The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  “I thought the 2010–2011 off-season was me, for maybe the first time, taking the easy way out, giving in to the environment,” Epstein said. “That was trading for Adrian Gonzalez and extending him and especially signing Crawford. In hindsight, Adrian is still a great player, he’s in the last year of his contract [and] he’s right on track. That worked out well. It was not received well in Boston. He had a great performance in Boston, but the clubhouse dynamic probably didn’t work out great in Boston.

  “The Crawford one was especially lazy. We almost avoided it. We were really close to trading for Beltran, and he ended up having an enormous year that year, getting traded for [Zack] Wheeler. Then we just got some bad stuff on his knee. The Mets would have been good with one or two end-of-the-roster guys.

  “[Signing Crawford] was just unnecessary. We had just signed Adrian. I didn’t do a good job of handling the environment and I took the easy way out. It was my fault. It’s easy to sign guys to seven-year deals. It’s hard to find guys that are more creative value solutions or plan ahead a couple of years.

  “You don’t admit it at the time what you’re doing, but upon reflection that’s not me, that’s not what we built here. I didn’t do it because I was leaving, but I knew once I did it, it reflected poorly on the fit going forward, regardless of results. And this was a stressful year. So we did that.”

  Crawford, hitting third in the lineup on Opening Day in Texas, went 0-for-4 in his Boston debut. He went 0-for-3 the next day, whereupon manager Terry Francona dropped him to seventh for the third game of the year. The Red Sox lost all three games to the Rangers, then lost all three games in Cleveland. So stressed was Epstein that he did something before the home opener that he rarely did: he addressed the team to try to shake it from its doldrums. The team continued to sputter, falling to 2–10. But the Red Sox soon marshaled all their talent to become the best team in baseball over the next four months. From that 2–10 start until September, Boston went 81–43, playing at the scorching pace of a 107-win team.

  As the team played well, Epstein had a brief conversation with Henry and Werner about his future. The owners told Epstein they wanted him to stay for as long as he wanted. They told him he could write his own job description. Epstein told them about some “internal conflicts” he was experiencing, and that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to stay in Boston forever. He recommended that Cherington succeed him someday.

  “He’s terrific,” Epstein told the owners. “He’s a lot more mature than I am in a lot of ways. He’s definitely the next general manager here. Let’s take this year to groom him so it could conceivably be a seamless transition if that’s the way it goes.”

  It wasn’t quite walking out in a gorilla suit, but Epstein did more than just hint about a succession plan to foretell his leaving.

  “And they were onboard with it,” he said.

  Several factors began to push the kid from Brookline further away emotionally from the Red Sox. Epstein read a book by Hall of Fame football coach Bill Walsh that summer in which Walsh wrote that the voice of a coach or executive turns stale after about a decade with one organization.

  “He talked about it as a sports executive, but it applied to almost any situation in a leadership role,” Epstein said. “That it benefits not only the individual but also the institution to seek change every 10 years. And I’ve seen it, with managers or coaches in other sports, leaders.

  “The same message or the same voice tends to get tuned out a little bit just by human nature. So it’s impossible to have the same originality, same creativity, same freshness…it’s impossible to look at things with an open lens. You start to close your lens based on your successes and failures a little bit. And so it got me thinking right there in the middle of that 2011 season.”

  Moreover, by August, Epstein had signed what he regarded as an especially deep class of draft picks, including pitchers Matt Barnes and Henry Owens, catcher Blake Swihart, and outfielders Mookie Betts and Jackie Bradley Jr. He was restocking the Boston cupboard. It fit his exit strategy. Epstein had begun to talk to his wife about the possibility of just taking a year off away from baseball. That’s when the firing of Hendry was announced. Suddenly, the perfect landing spot opened.

  “Everybody started asking me about the Cubs job,” Epstein said, “and I said, ‘I’m just focused on the Red Sox.’ But it definitely got my attention because of all the factors—having it in the back of my mind for seven, eight years, the sort of internal struggle of identifying emotionally with the Red Sox, the Bill Walsh, ten-year thing….

