The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  By contrast, though the Cubs had hardly dented Kluber in the series, the Chicago side of the card included five starters with pink or red Matrix boxes. Leading the way were Rizzo, with a red .308 Matrix, and Schwarber, with a red .307. Heyward followed with a pink .287, then Bryant, with a pink .279, and Zobrist, with a pink .278.

  Maddon made an addendum to his Matrix system in 2016: on the back of his card he kept another set of Matrix numbers for hitters when they face the starting pitcher for the third time in a game, a reflection of how modern ball games often pivot on the decision point of when a manager goes to his specialized bullpen.

  “Normally my Matrix increases by six one-hundredths,” he said, “So, like it goes from .262 to .268, .270 to .276 the third time through. I incorporated that this year. I heard people talking about that so much I asked [the Cubs’ analysts] if they could incorporate that into my card. The beauty of this system is if I have a thought, the information will be there for the next series, the next day, or when I want it.”

  Also on the card were strikeout and groundball percentages for hitters and pitchers. Like the Matrix numbers, these also were color-coded—the same light blue to red system for the strikeout percentages, but light green and green for the gradients of groundball percentages.

  “Strikeout percentage is so good, groundball percentage is so good, whether to start a runner or not on a full count,” Maddon said. “If the guy is high strikeout and fly ball, screw it. If you’ve got low-punch, heavy-groundball hitter, the guy’s going. We’ll take our shot. That’s where those numbers are impactful.

  “Even with the bullpen. You need a strikeout? I don’t want the ball hit at all. You pretty much know, but this validates percentage point–wise the potential percentage you’re going to strike out against this guy versus this other pitcher.”

  On a separate sheet of paper he folded inside his lineup card, Maddon kept information about the other manager’s bullpen usage. He had tallies of appearances, pitches, and innings for each pitcher over the previous five days. That information provided him with clues about whom the other manager trusts or what pitchers may be unavailable because of recent workload.

  “It’s just stuff to know,” he said. “When you’re making decisions, it’s nice to know. It makes you more confident making decisions, probably. Anything you want you can put on that card.”

  The card included a trove of personal marginalia handwritten by Maddon in purple ink. Toward the bottom of his card, down by the name of his starting pitcher, Hendricks, and running vertically up the left-hand side, he wrote “positive/optimistic.” It was a personal reminder that Maddon added to his cards throughout the 2016 season.

  “My mantra to myself was to stay positive and optimistic and to stay in the moment,” he said. “That was my mantra to myself all year.”

  In the upper left-hand corner of the card, just to the left of the Cubs logo, Maddon wrote the letter “H.” He has put an “H” on his card going all the way back to his first managing gig, with the 2006 Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The “H” is a remembrance of his father, Joseph Maddon. Why “H”?

  “Howard,” Maddon said. “That was his nickname. We called him that because every game we would watch on television Howard Cosell would say something, and two minutes later my dad would say the same thing Cosell said. Me and my brother said, ‘Hey, Howard…’ And it stuck. Everybody called him Howard.”

  Running across the top center of the card was a long line of other letters, each of which represented the memory of a friend or family member Maddon has lost. Maddon recited the names in perfect order without looking at the card.

  “I think about these people every day,” Maddon said. “I look at the lineup card and I’m able to see Gig, Johnny, Didi, Freda, Peter, Peter, Michael, Michael, Frank, Murtz, Anthony, Mr. Arci, Joe, Milt, Booty, Irene, Irene…That’s on the top of my card. I’m able to write that every day.”

  Running down the spine of the card, along the fold in a thin alley between the Cubs’ side and the Indians’ side, was another note he wrote to himself: “B Present. Not Perfect. Z. Irreverent.” The first two key words recalled one of the six key principles he spelled out to his team on the first day of spring training: Know we are not perfect, but can be present. The “Z” stood for Don Zimmer, the late coach who influenced Maddon in Tampa Bay, and the “Irreverent” was an homage to the way Zimmer taught him how to run a game.

  Maddon never ran a game by conventional means, never believed in reverence to the conformities of by-the-book baseball. Lord knows, as well as a nervous Cubs fan base who tried to think along with him, that Maddon would stay irreverent that night through the seventh game of the World Series.

