The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

Game 4 presented Maddon with urgency: win or face Cueto in Game 5 with the season on the line. The worst-case scenario seemed very likely when the Cubs, throttled by Moore, reached the ninth inning down 5–2.

  Maddon is not a manager above trying to get into the heads of the opposing team. He admits he likes to be unconventional in part because it can throw off another team. It was part of his extreme defensive shifting with the Rays, for instance, though shifts have become so commonplace that they no longer hold the same powers of confusion and doubt on a hitter they once did. He likes to squeeze-bunt with two strikes, move his second baseman to first base so his first baseman can charge on obvious bunts, and generally make himself a source of annoyance to another manager.

  “All the little games within the game you can perform can have a positive effect for you,” Maddon said. “That stuff—like when I look in the other dugout, the manager I cannot read his emotion, that’s the toughest guy. The guy you can read his emotion all the time, I like working against that guy. I much prefer that. I mean, I learned that in the minor leagues. I used to like to see the guy who got really happy or got really sad.”

  Those tactics, though, were of little use against the Giants.

  “Some guys, like Joe Torre, never gave away anything,” Maddon said. “And Bochy? No.”

  With Cueto looming, Maddon needed something big and he needed it now, in the ninth inning.

  “It’s just like Game 1,” Maddon said. “I’m standing there thinking the whole time, We cannot play Game 5.”

  Bochy removed Moore, who had thrown 120 pitches. It was as if he removed a critical piece from a game of Jenga. Bochy tried five pitchers against the next six batters, all of whom reached base. The Cubs scored four runs by the time the chain reaction of events ended: single, walk, double, single, error, single. Most notably, given Maddon’s spring training tutorial about B hacks, Baez knocked in the go-ahead run with a scaled-down swing on an 0-and-2 pitch that sent a grounder tumbling through the middle of the diamond.

  “That inning never happens with the way we hit before,” Borzello said. “That wasn’t the way we were as an offense before 2016.”

  Chapman closed out the ninth, and the series, with three swinging strikeouts. Something about that inning, however, made Epstein uneasy. David Ross, who had started the game, was behind the plate when Chapman pitched, a rarity during the season. Ross had caught Chapman for just 41⁄3 innings. (Maddon much preferred Contreras behind the plate with Chapman on the mound.) Ross called 13 pitches in that ninth inning. Every one of them was a fastball—not a single slider. Ross seemed to signal an old-school catching mentality: don’t get beat by anything other than your best pitch.

  Epstein, who likes to sit in the scouts’ section behind home plate for road games, looked around him as Chapman threw fastball after fastball. He saw the advance scouts from the Cleveland Indians scribbling notes. If he noticed it, he knew they did, too, so he knew what they were writing down: Ross calls all fastballs with Chapman. Epstein just filed away the observation, hoping—in vain as it would famously happen—it would never come into play.

  The inning otherwise was a perfect ending to the series. Maddon could exhale. There would be no more Cueto.

  “With all due respect to us,” Maddon said, “if we get to Game 5, I don’t know if we could have done that, with Johnny Cueto pitching. I don’t know if we could have mustered up. We got one point the last time: the 3-and-2 homer by Javy.

  “We win the World Series in Game 7. But we might have won it in Game 4 in San Francisco.”

  Done with Cueto and the Giants, the Cubs would next have to contend with Kershaw and the Dodgers. Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, one of the team’s leading celebrity fans, buddy of Epstein’s, and a texting friend of Maddon’s, sent the manager a good-luck text. “The texts from Eddie Vedder,” Maddon said, “are almost lyrical. You could make songs out of them.”

  The postseason on-the-job training of Chapman, from a diva of a closer into a multiple-inning weapon, would hit another bump in the first game of the National League Championship Series. Chicago took a 3–1 lead against the Dodgers into the eighth inning. Before the inning began, Maddon looked at his lineup card, saw that Corey Seager, the Dodgers shortstop and best hitter, was due up fourth, and called over Bosio.

  “Tell Chapman he’s got Seager,” Maddon told his pitching coach.

