by Tom Verducci
Epstein made the deal with Hoyer, his friend who had left to become general manager of the Padres, taking McLeod with him as his scouting director.
“Hands down the Red Sox were the most aggressive team,” said Hoyer, who received lesser interest in Gonzalez from the Cubs, the White Sox, and the Mariners. “They were calling me often. It was clear from early on that Adrian was the linchpin of their off-season plan.
“Theo was very judicious. He doesn’t like to trade prospects, and they knew they could sign Gonzalez to a long-term deal. The fact that Jason and I knew their prospects probably made it more difficult for them. You always hope a team asks about prospects you don’t like.
“So that knowledge made it more difficult, but it made it more transparent, too. There was no BS. Adrian was a guy Theo always had a crush on. Going back to when Adrian played for the Rangers, he wanted to acquire him then. Theo had watched him play as a high school player in San Diego. Theo, to his credit, never got off him.”
The personal cost was high for Epstein. He had drafted Rizzo in part because of Gutierrez’s reports extolling his character, and he had seen that for himself in the way Rizzo beat cancer. He placed a call to Rizzo after the trade was completed.
“Someday,” Epstein told him, “I’ll get you back.”
Hoyer and McLeod knew exactly what they were getting.
“When you have your player who’s going to be looked upon as a leader,” McLeod said, “and he’s also your best run producer, that’s the one who can take you where you want to be in the postseason. Not all guys are that way. Some great players want to be left alone. Some are snarky.
“It’s something that’s so cherished to have on a team, especially a team pushing into the postseason. Anthony has high expectations of his teammates and himself, and he makes everyone feel comfortable. He’s somebody they can go to and talk to, or just go to and have a laugh. He is someone that’s just wired that way from the time he was 17. He genuinely likes people, has a great heart, and certainly cares about his teammates.”
Hoyer’s phone immediately started to blow up over the trade—from people in the Red Sox organization.
“It was amazing how many texts I got from coaches and coordinators,” Hoyer said. “They all said they think this guy is a great player and a great person and they were sad to see him go. His makeup stood out right away. He became such a favorite among coaches in the minor league system. In a short amount of time he was a favorite of the player development staff. He was a beloved person.”
The Padres started Rizzo in 2011 at Triple-A Tucson, where he continued to rake. Rizzo hit .365 with a 1.159 OPS there.
On June 9, entering a home series against Washington, San Diego was in last place in the National League West with a 28–35 record. Hoyer decided it was time to promote Rizzo for his major league debut.
“I look back with regret at bringing him up when I did,” Hoyer said. “But we were getting zero production out of first base, we were struggling following a 90-win season, he had a 1.050 OPS and [was] tearing up the Pacific Coast League, and he was a guy we had gotten as a marquee name in a big trade. It was hard not to bring him up.
“He started pretty well that first week or so, but then he started struggling, and he did not have the survival skills at that point to handle it. It sort of snowballed on him.”
Rizzo hit .143 in 98 at-bats. On July 21, Hoyer demoted him to the minor leagues and handed his first-base job to a journeyman named Kyle Blanks. The Padres brought back Rizzo in September when rosters expanded, but he fared no better. He finished the year at .141 in 128 at-bats.
“When I was up there [in San Diego] I was missing pitches I had never missed in my life,” Rizzo said. “And I said to myself, Why am I missing this pitch? I don’t understand it. It’s a fastball right down the middle at 90 miles an hour and I can’t hit it.
“It was more, What is going on? And then it got to the point where I got sent down, I was hitting well again in Triple-A, and got called back up in September. Then I was at that point where my brain just needed a rest. I was overthinking: Try this, try that.
“I remember I had to go to winter ball that year, which I did not want to do at all. I just knew I needed a break. But at the same time I was going to do everything I could to be on the team next year. I ended up playing two weeks. I ended up rolling my ankle and went home.”
It was after that season, in October, that Hoyer and McLeod left the Padres to reunite with Epstein in Chicago. Another former young buck from the Red Sox player development office, Josh Byrnes, was hired to replace Hoyer in San Diego. One of Byrnes’s first moves was to trade for a first baseman, Yonder Alonso from Cincinnati, on December 17.