  In the upper right-hand corner of the card Maddon wrote, “DNBAFF,” an acronym he wrote on all his lineup cards. It stood for “Do Not Be a Fucking Fan,” a reminder that his job in the dugout was to take the emotions out of decisions and to stick to the word he wrote just below it: “Process!” In spring training of 2015, Maddon became good friends with Tom Moore, the 78-year-old assistant coach with the Arizona Cardinals. Moore grew up in Iowa, a Cubs fan. Later that 2015 season, Moore brought his son with him to Wrigley Field and, as guests of Maddon, stood by the batting cage for batting practice.

  “He was like crying,” Maddon said, “because he had the chance to take his kid to Wrigley Field. That was impressive. He’s just a real man.”

  Moore told Maddon something at their lunch that stuck with him: “In football, you break the other team’s will through the relentless execution of fundamentals.”

  Said Maddon, “I love that. I friggin’ love that. ‘The relentless execution of fundamentals.’ ”

  Maddon believed the same principle applied to baseball. That’s why he wrote “Process!” on the card. Stick to the process.

  The splash of colors, numbers, symbols, and notes made for a Jackson Pollock of a lineup card: a kind of organized chaos that held in suspension both beauty and meaning.

  Given the Cubs’ history, Maddon could use all the help he could get in his pocket. Their 108-year wait for another title was the longest championship drought in sports. The last time they did win the World Series, in 1908, occurred in the lifetimes of Mark Twain, Florence Nightingale, Geronimo, Winslow Homer, and Joshua Chamberlain, and in a world when the Ottoman Empire still existed but the 19th Amendment, talking motion pictures, electric traffic lights, and world wars did not. The heritage of the Cubs had grown mythical, only in a Sisyphean kind of way.

  This would be the third Game 7 in the history of the franchise. Each of the first two was played at Wrigley Field. Each one saw the Cubs yield nine runs. Each one ended in a painful defeat that ensured those series would stand as preeminent monuments to Cubs infamy, the kind of torment that convinced otherwise perfectly reasonable fans their team was cursed.

  In 1945, the Cubs lost Game 7 of the World Series to the Detroit Tigers, 9–3, after falling behind by five runs before they even took a turn at bat. The loss gave perpetual life to an otherwise trivial, bizarre event in the fourth game of that series, when the club prevented local tavern owner Billy Sianis from bringing his pet goat, Murphy, to sit with him at Wrigley Field. An outraged Sianis declared the Cubs would never win again, a decree that came to be known as the Curse of the Billy Goat.

  In 2003, the Cubs lost Game 7 of the National League Championship Series to the Florida Marlins, 9–6, after they took a 5–3 lead into the fifth inning. The loss perpetuated the ignominy of the sixth game of that series, when Cubs fan Steve Bartman deflected a foul fly ball that Chicago leftfielder Moises Alou thought he was primed to catch. The Cubs would have been four outs away from the World Series with a 3–0 lead if Alou had caught the ball. Instead, the incident triggered a cascade of events that produced eight runs among the next eight batters, condemning the Cubs to an epic 8–3 defeat.

  Those were the sorts of legends and poltergeists that made this Game 7 the biggest, most anticipated game in baseball history. No game eve
r had more history riding on it. The Cubs and the Indians had waited 176 combined seasons to win another World Series, with the Cleveland drought dating to 1948. It was, by far, the most drought-stricken World Series there ever was, displacing the mere 90 years of combined waiting the Cincinnati Reds and Boston Red Sox brought to the 1975 World Series.

  Since each team’s last World Series title, the Cubs and Indians combined had played four games with a chance to win their next one—only to lose all four of them. The Cubs provided one of those failed World Series clinchers (Game 7 in 1945) while the Indians stumbled three times (Game 7 in 1997 and Games 5 and 6 in 2016). This time somebody had to win. And somebody had to remain cursed.

