by Tom Verducci
Many of those in the ballroom—managers, coaches, instructors, scouts, trainers, analysts, etc.—figured Epstein, Jed Hoyer, and Jason McLeod would simply try to re-create what they had done in Boston. Others worried that their jobs weren’t safe under the new regime; many of those people would turn out to be right.
Epstein, who had just pulled off the trade for Anthony Rizzo, spelled out the hallmarks he wanted from a championship Cubs team. He wanted an offense that grinded out at-bats, got on base at a high rate, drove balls with authority rather than simply making contact, and boasted a relentless batting order, not one reliant simply on its few big hitters in the middle. He told them, however, that the Cubs would not sacrifice defense for the sake of fulfilling his offensive wish list.
“We’re going to have both,” he told them, “and we’re going to have it at every position.”
He told them he wanted a pitching staff populated by pitchers who threw a heavy percentage of strikes but also featured swing-and-miss stuff. He wanted those pitchers also to have high groundball rates, so they could induce weak contact into the teeth of a premier defense.
He wanted a baseball operations department that would be the best in baseball—“a scouting and player development machine,” to use his signature phrase.
“We’re going to have the resourcefulness of a small market team,” he told them, “and the resources of a big market team.”
And then Epstein told them about one of the strongest pillars of his entire building plan: he wanted players with strong character.
“We are not going to compromise character for talent,” he told them. “We’re the Cubs. We’re going to have both. Talent and character.”
The idea of so strongly emphasizing character may have struck some in the room as odd, especially coming from a Bill James disciple who built two World Series championship teams in Boston as an early adopter of analytic principles. Numbers had been his preeminent guiding principle. There was that first off-season in Boston, when Epstein and Hoyer could do their fishing in uncrowded waters for undervalued players, like David Ortiz and Bill Mueller, with a high rate of getting on base, while old-school general managers continued to emphasize batting average and runs batted in.
The next year, in the 2004 draft, Epstein found Dustin Pedroia, an undersized shortstop from Arizona State, with the help of data. That same year Epstein sent a flock of interns to NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis to collect 30 years’ worth of archived college baseball statistics. The interns photocopied the information and brought it back to Boston, where the baseball operations team developed an algorithm to predict major league success from the college statistics. One of the hitters the algorithm liked was Pedroia, an on-base machine who rarely struck out. Many clubs undervalued Pedroia because he was only 5-foot-9 and was not a plus runner.
After 64 players were picked, including 15 college hitters, the Red Sox could not believe their good luck that Pedroia was still available to them. He turned out to be even better than the algorithm forecast. After Boston converted Pedroia to second base, he became Rookie of the Year in 2007 and Most Valuable Player in 2008. A four-time All-Star, Pedroia has more hits and home runs than any Boston second baseman, with the exception of Hall of Famer Bobby Doerr. Eleven of the 15 college hitters drafted ahead of Pedroia played less than 200 games in the majors, including 5 who never played a day in the big leagues.
By 2012, overlooked value buys like Ortiz and Pedroia were getting harder and harder for Epstein and Hoyer to find. The use of advanced analytics was becoming commonplace. Old-guard general managers were being phased out by an entire generation of Epstein 2.0s—young bucks armed with degrees from elite universities and a hunger for data.
“The landscape was flat now,” Hoyer said. “There were so many smart people working for teams. Thinking back to that energy in the room in Boston when we could go after the Millars and Muellers and Guilléns and Hafners, it was so different now. It was really great that all us were here in Chicago, but we knew we couldn’t fall back on the way we used to do it. We had to keep evolving. We realized this was going to be really different.”
Epstein devoted the first day of the 2012 Mesa meeting to hitting philosophy. He devoted the second day to pitching philosophy, and the third to defense and baserunning. The entire last day was devoted to character. The Cubs, Epstein insisted, would acquire only players with outstanding makeup. Even Epstein realized himself how far he had evolved since he put so much faith in numbers when he began as general manager of the Red Sox. Now character did not just matter. It was essential to Epstein’s blueprint to win the World Series.
“I used to scoff at it, when I first took the job in Boston,” he said. “I just felt like, you know how we’re going to win? By getting guys who get on base more than the other team, and by getting pitchers who miss bats and get groundballs. Talent wins, but…It’s like every year I did the job I just developed a greater appreciation for how much the human element matters and how much more you can achieve as a team when you have players who care about winning, care about each other, develop those relationships, have those conversations…it creates an environment where the sum is greater than the parts.”
How did character become so important to Epstein?
“It was a lot of things,” he said. “It was living through the Nomar [Garciaparra] trade and how we played in the aftermath of that.”
Epstein made the bold move at the 2004 trade deadline of trading Nomar Garciaparra, a fan favorite because he had been a Rookie of the Year and two-time batting champion, mostly because Epstein’s proprietary defensive metrics showed Garciaparra to be among the worst shortstops in the league. But Epstein also made the move because he was concerned that Garciaparra’s brooding over his contract situation and intense media coverage created a negative clubhouse dynamic. The Red Sox went 42–18 without him. The lesson for Epstein was that the character of players in the clubhouse mattered, especially in a major market where negative issues get amplified.
