Jr., and Xander Bogaerts from his Boston days, and Ben Zobrist, Kris Bryant, Addison Russell, Dexter Fowler, and Jake Arrieta from his Chicago tenure.

  The National League lost the game, 4–2. It turned out to be the best possible outcome for the Cubs.

  —

  On the other side of the All-Star break, refreshed by the time off and renewed by Maddon’s principles, the Cubs returned to the way
s of a juggernaut. They would not lose a series for more than a month, reeling off a 24–8 run that was just as impressive as a similar one to start the season.

  During that run, and almost two weeks before the trading deadline, Epstein made one of his under-the-radar moves that quietly were becoming a hallmark of his rebuild. He traded for Mike Montgomery, a 26-year-old, left-handed pitcher from Seattle. Epstein gave up Dan Vogelbach, a first base prospect who was blocked by Anthony Rizzo, and Paul Blackburn, a strike-throwing right-handed pitching prospect. On the face of it, the move seemed extremely minor. Montgomery would be joining his fourth team in five years. His career record while bouncing between the starting rotation and the bullpen was 7–10.

  What Epstein saw was a pitcher on the cusp of breaking out. He saw not a middle reliever, the way he was used in Seattle, but a potential 15-game winner as a starting pitcher.

  “A year from now,” he said, “we’d never be able to trade for a guy like that, not without paying a heavy price. We try to get these guys before they are household names, like the way we traded for Andrew Miller in Boston before 2011. Montgomery is not Miller. He actually reminds me some of Jeremy Affeldt when he started to figure it out.”

  Affeldt, like Montgomery, was a tall left-hander who developed slowly in the Kansas City Royals system. At age 28 his career ERA was 4.55. He then signed with San Francisco, where he posted a 3.07 ERA over the next seven seasons while winning three World Series titles. Epstein’s plan was to keep Montgomery in the bullpen for 2016 and convert him to a starting pitcher in 2017. His track record for finding pitchers on the verge of breaking out was remarkable. His haul in Chicago included:

  Kyle Hendricks (2012). Instead of getting Hendricks, Epstein nearly traded his best pitcher at the time, Ryan Dempster, to the Atlanta Braves for pitcher Randall Delgado. Dempster, however, used his veto power as a player with 10-and-5 rights (10 years in the majors, at least 5 with his current team) to kill the deal. Epstein needed to pivot with mere days before the trade deadline. He was in a hurry to move veterans he inherited for young players who could help the Cubs in later years. Dempster, pitcher Paul Maholm, outfielder Reed Johnson, catcher Geovany Soto, and infielder Jeff Baker all would be traded within a six-day window.

  After the Atlanta deal fell through, the Texas Rangers called on Dempster. The Rangers were motivated to make a deal. They were clinging to a four-game lead in the American League West, and the team chasing them, the Los Angeles Angels, had just acquired ace Zack Greinke.

  Hendricks, 22 at the time, and pitching for Texas’s Class-A team in Myrtle Beach, was nobody’s idea of a hot pitching prospect, if only because he lacked the elite velocity the game craved. What Hendricks lacked in velocity, however, he made up for with pitching smarts. The son of a golf pro, Hendricks was a 4.0 student at Capistrano Valley High School in Mission Viejo, California. He wanted to attend Stanford, but he didn’t throw hard enough for the tastes of the coaching staff there. He chose to attend Dartmouth, where as a freshman he threw 71⁄3 shutout innings in the Ivy League Championship Series clincher, advancing Dartmouth to its first NCAA regional in 22 years.

  The Rangers selected Hendricks in the eighth round of the 2011 draft, after his junior year. (An economics major, Hendricks completed his degree in 2014 after returning for fall terms after baseball seasons with the Rangers and the Cubs. He wrote his final economics thesis on “Trade Liberalization and Foreign Direct Investment.”)

  Up against the 2012 trade deadline, the Cubs started to collect information on Texas prospects. Hendricks stood out because of his numbers. He was a premier strike-thrower who put the ball on the ground and did not give up home runs. In 20 starts at Myrtle Beach, Hendricks walked only 15 batters and gave up only eight home runs. Still, as a slightly built (6-foot-3, 190 pounds) right-hander who rarely cracked 90 miles per hour with his fastball, Hendricks appeared to have a limited ceiling. The crafty right-hander was an endangered species in baseball as velocity rose. In 2012, for instance, there were only 12 right-handed qualified pitchers in all of the major leagues who averaged less than 90 miles per hour with their fastball.

  The Cubs weren’t certain about Hendricks. And then, as the deadline neared, one phone call convinced them to take a chance on him. It came from a rival player personnel director who knew Hendricks.

  “We were told his makeup was off the charts,” Hoyer said, referring to how scouts describe a player’s character. “He said Hendricks had an 80 makeup [on an 80 scale]. Really, that alone sold us. We went with the makeup.”

  On July 31, just five minutes before the deadline, they traded Dempster for Hendricks and corner infielder Christian Villanueva.

