The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  For whatever reason, perhaps even the secret greeting if you wanted to believe the power of such rituals, Fowler in the 2016 regular season was one of the best hitters leading off games in recorded history. In first plate appearances of a game for Chicago, whether at home or on the road, Fowler batted .390, the fourth-best batting average in such spots going back at least 50 years. He also reached base 48.3 percent of the time, also the fourth-best leadoff rate, and posted an on-base-plus-slugging mark of 1.203, bettered only by Brady Anderson in 1996 and Hanley Ramírez in 2007. The man was instant offense.

  “Without Dexter it never happens,” Maddon said about the Cubs’ title.

  More than fraternal good-luck hand gestures, good old-fashioned preparation combined with cutting-edge technology explained Fowler’s fast starts. Few Cubs players consistently invested more pregame work with the NeuroScouting training software than Fowler. Some players dabbled once in a while with it on laptops and others occasionally tried out the Cubs’ latest toy, an 80-inch monitor near the indoor batting cage at Wrigley Field, which allowed a hitter to stand with a bat in his hand and track the speed and spin of the pitches of the opposing pitcher that night. But Fowler often preferred using the NeuroScouting technology on his tablet before games. Before facing Indians starter Corey Kluber, for instance, Fowler could watch the spin, speed, and path of actual two-seam fastballs thrown by Kluber that were captured by PITCHf/x. Over and over, as if cramming years of at-bats into one study session, he “learned” how to hit exact copies of the pitch by timing the tap on the space bar.

  “You see the exact pitch just as it would come at you,” coach Mike Borzello said. “With a two-seamer, you’ll know exactly how fast it goes, what the spin looks like, how much it runs. Does it have some tilt? Is it flat? After a while a hitter can make the slightest adjustment to his swing path based on all that knowledge. Dexter really, really liked to use that stuff. He was on it all the time.”

  With his big smile and perpetual upbeat nature, Fowler was yet another high-character player acquired by Epstein. Fowler’s father, John, a business owner, and his mother, Trudy, an elementary school teacher, stressed the importance of education when Dexter was growing up in Georgia. Recruited by Dartmouth and Harvard before committing to Miami, Fowler instead signed out of high school when the Colorado Rockies offered him $925,000 as a 14th-round pick in 2003. The Rockies traded Fowler to Houston before the 2014 season, after which Epstein traded pitcher Dan Straily and infielder Luis Valbuena to bring Fowler to Chicago. Fowler’s “return” to the Cubs in 2016—announced via Epstein’s “Godfather” stunt in the middle of practice—made the team whole and happy.

  Fowler spread his good cheer off the field as well. One day before a game in late August, and remembering how his mom would put his back-to-school supplies and clothes on layaway, Fowler walked into a Kmart store on the North Side of Chicago and announced he was picking up the store’s entire layaway bill. The tab for 43 families amounted to more than $5,000.

  Properly prepared for Game 7, including his ritual with Maddon, Fowler brought his good vibes to the plate to lead off the most anticipated game in baseball history. At 8:02 p.m. on November 2, 2016, Kluber wound and delivered a perfect two-seamer that ran down and away from an observant Fowler. It nipped the bottom and outside edge of the strike zone. Home plate umpire Sam Holbrook called it a strike. It was because Kluber could replicate so many of these exquisitely placed pitches, and with so much movement, and do so without the expression on his face changing even the slightest bit, that he earned the “Klubot” nickname.

  Klubot entered the game with the sixth-lowest postseason ERA of all time, 0.89, just behind Mariano Rivera, Harry Brecheen, Wade Davis, Jeremy Affeldt, and Babe Ruth. The whole lot of his postseason work, covering 301⁄3 innings, had come in 2016. This was his sixth start, tying a postseason record, including his third in nine days. His extraordinary workload was straight out of a bygone era, before specialized bullpens, pitch counts, and night World Series games. Klubot was trying to become the first pitcher to win five starts in one postseason, and the first since Mickey Lolich of the Detroit Tigers in 1968 to win three starts in a single World Series.