  As Maddon sat at his desk, there was no way for anyone to truly imagine just how different the world would be the next morning with a Cubs victory. Cemeteries around Chicagoland would fill with people carrying to the graves of their loved ones white flags with a blue “W”—the symbol of a Cubs’ win—mementos, newspapers, balloons, and assorted other pieces of evidence that the Cubs really did win the World Series.

  At All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, 18 miles northwest of Wrigley, people would festoon the resting place of famed Cubs announcer Harry Caray with baseballs, beer bottles, and 15 bushels’ worth of green apples, for it was Caray, in one of his 16 unfulfilled seasons broadcasting Cubs games, who said, “Sure as God made green apples, someday the Chicago Cubs are going to be in the World Series.” Also interred at All Saints is Hall of Fame catcher Gabby Harnett, whose 19 seasons for the Cubs tie him with Ernie Banks for the second-longest tenure in franchise history without a World Series title. Only Phil Cavaretta, who spent 20 seasons with the Cubs, invested more time since 1908.

  Flowers, rally towels, and notes also would cover the final resting place of Banks at Graceland Cemetery, just a half mile from Wrigley. And five miles from there, at Bohemian National Cemetery, people would flock to the columbarium built in 2009 to resemble the outfield wall at Wrigley. It is an ivy-colored redbrick wall with the same yellow “400” marker as in centerfield and a stained-glass image of the ballpark’s iconic scoreboard. “Cubs Fans Forever, Beyond the Vines,” it says, and from one of four ballpark seats facing the wall you can keep company with the ashes of those placed inside the wall’s 288 niches.

  At Wrigley Field, fans would turn the ballpark itself into a memorial. On the brick walls that face Waveland and Sheffield avenues, using chalk in many colors, they would draw their hallelujahs, including tributes and notes to loved ones, whether among the living or deceased, sometimes using ladders to find whatever empty space they could.

  The returns from the television ratings would be staggering, the likes of which had never before been seen for a baseball game since satellite, streaming, and multiplatform services vastly expanded viewing options. Game 7 would draw an average audience of 40.035 million viewers, including 49.9 million at its peak, making it the most viewed baseball game in a quarter of a century, since Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. In the last 15 minutes leading to the last out, about 82 percent of the homes in the Chicago market with a television on would be watching the Cubs. More than 10.5 million tweets would be sent out about Game 7, the most ever for any baseball game.

  Nowhere, though, would the scope of the catharsis be better understood than at the championship parade, held the day after the morning after. An estimated five million people, almost all of them in Cubs blue, would turn out for the team’s victory parade. It would look as if a seven-mile river of fountain pen ink spilled across America’s third-largest city. The crowd would be estimated to be the largest gathering of humanity ever in the Western hemisphere, and the largest in humankind’s history for any nonreligious event, though to see the rewarded faith on the faces of the supplicants was to believe something very much ecclesiastical was going on here.

  No championship ever bound more people than this one. No title was more defined by people pulling together than this one, right down to an impromptu team meeting during a rain delay that ignited the series-winning rally in Game 7. Theo Epstein, once known as the number-crunching wizard who broke the championship curse of the Boston Red Sox, built this team with an emphasis on people who would create the right ethos. The story of the Cubs’ championship would not just be about 2016. It would be timeless. It would also be about the power of human connection—teammates to teammates, teammates to fans, generation to generation. The mass of humanity that would assemble at the parade to celebrate their Cubs gave awe-inspiring testimony to that power.

  “We can win again next year, but it’ll never be that again,” Maddon would say. “It can’t. Firsts are hard to beat.”

  In January 2015, soon after taking the Cubs job, Maddon made his first appearance at an annual pilgrimage called the Cubs Convention, a publicity event for fans.

  “Joe, please take care of the goat,” a fan beseeched Maddon.

  Maddon didn’t miss a beat: “Right between the eyes!”

  Maddon laughed at the curse as much as his rejoinder. He was the new guy in town who gave no credence to generational talk about superstitions and unexplained oddities. One of his first orders of business was to scoff at this folklore. After all, as his lineup suggested, “DNBAFF.” But sitting in his office before Game 7 of the World Series, Maddon literally surrounded himself with totems that suggested his own belief in the mystical.