  As it happened, all three hitters in front of Seager reached base against Montgomery and Strop. Maddon summoned Chapman into the fire drill of a jam: bases loaded, nobody out, and Seager at bat, followed by Yasiel Puig. Chapman pitched to the edge of escape, getting two strikeouts. But the crafty veteran hitter Adrian Gonzalez tied the game with a two-run single. Recovering, as well as providing some foreshadowing for Game 7 of the World Series, Chapman at least preserved the tie by getting Yasmani Grandal on a groundout. Chicago won the game in its next at-bat when Miguel Montero slammed a pinch-hit grand slam, with an encore homer by Fowler.

  “I really believe Chapman coming in won the game for us,” Maddon said. “If anybody else pitches in that particular moment and they get ahead and [Dodgers closer Kenley] Jansen is in the game, then we don’t have much of a chance at all. Seriously, who else do you want to pitch to Seager right there?”

  As Chapman struggled to master the crash course in the mid-inning appearance, would Maddon be better off just starting the eighth inning with him?

  “No, why would I?” the manager answered. “I really don’t want to use him for six outs. The matchups were good, and these other guys are here for a reason. Now, if it’s an elimination game, I may do something like that.”

  The Cubs didn’t score in their next 21 innings, first getting shut out in a game started by Kershaw, then another one by Rich Hill, and then the first three innings of Game 4 started by 19-year-old rookie Julio Urias.

  If Chicago was stuck in a bad dream, Ben Zobrist woke up the team with the smallest of hits. After peeking to see Justin Turner playing a deep third base, Zobrist dropped an exquisite bunt single to start the fourth inning.

  “I contemplated bunting as I was walking up to the plate,” said Zobrist, who had four bunt hits during the season. “As I got in the box, I took a glance at third base. You do whatever you can to get things going. That’s what I was trying to do.”

  From there, the Cubs B hacked ’em to death. Baez singled to left on an 0-and-2 count, Contreras drove in Zobrist with his own single to left on an 0-and-2 count, and Heyward drove in Baez with a groundout on a 2-and-2 count. It was a clinic of situational hitting crammed into four batters. When Urias fell behind Addison Russell 2-and-0, the shortstop dropped the hammer: a two-run homer to stretch the lead to 4–0.

  The five-batter sequence flipped the series. The Cubs would neither lose nor trail again in the NLCS. Starting with the Zobrist bunt, Chicago outscored Los Angeles the rest of the way, 23–6.

  Adding to the surreal nature of the turnaround was the storybook awakening of Anthony Rizzo. The first baseman had been 2-for-28 in the postseason when, in the fifth inning of Game 4, he decided to forgo his own Marucci model bat for one that belonged to teammate Matt Szczur. Rizzo told the media that Szczur’s bat was the same size and weight, and that he sometimes switched to it when he was in dire need of a hit. Rizzo smacked a home run in that fifth inning at-bat. He would hit .432 the rest of the postseason, all of it with Szczur’s bat.

  The Cubs clinched their first pennant in 71 years with a 5–0 win in Game 6 at Wrigley Field. Hendricks, with a reprise of the same 71⁄3 shutout innings he threw to clinch the Ivy League championship as a Dartmouth freshman, outpitched Kershaw. With the help of three double plays and one pickoff, Hendricks and Chapman faced the minimum 27 batters, marking only the second time the ultimate in pitching brevity occurred in postseason history. The other occasion was the perfect game thrown by Don Larsen of the New York Yankees in the 1956 World Series.

  “We played our best game of the year,” Hoyer said, “and I’m happy f
or that. I think the players played their best because they know what this means to these people.”

  Never before had “That’s Cub!” been so obviously different from the century-old culture that had existed for so long in Chicago. Laughingstocks no more, the Cubs were going to the World Series. Nobody had been able to say that since Gertrude Stein, Al Capone, Henry Ford, and Seabiscuit were alive, and before Jackie Robinson signed a contract with the Montreal Royals, the first affiliated team to break the color barrier. The Cubs, yes, the Cubs—the team of Phil Cavarretta and Phil Brickma, of Fergie Jenkins and Ferris Bueller, of Ernie Banks and Ernie Broglio, of Steve Bartman and Leon Durham, of pet goats and black cats—were a source of juvenile amusement no more.

  Shortly after Maddon was hired, and upon attending that midwinter Hajj known as Cubs Convention, the manager met an 80-year-old lifelong Cubs fan named Rhena Knourek. In the gift bag she received as part of her entry to the convention was a ticket for a free autograph from Maddon.