  “This is before the collapse. We’re the best team in baseball, we look really good, it’s August of 2011, I’m thinking this would be really great if we can win a World Series and I can leave on top—a third World Series, they’re set up for the future. That summer we drafted Betts, Swihart, Henry Owens, and Bradley and we had signed Xander Bogaerts, he was starting to come. They’re set up for the future. This wave of prospects is going to be really good. Stable big league team, best team in baseball, if we can win the World Series it’s the perfect opportunity to end it, nine years as a GM, ten years as a Red Sox, and move on to the next thing. And the Cubs would be awesome.”

  On Monday, September 5, the Red Sox held an 8-game lead over Tampa Bay for the wild card spot with 23 games to play, though they had just dropped back-to-back home series to the Yankees and the Rangers. A confident Epstein invited his top baseball operations advisors to Toronto, where the Red Sox would play a 4-game series against the Blue Jays, for pro scouting meetings. But the meetings had another purpose: a possible last chance for Epstein to simply hang out with his guys, as if it were the bookend to the 2004 Cape Coral spring. “I never do this,” Epstein said about the off-site meetings jaunt. The more he thought about the Cubs’ job, the more intriguing it became.

  “So eight of us flew up there and we would have had a good time, but we played a horrific series,” Epstein said. “It turned out to be the start of the collapse.”

  The Red Sox lost the first game of the series in a heartbreaker, 1–0 in extra innings. Jon Lester pitched superbly the next night in a 14–0 Boston laugher. The Red Sox seemed to be righting themselves as they took an 8–6 lead into the eighth inning in the third game of the series, with their best reliever, Daniel Bard, on the mound. A tall right-hander who threw sinkers that approached a hundred miles an hour, Bard had fashioned a 2.01 ERA in 134 appearances over the previous two years. He was as reliable as a manager could want with the game on the line. But that night in Toronto, something suddenly and strangely seemed to afflict Bard. Without warning, his sinker began to cut uncontrollably on him.

  “All of a sudden it was, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ” Epstein said.

  Bard could not control his pitches. The eighth inning became a bonfire of mistakes: hit by pitch, groundball single, walk, two strikeouts to get to the edge of extinguishing the mess, but then two bases-loaded walks to tie the game, followed by a three-run double off Bard’s replacement, Matt Albers. The Red Sox lost, 11–10. They made the last out of the game when a pinch runner, Mike Aviles, was thrown out trying to steal second.

  Bard was never the same. Starting that night in Toronto, he went 0–4 with a 12.46 ERA down the stretch. He walked nine batters in 82⁄3 innings. Never again was he effective. Bard mysteriously lost his ability to throw strikes and never got it back. He bounced from the Red Sox to minor league teams in the Cubs, Rangers, and Pirates organizations before his lack of control pushed him out of baseball. In 2016, at the age of 31, he tried a comeback with Palm Beach, the Class-A team of the St. Louis Cardinals. The comeback ended after he walked 13 batters in three innings.

  Boston lost the final game of the Toronto series, 7–4. The Red Sox had now lost 6 of their previous 8 games and were fully caught in a downward spiral that would only get worse. The Red Sox had built such a big lead that they could have gone 8–19 in their final 27 games and still tied for a playoff spot. Instead, they went 7–20. They played their
final 29 games without ever winning back-to-back games.

  The more they lost, the more they broke apart from within. Pitcher Josh Beckett feuded with the front office. The Boston Globe would later report that Francona was distracted by personal issues and that starting pitchers Beckett, Lester, and John Lackey would drink beer, eat fried chicken, and play video games in the clubhouse during games when they were not pitching. Players feuded with one another. The egos that had created cracks in the clubhouse while they were winning caused deep fissures as they lost.

  So toxic was the atmosphere that, as Boston’s lead slipped away, one unidentified player began to shrug it off by saying, “Why we do we want to play in October anyway? We don’t get paid for that.” True enough—players get their annual salary based on the 26 weeks of the regular season—but the sentiment, even if expressed in a joking manner, revealed a deep problem with the character in the clubhouse. Epstein heard about it and wondered, “Who says that?” And he knew the answer: a losing player.