“I get a call after that from our GM saying I was still a big part of the organization,” Rizzo said, “and I was going to be there and a part of their future.
“A week later I get traded.”
Said Hoyer, “The Cubs are really fortunate. If when he came up he played really well, there’s no chance the Padres would have traded him. There’s no way when Jason and I came out to Chicago that the idea of acquiring Anthony Rizzo was even possible. He was their first baseman of the future and there was no one to compete with him.
“Once they traded for Yonder Alonso, Josh Byrnes said he didn’t want a quarterback controversy. Anthony had lost his main sponsors. And I knew how much Theo wanted him.”
“The trade,” Epstein said, “was not a slam dunk.”
Epstein’s inner circle debated the merits of giving up Andrew Cashner, a 24-year-old, big-bodied pitcher who threw 97 miles per hour—the makings of a future ace—for Rizzo. The game was pivoting toward a pitcher-dominated era. Young, cost-controlled, power arms like Cashner were highly valued currency, especially for teams rebuilding. Hoyer and McLeod had seen how badly Rizzo looked against major league pitching. His swing was too long. He couldn’t catch up to average velocity.
“Hey, this is a 21-year-old who struggled his first couple of months seeing big league pitching,” Epstein argued. “Great. That’s exactly when you can get him.”
Hoyer and McLeod agreed with Epstein in general about the principle of buying low, but cautioned him that they had seen every one of those big league at-bats; Epstein hadn’t.
Eventually, the three of them came to a consensus: now was the time to buy low on Rizzo, with the faith in his character that he would do whatever it took to make adjustments with his swing. On January 6, 2012, the Cubs traded Cashner to San Diego for Rizzo. The clubs also exchanged lesser prospects in the deal.
“When I got traded I was ecstatic,” Rizzo said. “I’m from Florida. I’m not the biggest West Coast fan, so Chicago is closer to home. I had the opportunity out of high school to go to Arizona State to play baseball, and I decided to stay closer to home at Florida Atlantic. I like being able to stay closer to home.
“Obviously, when I got here we weren’t very good. I had no idea about the fan base. My first time I came to Chicago it was snowing and it was cold. Then I get called back up in June and it’s like a whole different ballgame. Everyone’s out in the city having a good tine, taking advantage of the nice weather, the games are rocking—we weren’t good and they’re still rocking—and just how the fans embraced me and all the stories you hear, I feel like Chicago is home now.”
Epstein had been on the job with the Cubs for less than three months when he made the Rizzo trade. It was his third trade in that period. The first didn’t work out so well: he traded DJ LeMahieu, a future All-Star, Gold Glove winner, and batting champion, with Tyler Colvin to Colorado for two former hot prospects who fizzled, Casey Weathers and Ian Stewart. He also traded reliever Sean Marshall for versatile pitcher Travis Wood, who was part of the 2016 championship team.
But the Rizzo trade was a watershed moment for Epstein. Rizzo was one of the four impact players Epstein needed to build a championship team. One down, three to go.
Just as importantly—though so subtly the rest of baseball
didn’t pick up on what he was up to—Epstein signaled his intentions about how he was going to rebuild the Cubs. The clues were right there in the Cashner-for-Rizzo trade. This was going to be a very different blueprint than the one Epstein used to win championships with the Red Sox. It had to be.
The Cubs’ lineup for Game 1 of the World Series sat on the desk in front of Joe Maddon with a name that had not been in there in 201 days: Kyle Schwarber. He was listed as the first Cubs designated hitter in World Series history, batting fifth. The World Series opened in Cleveland for the first time among the 112 ever played, and did so because the American League had won the All-Star Game back in July, a game in which the winning pitcher was Corey Kluber, the Cleveland Indians’ Game 1 starter, and a game that Cubs pitchers Jake Arrieta and Jon Lester had skipped in order to take the rest.
If the downside to the NL losing the All-Star Game meant the Cubs would not have the home-field advantage in the World Series, the upside was that the designated hitter rule allowed Maddon to start the World Series with the use of Schwarber’s bat, a turn of events that shocked the manager himself.