  In 2016, Hendricks posted the second-lowest ERA in the history of Wrigley Field, 1.32, a mark bettered only by Grover Cleveland Alexander 96 years earlier. Hendricks won the ERA title (2.13) and finished third in Cy Young Award voting.

  Hector Rondon (2012). Rondon was the Cleveland Indians’ minor league pitcher of the year in 2009. Two years later he wanted to quit.

  After undergoing Tommy John surgery in 2010, Rondon fractured the same elbow the next year while pitching for Caracas in the Venezuelan Winter League. A screw that had been placed in his elbow during the Tommy John surgery dislodged from the bone. He needed another surgery. Doctors told him he had only a 20 percent chance of pitching again. That’s when he decided to quit. He told his girlfriend, his father, his mother, and the Indians that he was finished with baseball. He was 23 years old.

  Rondon eventually reconsidered. He underwent the surgery. He grinded through his second major rehabilitation program on the elbow. He made it back in time to throw 7 innings at the end of the 2012 minor league season. Rondon added 21 innings in the Venezuelan Winter League. The Indians, believing teams would not want to take the health risk on Rondon, left him off their roster. The decision exposed Rondon to the Rule 5 draft, an annual winter draft in which teams can select certain qualified nonroster players from other organizations, with the catch being that they must keep that player on the major league roster for the entirety of the next season.

  One of the Cubs’ minor league coaches, Franklin Font, worked on the Leones staff in Venezuela, saw Rondon pitch there, and recommended him.

  Rondon pitched so well with the Cubs that in 2014 he became the team’s closer, a role he held until Chicago traded for Aroldis Chapman in July 2016.

  Jake Arrieta (2013). The worst starting pitcher in Baltimore Orioles history pitched like Bob Gibson in Chicago. Freed from constraints the Orioles had imposed on his delivery and pitch selection, Arrieta became the 2015 Cy Young Award winner with a season for the ages.

  Pedro Strop (2013). The Colorado Rockies signed Strop at 16 years old out of the Dominican Republic and released him at 23. The Texas Rangers signed him, but they traded him three years later to Baltimore, where in 2013 he posted a 7.25 ERA while walking six batters per nine innings. Though he threw 97 miles per hour, Strop fought control issues at every stop. The Orioles included Strop in the Arrieta deal that year. With the Cubs, Strop has posted a 2.68 ERA while reducing his walk rate nearly in half, to 3.4 per nine innings.

  Carl Edwards Jr. (2013). This is the story of the “String Bean Slinger.” As a skinny senior pitcher at Mid-Carolina High School in Prosperity, South Carolina, Carl Edwards Jr., all 6-feet-2, 160 pounds of him, was determined to follow his close friend and high school catcher Will Bedenbaugh to Carolina Southern University. Bedenbaugh, two years older than Edwards, played 10 games at CSU as a freshman before suffering an arm injury. Just after midnight on December 12, 2010, while home in Prosperity, Bedenbaugh was driving his 2009 Dodge Challenger when it left Mount Pleasant Road, hit several trees, and caught fire. Bedenbaugh was killed.

  Edwards’s plans to attend CSU changed. The following spring he attended a predraft workout held at Capital City Stadium in Columbia, South Carolina. Scouts from the Rangers, Blue Jays, Red Sox, and Padres were on hand for the event. A Rangers scout named Chris Kemp hoped that Edw
ards didn’t bring his best fastball that day. Kemp already believed he might be sitting on a gem. He saw Edwards pitch in an adult league referred to as the “Bush League,” a very competitive sandlot league composed mostly of African-American men, some in their 40s, from communities around central South Carolina. Kemp saw Edwards hit 91 miles an hour and loved the whiplike action of the skinny kid’s arm. Edwards remained under the radar for most teams because he did not participate in the elite showcase circuit for top high school prospects. To Kemp’s relief, Edwards didn’t crack 90 that day.

  In all, 1,463 players were selected in the draft before the Rangers—in the 48th round, a round that no longer exists in a draft that has been truncated to 40 rounds—finally called the name of Carl Edwards Jr. The Rangers signed him for $50,000. They also put him on a 6,000-calorie daily diet. Each day Edwards would throw into a blender milk, ice, Nutella, peanut butter, Oreos, and protein powder, and chug the calorie-laden shake. He still had trouble gaining weight, but his fastball gained velocity. He had his first pitching lesson in Texas’s 2011 Instructional League.

  Hitters couldn’t touch him. By 2013 he was ranked as the 14th best prospect in the Texas system. In 1701⁄3 innings, Edwards struck out 240 batters and posted a 1.59 ERA. Then, on July 22, 2013, on a night when he was scheduled to pitch, Edwards walked into the clubhouse of the Hickory Crawdads and saw a report on ESPN that the Cubs had traded veteran pitcher Matt Garza to the Rangers for pitcher Justin Grimm, third baseman Mike Olt, Edwards, and a player to be named, who turned out to be pitcher Neil Ramirez.

  A short time later his phone rang. It was Epstein. “Welcome to the Chicago Cubs,” Epstein told him.