  “Do you know what this is?” she said, holding it aloft. “It’s a godwink.”

  A godwink? Knourek went on to explain that a godwink is one of those little events in life that seem random but happen for a reason. The Cubs, the supposedly cursed Cubs, suddenly were surrounded by godwinks. The home run by Baez in the basket…The five relief pitchers who failed Bochy and allowed them to avoid Cueto…The bunt by Zobrist…Rizzo switching to Szczur’s bat…

  There were more godwinks in the clincher. A pop fly by the penultimate batter, Carlos Ruiz, landed near the spot where Bartman had tried to catch a similar foul ball 13 years earlier; this one landed harmlessly. The game began at 7:08 local time—that’s 19:08 on 24-hour time. It took two hours, 36 minutes—the exact time of the game the last time the Cubs clinched the pennant, back on September 29, 1945 in Pittsburgh. It was played on the exact date, 46 years later, of the death of Billy Sianis, the tavern owner and original conjurer of the Curse of the Billy Goat.

  With one on and one out in the ninth, with the team on the precipice of the pennant, scouting director Jason McLeod, who worked with Epstein and Hoyer dating back to their Boston days, took a moment to reflect on the team on the field. He saw Anthony Rizzo, Albert Almora Jr., Kris Bryant, Willson Contreras, and Javier Baez, all of them either drafted or developed by the trio.

  “All from either in Boston or Chicago,” McLeod said. “And the next thing I thought about was, Wow. They’re all so young.”

  Chapman threw the next pitch, and that, too, was a godwink: a double play, Russell to Baez to Rizzo, which served as the perfect homage to Tinkers to Evers to Chance of the world champion 1908 Cubs. On the grounds where once stood a Lutheran seminary before there was Wrigley Field, it was time again to sing hallelujah.

  Rizzo stuffed the baseball in the back pocket of his uniform pants. After the game that night, most of the Cubs repaired to Lester’s house for a victory party. Rizzo took the ball with him as he drove away from Wrigley, and left it in his curbside parked car as he celebrated at Lester’s house.

  “I was nervous the whole time,” he said. “I thought maybe the car was going to get towed or somebody was going to break into it.”

  When Rizzo left the party to drive home, he was relieved to find the historic baseball still in the vehicle. With the team flying to Cleveland the next day for the World Series, Rizzo decided to store the baseball in a secure, private place while he was gone.

  “I put it in my sock drawer,” he said. “That’s where I keep it.”

  Even later that night, after the party at Lester’s ended, two men slipped into Wrigley Field and onto the diamond. It was five o’clock in the morning, about two hours before sunrise. The pandemonium of the first pennant for the Cubs in 71 years had given way to the stillness of the otherwise empty old ballpark. The two men played catch and took batting practice. In those small hours of an historic night, carefree, Eddie Vedder and Theo Epstein looked not like the rock stars we expect but like children at play.

  The Cubs came prepared to Cleveland. They brought with them from Chicago their proprietary organic juices and their nutritionist. Next to a row of bat bags, they filled an entire refrigerated case in a clubhouse hallway with healthful concoctions with handwritten labels such as “Wrigley Firekiller,” “Wrigley Peppermint,” “Plant Fix,” “Immunity,” and “Spiritual Matcha.” The search for any edge was a boundless pursuit that included shots of turmeric, organic yogurt, grapes, apples, pears, coconut water, and bottled water.

  The Cubs had arrived in Cleveland late the previous night, Halloween, making Joe Maddon most likely the first manager in World Series history to delay travel so that his players could enjoy trick-or-treating at home with their kids. Jon Lester and David Ross, naturally, trick-or-treated together with their children. Maddon was thrilled to be back in Cleveland for Game 6. For one, it meant that his team remained alive, having staved off elimination behind Lester in Game 5 in Chicago. For another, it meant a return to American League rules, and the return of Kyle Schwarber in the starting lineup as the designated hitter. This time Maddon moved him from fifth, where he hit in Games 1 and 2, to second. With Kris Bryant behind him, rather than Addison Russell, Schwarber was more likely to see pitches to hit. Maddon knew that the threat of Bryant’s home run power behind Schwarber would prompt Cleveland pitchers to be more aggressive against Schwarber—rather than risk a two-run homer by passively walking Schwarber.