“I really didn’t expect this—at all,” Maddon said at his desk. “I’m not being disingenuous. I had no idea until a couple of days ago when they said, ‘Schwarber was cleared by the doctor in Texas to do this.’ I said, ‘Okay, what are we going to do?’ ‘Well, we’re going to have him take some BP and we’ll send him to Arizona.’ He goes to Arizona and the guys watching him go, ‘He looks normal.’ And I saw the video of him swinging and running. Very normal.
“So he could run into something tonight very easily, there’s no doubt.”
What kind of hitter was this? How could the manager actually expect somebody to hit a home run in the World Series after missing six months with a blown-out knee? That Maddon could think it was possible—“very easily”—said much about both Schwarber’s freakish hitting skills and how much the club had come to love and believe in this 23-year-old who looked and hit like a linebacker.
Schwarber had not seen major league pitching since April 7, when, playing leftfield against the Arizona Diamondbacks in Phoenix, he collided with centerfielder Dexter Fowler while both were trying to catch a ball hit between the two of them.
“I was watching on my couch in Chicago and it was awful,” Theo Epstein said. “I almost got physically sick. It was bad. We all felt that way. We were talking ourselves into, ‘Maybe it’s just a bone bruise or something.’ But we kind of knew.”
Doctors would have to wait until the next day, when the swelling subsided, to perform an MRI. The news was not good: Schwarber had torn ligaments in his left knee. On April 19, Dr. Daniel Cooper performed surgery to reconstruct Schwarber’s anterior cruciate ligament and to repair his lateral collateral ligament. The Cubs said he was expected to be ready for 2017 spring training. Privately, they hoped in a best-case scenario he would be cleared in time to play the second half of winter ball.
“Once you hear he’s out for the season, it’s just sickening,” Epstein said. “It’s denial for him and the team, because he’s such an integral part of the lineup. He creates fear with his left-handed bat.”
Epstein had grown personally attached to Schwarber, ever since September of 2013 when, after watching about 80 videos of Schwarber as a sophomore catcher at Indiana University, he fired off an e-mail to his scouting director and others who were preparing for the 2014 draft: “Take your scouts off the road. We have our pick. We’re taking Schwarber with our first pick.” Schwarber had just hit .366 with a school-record 18 homers, the third most in the country.
Recalled Epstein, “I said, ‘I don’t care who pitches for us, we’re going to let him play leftfield for a decade and put up Big Papi numbers. We can get anybody to pitch.’
“Nobody talks about how left-handed hitters tend to have that longer swing. No one has a shorter, more powerful left-handed swing than Schwarber—with a lot going on in his swing. He’s a rhythm hitter and there’s a lot going on with his prepitch movement, but he’s always on time. He has a natural instinct to be on time. Not like one of these skill guys who just happen to be on time. He recognizes movement, he understands pitching.”
The Cubs held the fourth overall pick in the draft. Epstein wanted Schwarber, even having just watched him hit on video. Then he actually met him, and he was convinced even more that Schwarber was the best player available to the Cubs in the draft.
In February 2014 Epstein and the Cubs’ front office personnel had just moved into their new spring training quarters in Mesa, Arizona. Epstein noticed that Indiana was scheduled to play games that month in Arizona as part of the Pac-12 versus Big Ten tournament, so he extended an invitation to the Hoosiers to take batting practice at the Cubs’ new complex. His motivation was more than altruistic. Epstein wanted an up-close look at Schwarber and teammate Sam Travis, a first baseman who would be picked in the second round by Boston.
Schwarber had been a second-team, all-Ohio middle linebacker at Middletown High School who drew the interest of Big Ten schools to play football. No major league baseball team bothered drafting him out of high school, so he enrolled at Indiana. He was a three-year hitting star as a catcher at Indiana, following up his big sophomore season with a .358 average in his junior year. Scouts wondered, however, if at 6 foot and 240 pounds he had the defensive skills and athleticism to succeed in the majors. MLBPipeline.com rated him as the 16th best player available in the 2014 draft. Baseball America rated him 17th, and in a mock draft in May had him going 24th.