  “It just got ugly,” Epstein said. “It had been hidden by the winning. It was like a Shakespearean tragedy that year.

  “It turns out we needed to go something like 8–19 to make the playoffs and we would have made the playoffs under the new [two wild cards] format [that began the next year]. Obviously, we didn’t deserve to. It was like watching a monthlong car crash in slow motion.

  “We just could not win. We ran out of pitching, we started making fundamental mistakes, defensive mistakes, and in Baltimore it was like a crushing blow.”

  The Red Sox still managed to get to within one out of tying for a wild card spot on the last night of the season in Baltimore. They led, 3–2, with two outs, nobody on base, and their closer, Jonathan Papelbon, on the mound. But the next three Orioles batters all hit safely: double, double, and single, the last hit a sinking line drive that fittingly wasn’t caught by Crawford, Epstein’s $142 million free agent albatross who that year hit a miserable .255 with a .289 on-base percentage. The Red Sox trudged off the field with a 4–3 loss, their season over. Boston finished with 90 wins. It wasn’t good enough. For the first time under Epstein, the Red Sox missed the playoffs for a second consecutive year.

  He never saw this coming. Before September Epstein had an exit strategy mapped out based on a successful season. Now what?

  “So I had this thought in my head, ‘Oh, we’ll win the World Series, wrap it up with a neat little bow, and it’s unassailable,’ ” Epstein said. “There can’t be any critics with how I left. So now I was in a really rough spot, conflicted emotionally more than anything else about what to do. And so it took a lot of soul searching.”

  Two days after the loss in Baltimore, Ricketts called Henry and Werner to ask for permission to talk to Epstein. “It didn’t surprise them at all when the Cubs called,” Epstein said, remembering the conversation he had with the Red Sox owners at the beginning of the season about his internal conflicts.

  “And John and Tom were great about it,” Epstein said. “They basically said, ‘Look, we’d like you to stay.’ ”

  Said Ricketts, “John’s a friend. It was very cordial. At that point I think he realized Theo wasn’t going to sign an extension. It was a friendly conversation. He agreed to let me speak with Theo.”

  Epstein wrestled with his own thoughts in the immediate wake of the collapse.

  “Now that we collapsed, is it important to stay?” he said. “There were some mixed feelings. There was the feeling that Hey, there’s kind of a mess here, we have to stay and clean it up because everything was so public when you lose in that fashion, everything was dumped out there in the open, all the little things that go on behind the scenes became public.

  “They also knew personally, for my happiness, the Cubs’ opportunity was the right thing, because I had been open with them about how I was feeling and my long-term prospects. So they were great about it and I think a big part of them was they wanted to do the right thing for me, which I really appreciate. They said, ‘Why don’t you talk to Tom?’ They gave permission.”

  The meeting with Ricketts in New York went even better than Epstein could have imagined. As if stuck in a relationship that had run its course over a decade, and with the worst aspects of the otherwise invigorating Boston fanaticism fresh in his mind—the hyper-coverage, the daily strain of your happiness defined by whether you won or lost, the exhaustive autopsies of every defeat, and, in this case, a historic collapse—Epstein was ready for change. But Ricketts came bearing not just the opportunity for change. He also brought the opportunity to go back to the Cape Coral house, a chance to rediscover the energy and passion that only comes with a project at its start. And there was no project in sports as meaningful as this one: the chance to build the first championship Cubs team since 1908.

  Epstein could easily imagine its meaning because of the 2004 championship in Boston, when he felt the powerful catharsis. Cubs fans had been waiting even longer, a burden that transferred to the 1,728 players and 52 managers who wore a Cubs uniform between 1908 and 2016. As the Cubs were making their fluky playoff run in 1984, for instance, former third baseman Ron Santo, who played the most games for the franchise without getting to the postseason except for teammates Ernie Banks and Billy Williams, made a confession. “I’ve got everything I want in life,” he said then. “I’m a happy man. But I’ve got this guilt. I don’t think I could have done more than I did, but it was a failure. I felt guilty for the fans. For Chicago. If they win the pennant this year—and they’re going to win this—believe me, it’s going to take all that guilt off me.”