“Probably on the other end of things,” Epstein said, continuing, “was coming off the 2011 experience and how things fell apart in the clubhouse there despite our best intentions. And then also it was coming to a place that was kind of vanilla for a long time. What was the personality of those Cubs teams? They had been to the playoffs in ’07, ’08, but what was the personality? Who were the leaders?”
Epstein wanted leaders who were everyday players to define the personality of his team. That’s why the quick acquisition of Rizzo was so telling about how Epstein wanted to rebuild the Cubs. Rizzo was his prototype. He was the first of the four impact players Epstein knew he needed in his lineup to win a World Series. But Epstein also knew that getting a building block like Rizzo in a trade was like hitting a walkoff homer: a rarity he could not count on. The key to building a winning culture did not exist in trades.
“It starts in the draft room,” Epstein said. “That’s the one time all year when you decide proactively, affirmatively, what type of person, what [kind of] human being, you want to bring into your organization. When you trade for players, you can only trade for those players who are available. It’s a small subsection of players. When you’re signing free agents, you can only sign those free agents who are available—a very small percentage of players who are available.
“In the draft, when it’s time for your pick, the entire universe of eligible players is out there for you. You choose one of them. Whether you sort of admit it or not, you’re saying, ‘This is what I want my organization to be. This is what I want my organization to be about. This is a Cub.’ Every time you pick, especially in the first round, that’s what you’re saying.”
At the time Epstein left Boston for Chicago, baseball was falling into a deep, offensive recession. A rise in fastball velocity and a surge in the inventory of pitchers who could throw in the mid- and upper-90s—coupled with advances in defensive strategies, including the widespread adoption of shifts—turned baseball into a game that
emphasized run prevention. The game was sinking into its lowest offensive trough in a generation. In 2011, the Major League Baseball earned run average fell below 4.00 for the first time in 19 years (3.94), strikeouts set an all-time high for the fifth straight year (now at 11 consecutive years and counting), the strikeout-to-walk rate hit an all-time high, home runs per game declined to its lowest level since 1993, runs per team per game sank to its lowest rate since 1992, and batting average dropped to its lowest mark since 1989.
The 2011 draft mirrored this rise of pitching. Clubs drafted pitchers with 18 of the first 28 picks, including the top four selections (Gerrit Cole, Danny Hultzen, Trevor Bauer, and Dylan Bundy). Throughout its history, whether in times when pitchers dominated or times when hitters dominated, baseball lived by mantras such as “You can never have too much pitching” and “Good pitching stops good hitting.” Drafting pitchers seemed, at least in a traditional way of thinking, the proven, safe route.
In Chicago, however, Epstein decided to zig while everyone else zagged. Pitching, he decided, was something he would worry about later. Most important to him was establishing what it meant to be a Cub, and the ones who most determine the culture of a team are the ones who play every day, not the ones who pitch every fifth or sixth day. Epstein believed that starting pitchers, at best, become leaders of the rotation once they get established, but not leaders of an entire team.
“There’s lots of reasons why we went toward position players instead of pitchers in the first round, but that was a big one,” Epstein said. “We are going to define our identity. We’re going to define it through our best players. We’re going to define it through our young nucleus. So we want character, too.
“We want players who are invested in their teammates, we want players who are going to understand what it means to play in a World Series for the Cubs and their fans. We want players we trust can respond to adversity. We want players other players like being around. We want guys who care about winning, and prioritize it, and are happy when the team wins and they are 0-for-4 and are pissed even if we lose and they are 3-for-4.”
There was another reason that Epstein emphasized drafting position players with character for the foundation of his team. Despite the traditional emphasis on pitching, hitters are more reliable than pitchers, especially because the increase in pitching velocity has dovetailed with and even caused a rise in arm injuries, particularly blown elbow ligaments that require Tommy John surgery.
“We really focused so much on acquiring bats and position players because we knew that was the safer path for us to take,” Hoyer said. “People thought, You guys are taking the wrong path because you win through pitching. But that’s not the way we saw it.
“Safety. That was a big part of it. We knew we had one chance to do this. We only had so long to draft at the top of the draft. So we took the safest route. We bought bonds instead of stocks.
“The Mets were really close to winning the World Series [in 2015]. They went the opposite way. There are plenty of examples of teams that drafted well. The Giants drafted [pitchers] Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, and Madison Bumgarner. How often does that happen? The way we happened to do it was safer. We emphasized building up our core players. It became such a buzzword that people mocked us. But we felt sustained success came from position players. They were the rock on which you build the rest around.”
While baseball fell deeper into a pitching-dominated era, and while teams continued to chase pitchers at the top of the draft, even as elbows were blowing out at an alarming rate, the Cubs under Epstein chose a path no other club saw. In the first five years since Epstein joined the Cubs (2012–2016), teams used 47 percent of the top 30 picks in the draft on pitchers (71 of 150 picks). But only one team did not select a single pitcher with one of those 150 top 30 picks: the Cubs.