Epstein and Jason McLeod met with Schwarber in Epstein’s office after the hitting session in Mesa. The conversation lasted an hour.
At one point Epstein told him, “Hey, some guys even out here in our own organization don’t think you can catch.”
Schwarber paused and looked him square in the eye, the anger evident.
“Well, I look forward to proving those fucking people wrong,” he said.
Said Epstein, “He dropped an F bomb! It was great! He came away as an incredibly likable baseball rat with a football mentality whose teammates are going to love him and the ultimate, grounded, Midwestern kid who wants to do the right thing and have fun doing it. He wants to go to battle with his teammates and win at all costs, but in a really relatable, likable, fun way. He’s so magnetic and such a baseball rat it’s ridiculous.
“Once we met and shared our vision for the organization and he got to tell us what he’s all about, there was a mutual feeling that this was meant to be. And we needed to make this happen.”
Said Schwarber, “It just kind of clicked. It was like we had the same beliefs in baseball terms. It’s all about winning. So that’s the only thing that matters at the end of the day—making sure that we get a win.”
The three teams that drafted ahead of the Cubs all picked pitchers: the Astros took high school pitcher Brady Aiken, the Marlins took high school pitcher Tyler Kolek, and the White Sox picked college pitcher Carlos Rodon. There was some doubt about what the Cubs would do next, even within their own draft room and despite Epstein’s enormous regard for Schwarber. A healthy discussion followed about whether Schwarber was worth the fourth overall pick. Some in the room felt Chicago needed a pitcher, the position everybody else in baseball seemed to want. That year teams drafted 13 pitchers with the first 19 picks. College pitchers such as Aaron Nola, Jeff Hoffman, and Brandon Finnegan remained on the board.
“By the time we got to the draft room, typically guys like [Schwarber] who are bat-first or bat-only, they don’t go that high in the draft,” Epstein said. “So he was more a consensus late-first-round guy. But we had a lot of conviction. Scouts loved the bat. We all loved the bat. Our statistical model loved the bat. And makeup was huge. Stan Zielinski, the area scout, did a great job getting to know Kyle inside and out. Jason and I felt like we knew him.
“And there were a lot of good arms available so the debate in the draft room really crystallized. It was like, ‘We can choose a pitcher who is going to move
quickly and can help us win every fifth day, but pitchers have a really hard time leading. They can lead the starting rotation after they get established a little bit, but it’s hard for them to lead the team. We draft Kyle Schwarber, he’s on the field every day, he’s going to rake, and he’s going to be right in the middle of everything that is going to happen in this organization.’ ”
Epstein continued stumping on behalf of Schwarber.
“He is what we want to be: how he prioritizes winning, how he cares about his teammates, how hard he plays, how much he loves the game, how much he wants to win,” he said.
The room started to turn. Epstein put Zielinski, the scout, on the phone. Zielinksi also gave a heartfelt speech in support of Schwarber.
“There was a lot of passion about him,” Epstein said. “And we went from kind of split to consensus.”
The Cubs took Schwarber with the fourth overall pick and quickly signed him for less than the assigned value of that slot. Most people considered the pick a reach, especially for a National League team, which would not have the option of using Schwarber as a full-time designated hitter.
Wrote Baseball America, “His bonus of $3.125 million, which was $1,496,200 under the slot allocated for the fourth overall pick, was also seen as both a compromise and a negative reflection of his overall ability.”
Upon signing him, Epstein invited Schwarber to Wrigley Field, where they sat together in Epstein’s box during a game.
“He became part of our heartbeat,” Epstein said. “You can’t put a dollar figure on that. That’s so hard to find. When he showed up here, after he signed, he was up in the box watching the game and he kept saying, ‘I can’t wait. Just trust me, I’m going to do everything I possibly can to help this organization win a World Series. I’m going to do everything in my power to help this team win. I won’t let you down.’ ”
Schwarber zoomed through three levels of Class-A ball that summer, hitting .344 in 72 games. Only five months after drafting Schwarber, Epstein was dropping his name to help sell the Cubs in an attempt to lure free agent veteran pitcher Jon Lester to sign with the team.