  Maddon and the Cubs were on the lookout early for a sign that the machinery of Klubot wasn’t humming with quite the same efficiency—a crossed wire, a half a quart low on oil, a blinking warning light, or, better yet, a misplaced pitch. It didn’t take long. With the count 2-and-1 to Fowler, after Kluber missed with two fastballs, there it was: a two-seamer, over the fat of the plate, with none of the usual arm-side run on the famed Klubot sinker. Fowler, or “Hugo” as he sometimes was known (the shortened form of “you go, we go”), crushed it over the wall in centerfield. It was the first leadoff home run in World Series Game 7 history. It was as if he had seen the pitch many times before.

  The lack of action on that pitch was the blinking light the Cubs wanted to see. It told them that on this night Klubot was simply Kluber—pushed to the fatigue point Arrieta reached the previous year.

  “What I thought from the home run was he’s not as good as the last time we saw him,” Maddon said. “I thought that was validated right there. The fact that Dexter could do that as the first hitter of the game told me that Kluber was not the same, that his stuff could not be as sharp as the last time. So that’s kind of an uplifting thought, but I’m not convinced of everything. The leadoff home run sometimes can be your only run of the game. I’ve seen that way too many times.

  “But under those circumstances, yes, number one, scoring first and, number two, if he’s going to do that to Kluber in his first at-bat, then Kluber’s stuff might not be as good. That had to be the residue at that time of year. That’s a lot of work. But listen, he’s so good. But once he hit that home run I thought we’re in a little better shape.”

  —

  Kyle Hendricks took the ball for the Cubs, with the chance to complete a personal championship hat trick. He had thrown 71⁄3 shutout innings to win the 2009 Ivy League championship and 71⁄3 shutout innings to win the 2016 National League championship. Before the game, Hendricks huddled with Borzello, pitching coach Chris Bosio, and catcher Willson Contreras to take advantage of Chicago’s formidable run-prevention infrastructure.

  Unlike Arrieta, the Cubs’ Game 6 starter, Hendricks liked to use a malleable selection of pitches. The right-hander relies primarily on a darting sinker at the edges and bottom of the strike zone and, most unusually, two versions of a changeup: the traditional right-handed changeup that fades to his arm side, and a unique “cut” changeup that slides in the opposite direction, to his glove side. He complements his base pitches with two selections that rely on the element of surprise: an elevated, 90-mile-an-hour, four-seam fastball and a modest curveball, thrown rarely enough to almost always get a called strike.

  In a sport in love with power, Hendricks owned little of it. The hardest pitch he threw all year was 91.5 miles per hour. The genius of Hendricks, however, came from two distinctive traits—one physical and one mental.

  The physical anomaly is a slight bend in his wrist when he brings the ball up to the loaded position in his delivery. The wrist turns back slightly toward his head and remains “tucked” as he begins to bring the ball down and back. The unhinging of this loose, tucked wrist helps give life and movement to his pitches. On the mound, because of this wrist action, he looks like a man throwing a paper airplane, and often can make the baseball dip and dive just like one.

  The mental edge Hendricks owns is his love and understanding of the cat-and-mouse game with hitters. He stays out of patterns with his four pitches, a particularly valuable trait with the Indians seeing him for a second time in five days. Borzello enjoyed working with Hendricks. It reminded him of his days with the Yankees when he would spend hours working with Stanford grad Mike Mussina. They didn’t have nearly as much information then, but they would scour video for hours and talk about the best way to attack hitters. Hendricks, like Mussina, thirsted for informatio
n about how to keep hitters off balance.

  “The more hitters get a look at pitchers, the tougher it is for the pitcher,” Borzello said. “A lot of the stuff we put in the plan for Game 7 had to be put together in the right way based on what we did the last time. All the stuff is the same, as far as the information and his pitches, but now it had to be scrambled. You’re kind of moving pieces around as far as when you throw pitches.

  “So going into Game 7, me and Willson and Kyle met like we always do, going over everything with each other. We talked to each other, go over video…the key is you don’t want guys sitting on pitches. You don’t want to be too predictable. It’s tricky.

  “I felt pretty good about it because I felt really comfortable in Kyle. The thing about Kyle is he’s not going to go off the page. We’re going to win with the plan or go down with the plan. Kyle was not going to beat himself. I felt good about that.”