Chicago’s avoidance of pitchers proved prudent. Of those 71 pitchers other teams selected among the top 30 picks over the five drafts, just as many pitchers have had either Tommy John surgery or thoracic outlet syndrome surgery (14) as reached the major leagues.
Even if you narrow the sample to pitchers taken with one of the first 10 picks—the ones who should be the safest selections—the returns on investment remain poor. Of the 25 pitchers picked in the top 10 over the previous five drafts, only 2 have a winning record in the majors: Carlos Rodon of the White Sox and Aaron Nola of the Phillies, neither of whom is a front-of-the-rotation pitcher.
For Epstein, deciding to build the team around high-character position players was an easy, if novel, choice. Having the infrastructure to find those players loomed as one of Epstein’s biggest challenges.
Since the draft began in 1965, few if any teams have drafted worse than the Chicago Cubs. A 2014 study by ESPN ranked the Cubs dead last in average wins above replacement from first-round picks. The Cubs’ top picks were particularly abysmal from 1999 to 2010. In those 12 drafts, Chicago took 16 players in the first round. Half of them never played a day in the big leagues, and only 2 of them played more than two seasons with the Cubs: Mark Prior and Tyler Colvin.
When Epstein arrived, the Cubs were still relying on the old-school wisdom of scouts, but they were a decade behind the rest of the industry when it came to the number of scouts and front office employees, and the sophistication of their databases. Their software program, at least when it was used, was an outdated one that other teams had used in the mid-’90s. Many scouts still filed handwritten reports on paper. The internet was not being fully utilized. Twice a day—midmorning and midafternoon—the Cubs’ information manager, Chuck Wasserstrom, would print out multiple copies of baseball news and notes from the internet, staple them into packets, and drop them on the desk of front office executives, even though such information was available to anybody who knew how to use a web browser.
“That’s how behind we were,” one employee said. “We were killing a lot of trees in the digital age.”
Epstein was stunned at how small an investment the Cubs were putting into scouting and player development, both in terms of money and processes. He was coming from Boston, where the Red Sox were among the most advanced clubs in that department. The draft rules had changed on him, he faced the daunting task of changing a losing culture, and he inherited no homegrown impact players. But of one thing Epstein could be sure.
“We knew how to do this: build a scouting and player development department,” he said.
There would be no more short, handwritten reports on players. No more photocopied printouts of internet news. Epstein immediately would have to replicate the deep, diligent system he used in Boston, especially now that he was placing an even greater emphasis on finding players with character.
“Okay, we know our principles,” he said. “We built our scouting department around the idea that the currency in the draft is information. That’s it. The currency in the draft is not, ‘I’m a little bit better of a scout than you.’
“We’re going to have great scouts. We’re probably going to have some that are not so great mixed in. You don’t know it. It takes years. But the currency of the draft is information. So yes, scouting information. We’re going to have more scouts and better scouts and make sure they see the right players and see them more often than the other teams.
“Give us makeup information. It’s not going to be ‘Check a box on a scouting report: excellent, good, fair, poor.’ That’s what it was. ‘Good kid.’ I saw it a hundred times. ‘Good makeup. Good kid.’ Tells you nothing. Explain.
“Everyone’s life is really complicated and involved and there are myriad influences and background factors and transformative experiences and challenges and times when they responded the right way to adversity and times they responded the wrong way. And you have to dig and figure out what makes this person tick and how he’s going to respond in pro ball.”
Epstein gave his scouts very specific marching orders. On every prospect he wanted the area scout to give three examples of how that player responded to adversity
on the field, and three examples of how that player responded to adversity off the field. They were to dig into the player’s makeup by talking to just about anybody who knew him: parents, guidance counselors, teammates, girlfriends, siblings. He wanted as many questions answered as possible: What’s the family situation like? How does he treat people when no one’s looking? What do his friends say about him? What do his enemies say about him? How does he treat people he doesn’t necessarily have to treat well? What motivates him? Is he externally motivated where he wants money or followers?
“You really want people who are motivated by the competition,” Epstein said, “especially by winning. You try to find the guys that want to thrive in that environment.”
Cubs scouting reports would never look the same again. Epstein wanted reports that went on for pages, like the Russian novels his father had him read as a boy. The scouts who didn’t take to the long-form scouting reports didn’t last. Epstein ran them off.
Epstein had to have this information. It wasn’t hard, measurable data. But it was information nonetheless, and if Epstein was going to build a team around high-character, high-impact, position players, he wanted as much of it as possible.
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“Medical information is important, too.” Epstein said. “So if you can dig deep in all those buckets, if you can find some new way of looking at players no one else has, you can really separate yourself. That’s where the neuroscouting stuff was huge for us.”
Neuroscouting? In 2007 Drs. Wesley Clapp and Brian Miller founded NeuroScouting LLC in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their self-defined mission involved “paving new roads in converting the latest neuroscience research into actionable technologies for elite performers in ‘read and react’ sports.” Think of what they do as providing the services of an athletic trainer, not for the body but for the brain.