  The Cubs did not win the pennant in 1984. Santo was 70 years old when he passed away on December 2, 2010. The guilt of being an unrequited Cub remained to his very last breath.

  Ricketts wasn’t interested in one fluky season. He and Epstein shared a vision: to rebuild the Cubs from the ground up to create a sustainable champion. Such a plan allowed for a few years without the day-to-day pressure of winning, a respite from the cauldron in Boston that was wearing on Epstein. Ricketts talked about the construction of a champion in physical terms, too. He loved Wrigley Field, but he hated that it presented his players with substandard working conditions. Players, for instance, had no batting cage to prepare for at-bats during games. They had to construct a net in the clubhouse in order to hit off a batting tee, but only after they hung a board and netting to protect a nearby television. A first-class organization, he told Epstein, deserved first-class facilities. The more Epstein heard, the more he remembered Cape Coral.

  “Back in that cocoon. That’s what it represented,” Epstein said. “It wasn’t a conscious thing, but it represented all the redeeming aspects of the Boston experience that were now a lot tougher to attain in Boston: the building, the excitement of a new challenge, working shoulder to shoulder with people…I still love my baseball operations family in Boston, but once it was clear I could reunite with Jed [Hoyer] and Jason [McLeod], that was a big part of it.

  “Frankly, I have to admit—I never thought about it this way—but deep down knowing it would be a build but the pressure of the standings for the first year or two wouldn’t matter at all…That appealed to me, having just gone through the torture of yet another loss, another loss, another loss in September of that year. It represented a respite from that. Because that wears on you. I probably aged five years that month of September.

  “And the chance to re-create the thrill of ’04, the region-wide joy and relief and catharsis that championship represented. That’s why you go to Chicago, to try to bring that to people again, watching an organization and a fan base experience something like that in such an intimate, personal way that connects fans and families and generations. It was by far the most meaningful part of the whole decade in Boston. You’re lucky to ever think about playing a small part in that at least once, but you never think you could re-create it or duplicate it, even just the chance of it is super appealing.”

  Epstein soon agreed to Ricketts’s offer,
though it was not immediately announced. Epstein wanted Hoyer, who was then general manager of the San Diego Padres, and McLeod, Hoyer’s assistant there, to reunite with him in Chicago. Hoyer was an ascendant star in his own right. He interviewed for general manager positions in Pittsburgh after the 2007 season and in Washington and San Diego after the 2009 season. Hired by the Padres, Hoyer inherited a 75-win team and immediately improved it by 15 wins. The Padres slipped back to 71 wins in 2011.

  Hoyer was in Arizona with his wife, who was eight months’ pregnant, looking at spring training rentals for 2012 when his phone rang. It was Epstein. He wanted Hoyer, and he wanted McLeod. It was the chance to go back to Cape Coral.

  “I thought, What an incredible opportunity for Theo. They’re going to be great,” Hoyer said. “We had this whole conversation. I had a good job. I was happy. A big part of me started to think about building something there in San Diego, the challenge of building something without a big payroll.

  “But as we started talking through it, it was clear this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The door wouldn’t swing open again. Once it was clear Jason might go, it became incredibly appealing. It was a great city with a great fan base and a great story. This was the one place we could replicate ’04.

  “One thing I thought about was our relationship. We knew the size of the task. We knew the responsibility on both of us. Neither one of us is great at being super specific at those responsibilities, but I knew he would give me a ton of autonomy and that’s what happened. This is ultimately a situation where Theo is the final decision maker. But I felt as though I was able to have an impact. I never would have left for anyone else. It was more about our relationship.”

  Epstein broke the news to Henry, Werner, and Lucchino: he was gone. His departure happened over years and involved the slow incubation of personal and emotional conflicts, but much of the press boiled it down to a simple narrative: after learning at the foot of Lucchino, the student had to leave to get out from the heavy hand of his mentor. Epstein never bought that facile presentation.