  In Contreras, the Cubs also were putting the game plan into the hands of a former minor league third baseman who, out of boredom, converted himself to a catcher, and until June 17, 2016, had never caught a major league game. His inexperience was obvious when he first joined the Cubs. Contreras played the game in a hurry, putting down signs almost as soon as he threw the ball back to the pitcher from the previous pitch.

  “When you watch a guy go too fast, he’s not thinking his way through the game,” Borzello said. “He’s just trying to get by. That was the hardest part in the beginning.

  “Luckily for me, I’m on the bench. I’m talking to him every half inning. That’s my job. That’s all I’m doing. I’m going over the next three hitters with the catcher throughout the entire game. ‘Okay, we’ve got this guy, and start him with this…this is what you want to do here’…just going back and forth, going by the reports but also how we’re going to sequence it. ‘If it’s 0-1 do this, if 1-0 do this’…It’s all count-specific. He got a really good understanding of my language and personality. It’s a lot to handle, but I tell him every day, ‘I don’t care if you go 0-for-4 and strike out four times. It doesn’t matter to me. I care about the catching.’ ”

  Before the season started, Borzello had met with Contreras in Arizona to get to know him. He told him, “One thing I can never have you do is take your at-bats to the field with you. Does that happen with you sometimes?”

  “Yes, it does,” Contreras replied.

  “From now on it can never happen. And I’m going to stay on you about it.”

  Contreras’s youthfulness and great skill were evident on almost a daily basis in the NLCS. In Game 4, Contreras struck out in the top of the ninth with the Cubs holding an eight-run lead. Borzello noticed that Contreras seemed distracted and distant behind the plate in the bottom of the ninth. The next day Borzello grabbed him and said, “Remember what I told you in Arizona? I felt that happened yesterday. I can’t have that happen.”

  In Game 5, an 8–4 Cubs win, Contreras left the field after the last out arguing with home plate umpire Alfonso Marquez. It was the continuation of his chirping about calls that had been going on for two innings.

  “Contreras was up his ass in Game 5,” Maddon said.

  Marquez later told Maddon, “If it was the regular season, I would have kicked him out,” to which Maddon replied, “Thank you for not doing that.”

  In Game 6, the clincher, Contreras hit a home run off Clayton Kershaw to put the Cubs ahead, 4–0. Contreras ran up and down the dugout, high-fiving everybody in sight, then quickly remembered his priority. He calmed himself and sat down next to Borzello.

  “Okay, let’s go over the next three,” he said.

  Said Borzello, “That was pretty cool. You could see him growing up as we’re playing. He’s so passionate about the whole game—his part of the game and the team’s success. He’s really into it. You have to let him play with that passion, but also, mentally, you have to keep him in the right frame of mind. He gets frustrated and overall he’s very emotional. But it’s like I told him, ‘Do not change who you are, because that’s why you are the player that you are.’ ”

  Borzello knew he would have to prepare three catchers for the game, a highly unusual World Series possibility. Maddon had told David Ross to be ready to enter the game when Jon Lester came out of the bullpen; he trusted nobody else to work with Lester. And Borzello made it a point to tell Montero to keep himself mentally sharp—that he should expect to play if, for instance, Maddon pinch-hit or pinch-ran for Ross.

  “Most teams don’t even carry a third catcher,” Borzello said. “If they do, usually the third catcher doesn’t even think he’s going to play. You’re there just in case of some extreme emergency. But the way we were going to use these line changes, with Rossy coming in with Jon, I knew there was a good chance Montero would get in the game.”

  “Don’t check out on me,” Borzello told Montero. “I’m telling you, you’re going in this game at some point.”

  “I’ll be ready,” said Montero, a proud veteran who was unhappy about his diminished role as Contreras earned more time.

  The idea of using three catchers was almost absurd, based on how rarely it had happened in the history of the World Series. Only twice did a team use three catchers in a game, both times in losses: the Phillies did it in Game 2 of the 1950 World Series, and the Dodgers did so in Game 3 of the 1978 World Series.

  Before this World Series began, the Cubs’ front office held a meeting with the coaching staff to formulate the 25-man roster. There was some talk in the room about adding an extra pitcher—the name of right-hander Trevor Cahill was discussed—and some talk about adding a bench player with speed. Any alteration would likely have cost Montero his roster spot. The consensus was to keep the three catchers: a rookie, a veteran in midcareer, and a veteran playing his final season.