  “I think, based on what Schwarber did in that last series, the Indians say, ‘This is no joke, he’s okay.’ ” Maddon said. “So once they found that out, if I hit him in the five hole they go straight to Addison every time. That was the whole thing: Where do you protect a guy?”

  Maddon gave great credence to lineup protection, or how the order of hitters influenced the manner in which they were pitched. He clustered his best hitters together, so that if you thought about “pitching around” one good hitter, the next one could make you pay a price. Maddon prioritized protecting Schwarber, Bryant, and Rizzo, who had the switch-hitting Zobrist behind him. Zobrist was especially valuable in protecting Rizzo because his ability to make contact made him dangerous with runners on, and his skills from either side of the plate gave opposing managers no obvious choice when it came to matching up relief pitchers against him.

  “And Zo is the consummate protector,” Maddon said. “So it kind of ends there. After that, everybody is on their own life raft. Russell might catch something, Willy might catch something, Heyward, they all might catch something. But that top part, they’re all protected by something. That’s how I see it.”

  The guys on their own life raft, without protection, were Russell, Contreras, Heyward, and Baez, the six-seven-eight-nine hitters. Combined, they were batting .169 in the World Series.

  “You look at the last four guys in our lineup, that’s all defense there,” Maddon said. “Hope we get some knocks there. The last two guys—Heyward and Baez—I can’t take them off the field right now. I look out there and we’re better with them out there.”

  Baez, Maddon’s wild-swinging second baseman, had fallen into a canyon of an offensive funk. Baez had managed one hit, a bunt single, in his previous 16 at-bats, half of which ended with him flailing at third strikes that usually were nowhere near the strike zone. The co–Most Valuable Player of the National League Championship Series was as good as done when the count reached two strikes. Maddon called him into his office for yet another chat.

  “You need to create more time for yourself,” Maddon told him. “You’re subtracting time from everything you do. Your time management at the plate is poor right now. You need to play with the big part of the field. You need to think left-center [and] over. Think singles. Let the ball get deep. Jam yourself. If you crack your bat, I don’t care.

  “But to move the baseball it has to be the other way, to create more time. Now listen to me…Right now everything is like this, like a gate…”

  With his arm Maddon made the swinging motion of a gate. Baez was casti
ng the barrel of the bat away from him—creating a long path to the ball—which meant the only way he could hit a baseball is if he caught it well out in front of the plate. It was rudimentary stuff, but an indication of how lost Baez had become at the plate.

  “I went through it very slowly,” said Maddon, who said hitting coach John Mallee would follow up with Baez on the conversation. “He left smiling. Mallee has talked about all the things we’re talking about. Johnny is handling that. I wanted it to be more visualization. The first at-bat, if he whistles a rocket to rightfield, heads-up. He’s going to have a good night.

  “John has all of that data: only 25 percent of pitches are in the zone with two strikes on him, 30 percent overall. We’ve got it all, and he knows. He’s just a young kid in swing mode right now. I just wanted to give him a different game plan. Let it get deep. Jam yourself. Give yourself more time. I explained it to him as a time-management problem.

  “I didn’t want to put this on him right now, but there’s this other thing I used to do. Guys like that, your first at-bat you’ve got to take a strike, second at-bat take a pitch, third at-bat you can swing at first pitch, and all bets are off if there’s a runner in scoring position, even in your first at-bat. I don’t want to hamstring you with runners in scoring position. But otherwise, take a strike, take a pitch, you’re on your own your third at-bat. And when you take that pitch, just don’t take it. Go through your whole process. Get loaded, get on time, put your foot down, and see the ball.

  “Now if this was April, May, that’s exactly what I would have told him to do. But right now I just tried to present it to him that way.”

  Baez and the Cubs figured to see more of the steady diet of Cleveland breaking balls, especially with curveball specialist Josh Tomlin starting on short rest. The Indians had thrown Chicago 30 percent breaking balls in the first five games. The Cubs had little success against spin. They were hitting .190 against the Indians’ sliders and .163 against their curves—overall, .172 against breaking balls with only one home run.