  The dark chocolate? He carried it with him everywhere he went because he believed it to be good for brain stimulation.

  The pictures of Weaver, Tanner, and Howser? Maddon began the postseason with the eight-by-ten of Weaver out of supplication to the God of the Three-Run Homer, given Weaver’s love of the long ball and his hatred for making outs on the bases. Maddon wanted to channel the Hall of Fame manager. He carried the photo with him from Chicago to San Francisco to Chicago to Los Angeles to Chicago to Cleveland and back to Chicago.

  Then, before Game 5 of the World Series, with the Cubs trailing the Indians three games to one, Hyde, the first base coach, walked into Maddon’s office and on his desk dropped pictures of Howser and Tanner. Howser’s 1985 Royals were the most recent of only five teams to come back from a three-games-to-one deficit to win the World Series. Tanner’s 1979 Pirates preceded the 1985 Royals, and remained the last team to finish off such a comeback on the road. After the Cubs won Game 5, Earl, Dick, and Chuck all accompanied Joe to Cleveland.

  Finally, inside a backpack resting on the floor, was an old, faded, blue Anaheim Angels hat. The hat was nearly flat and showed dirt and grime from years of use. The hat belonged to his father. Joseph Anthony Maddon was a first-generation American of Italian ancestry who ran the family plumbing business in Hazleton that his father, Carmen, began in the 1930s. Beginning in 1975, Joe, his firstborn son who wanted no part of pipes and faucets, spent 31 years with the Angels as a minor league player, instructor, and manager, and as a major league coach. As a minor league player, Maddon once was asked to fill out a standard questionnaire in which one question required prospects to list their heroes. Most prospects just named the major league player they had idolized growing up.

  Maddon wrote: “My father, Joe. He’s a plumber. He takes pride in it, so he’s the best there is.”

  Maddon first reached the major leagues with the Angels as a coach in 1994. His dad grew partial to a periwinkle blue Angels hat in a style the club began wearing in 1997. The proud father would wear that hat all the time until the day he died, April 15, 2002. Later that same year, the Angels reached Game 7 of the World Series against the San Francisco Giants. Between innings, Joe—then the bench coach for Angels manager Mike Scioscia—would run from the dugout to his locker in the clubhouse to rub his father’s hat for good luck.

  In the ninth inning, with the Angels holding a 4–1 lead, Maddon brought the hat back with him to the dugout. He placed it on a shelf in front of him—facing the field so that his father could “see” his son’s team win the World Series.

  “I put the hat on that shelf so it was fac
ing out,” Maddon said, “and covered it with my papers because I didn’t want to make it too obvious.”

  It was the only time Maddon was in uniform for Game 7 of a World Series—until this night, November 2, 2016. If the night turned out the way Maddon wanted—if his young hitters could resist chasing Kluber’s assortment of devilish pitches, if he could build a bridge of pitchers between Hendricks and Chapman, and if the goat and Bartman really were nothing but meaningless fluke events—then his father’s hat would be with him again to see the last out.

  “I’m really not superstitious,” Maddon said. “I’m—how can I say it?—I’m into thoughts. It’s like you channel your thoughts in the right direction, and if you think it has a chance of happening, it has a better chance of happening. If you don’t, it has less of a chance of happening.”

  It was approaching 8 p.m. First pitch, as was printed right there atop Maddon’s lineup card, was scheduled for 8:08 p.m. It was time for Game 7. Maddon took his lineup card and rubbed it three times on the picture of Weaver on his desk, then he rubbed it three times on the picture of Howser, and then he rubbed it three times on the picture of Tanner. Only then was he ready to go. He folded the lineup card in half, stuffed it in the back pocket of his uniform pants, and headed to the dugout.

  He left his father’s hat in his office. He would be back for it later.

  The secret meeting took place in New York, the better to keep reporters off the scent.

  It happened in the apartment of Cubs owner Tom Ricketts the first weekend of October in 2011. The windows offered a spectacular view of Central Park. A playoff game between the Phillies and the Cardinals played on the television, though it was little more than background noise to the conversation between Ricketts and the man he wanted to rebuild his franchise, Theo Epstein.