  “It doesn’t seem like that big of a decision as you’re sitting there,” Borzello said. “Turns out to be one of the biggest decisions of the series. The decision to carry three catchers was as important as any decision we made.”

  The catching conga line would start with the rookie, Contreras. That alone, at least on paper, was a huge risk. It would be just his 50th major league start behind the plate. This game marked only the third time a team trusted a catcher to start one of the 38 decisive Game 7s of the World Series in the same year he made his major league debut. The other teams to be so bold were the 1946 Cardinals, with 20-year-old Joe Garagiola, and the 1912 Red Sox, with 26-year-old Hick Cady.

  “The hardest part over the last few months was getting Willson to a point where we felt not only me, Joe, and the coaching staff, but also the pitching staff was comfortable having a rookie catcher behind the plate in such meaningful games,” Borzello said. “Leading up to the postseason, it was really getting Willson to understand the scouting reports, understanding the words on the page and what picture it paints, and having the recall in real time. He did an amazing job and was really diligent.

  “By Game 7 we really trusted Willson with the information. That being said, you have a guy on the mound who doesn’t forget one thing. Kyle Hendricks is so prepared, it was going to be exactly the same as it’s been all year. The information doesn’t grow because of the size of the game. With Kyle, believe it or not, it’s in depth whether it’s the middle of the season or Game 7.”

  —

  Contreras warmed up Hendricks in the bullpen. Bosio and Borzello watched. Hendricks gives nothing away in terms of body language or emotion. Maddon, in fact, had to learn that when Hendricks drops his chin, as he often does, it is not a sign of a loss of confidence. It is simply the way Hendricks carries himself on the field—that is, as calmly as if he were exploring the stacks of the Feldberg Business and Engineering Library back at Dartmouth. But on this night, Hendricks’s pitches in the bullpen were not as crisp as usual. Borzello harbored a concern, which he kept to himself.

  “He was a little off,” Borzello said. “Generally, he’s the same all the time. His command is always there and his stuff is th
ere each start. For this start, he was a little erratic warming up, a little jumpy. I was concerned a little bit. You’re afraid of giving up a run early in a game like this. You’re facing Corey Kluber, so you know you can’t give up many and win this game. I thought the first inning or two he wasn’t right, then I thought he got comfortable. But one thing about Kyle: his demeanor never changed.”

  Hendricks, spotted the one run on Fowler’s home run, worked around an error by Baez in the first inning and two singles in the second inning. In the middle of the second inning, as planned, Lester and Arrieta walked from the dugout to the bullpen, accompanied by Ross. Maddon was bound to get Lester in the game, but Arrieta, who threw 102 pitches the night before, wasn’t even listed on his lineup card among his available relievers.

  More trouble percolated in the third against Hendricks when Coco Crisp led off with a double. Indians manager Terry Francona, however, played the situation more conservatively than he had all year. Francona had never asked one of his position players to bunt before the seventh inning with a runner on second while trailing. But here, in the third, he handed Chicago an out when Perez bunted Crisp to third base. Maddon brought the infield in, but it did not matter as Carlos Santana singled to rightfield, tying the game at one. Francona played for one run early in the game, and, as it turned out, that was all he would get.

  Baez extended the Cleveland rally with another error, this time when he dropped a toss from Addison Russell at second base while rushing to complete a double play.

  Now Maddon was getting uneasy about Hendricks. He sent Bosio to the mound to kill some time as Carl Edwards Jr. and Mike Montgomery scrambled to get ready in the bullpen. The Indians had runners at first and second, one out, and their best hitter, Francisco Lindor, at the plate. The bullpen was busy and the crowd was roaring at full throttle, especially when Hendricks missed with each of his first three pitches to Lindor. (In truth, Cubs fans accounted for a good chunk of the 38,104 people in the ballpark, as some Cleveland fans opted to stay home and cover college tuition bills with prices they could glean from reselling tickets. Game 7 was the most expensive baseball game in history. Tickets sold for an average price of about $4,000, with a seat behind the Cubs dugout costing $19,500.) Each missed pitch moved Maddon closer to getting Hendricks out of the game, though the situation, with two baserunners and the haste in which it occurred, was too “dirty” for Lester.