The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  Epstein heard about the company while he was with the Red Sox and, around 2009–2010, entered into an exclusive agreement with NeuroScouting, establishing Boston as the only major league club that could use its services. Ever on the hunt for information, Epstein was curious if neuroscouting could provide predictive information about draft-eligible hitters. A hitter has four-tenths of a second—the equivalent of the blink of an eye—to see, decode, decide, and, if he chooses, swing at an average big league pitch. What if neuroscouting could provide data on how well and how quickly players processed all that information?

  NeuroScouting developed three games as an evaluative tool. One example is a game in which the player sees pitches coming at him as if he is in the batter’s box. The graphics are very simple, because if they appeared too lifelike—too much like a sophisticated video game—the players with vast gaming experience would score better than the ones who do not have such familiarity. The “baseball” coming at the hitter is a green circle, and it is moving with the speed and spin of real major league pitches. The game uses actual pitch data from the motion-capture technologies of PITCHf/x and TrackMan, MLB-licensed technology services. The hitter must hit the space bar when he judges the ball to be in the hitting zone.

  The game then takes a twist. The ball may or may not turn red on the way to the plate. If it does turn red, the hitter is to avoid hitting the space bar—the equivalent of “taking” the pitch.

  Sometimes the ball turns red right out of the “pitcher’s” hand. That’s an easy take for a hitter. Sometimes it turns red two-thirds of the way to the plate. That’s a much harder take, the equivalent of a slider that looks like a fastball, only to break late and out of the strike zone. Researchers have discovered that the human brain can no longer complete the swing-or-don’t-swing decision once the ball gets to within 10 feet of home plate. In technical terms, it’s the measurement of a neural pathway called inhibitory control. So the game can push the hitter right up to the human limit of inhibitory control.

  The Red Sox began their use of NeuroScouting’s technology by trying it on their major league hitters. The collection of that data gave them basis points for some of the elite hitters in the world when it came to “read and react” and inhibitory control. Beginning in 2010, the Red Sox used that data as context when measuring the neural skills of draft-eligible players.

  One day in the spring of 2011, Red Sox personnel visited John Overton High School in Brentwood, Tennessee, and waited for one of the students to stop by on his lunch period. Mookie Betts, who had gained acclaim as an all-state bowler but was lesser known around the heavily scouted elite travel baseball landscape, sat down at a table with the NeuroScouting games on a laptop. The Red Sox evaluated Betts as someone who figured to go in the tenth round of the draft that year. When the results reached Epstein, he was astounded.

  “Mookie was up there with David Ortiz and Dustin Pedroia,” Epstein said. “That got our attention. We moved him up from the tenth round to the fifth round. We got him in the fifth round.”

  A total of 171 players were drafted before Boston took Betts. He has developed into one of the best players in baseball—the Most Valuable Player runner-up in 2016—who is known for how fast his hands work as a hitter.

  In Boston, Epstein was happy with the use of neuroscouting as an evaluative tool. Then the idea occurred to him and the NeuroScouting team that it might also work as another application: as a training device. If the laptop games served as a means to collect data on the neural pathways of potential draft picks, what if they could train players already in the system—a kind of batting practice for the brain?

  Epstein noticed that the players were getting better at the games the more they played them. So he required all minor leaguers to play the games for about 15 minutes before they took the field for batting practice. They were instructed to do this a minimum of three or four times per week.

  “We could track how much they trained on it and how they were developing,” Epstein said. “We started to see a soft correlation to performance on the field: improvement in neuroscouting led to improvement on the field, which is cool.”

  When Epstein joined the Cubs he took neuroscouting with him, though the team’s contract became exclusive to the National League, not all of the major leagues. (The American League’s Tampa Bay Rays began using neuroscouting with their minor leaguers in 2013.) In the flattening landscape of information available to major league teams, Epstein managed to find and hold an edge over his competitors.

  In the spring of 2012, armed with neuroscouting reports and the Russian novel–length scouting reports from his newly challenged scouts, Epstein still needed one more piece of information before deciding how to use his first draft pick as the architect of the Cubs: he had to speak with the top candidates himself.

  The Cubs held the sixth overall pick in the draft. The draft class was weak when it came to elite college hitters—the type most likely to be impact players. The only college hitter who would be selected among the top 14 picks was Florida catcher Mike Zunino, who had been a bust for Seattle. The Cubs set their sights on two high school players: Carlos Correa, a shortstop at Puerto Rico Baseball Academy, and Albert Almora Jr., an outfielder at Mater Academy Charter School in Hialeah, Florida. As it turned out, Houston, picking first overall, would take Correa.

  “To Houston’s credit, they played their cards close to the vest,” Hoyer said. “We spent the year talking about Correa or Almora, and then—bang!—they took Correa. We didn’t know which direction they were going to go.”

  Picking sixth, Epstein remembered his meeting with Almora. Epstein and McLeod flew to Miami in May 2012 and drove to Almora’s house in Hialeah. They sat in the family living room. Out back was a batting cage. When Almora was a small child, his father gave him a choice for the backyard: he could have a pool or he could have a batting cage. The child chose the batting cage. Once the cage was installed and through high school, Almora hit in that cage every day, usually with his father throwing to him.

  “Every. Single. Day,” Almora said. “I didn’t miss a day.”

  As a senior at Mater Academy, Almora hit .603 and struck out only three times in 87 plate appearances. He also maintained a 4.1 grade point average. He had made a commitment to play at the University of Miami.

  The year before Epstein and McLeod paid their visit, Almora lost both of his maternal grandparents. His grandmother died six months earlier, just as he was leaving to catch a flight to Colombia to play for the 18U USA team in the Pan American Championships. His parents decided not to tell him about her passing until he returned, leaving him to his task of being the team leader and trying to win a gold medal. His team did win the gold medal and Almora was named Most Valuable Player of the tournament and later USA Baseball Player of the Year. When he arrived home and heard the news about his grandmother, Almora buried his gold medal next to her, saying he won it for her, so he wanted her to have it.

  Epstein and McLeod already were working with glowing scouting reports from area scouts Laz Llanos and John Koronko, who became a scout after his 13-year pitching career—which included 31 big league games—had ended the previous year. But Epstein and McLeod wanted personal confirmation of what made Almora tick. Most importantly, what they wanted to know was what motivated him. Was he motivated by external factors, or was he motivated by winning? They were blown away by his responses.

  “I’m telling you,” he told the Cubs executives, “all I want is a chance to go out there and help the Cubs win the World Series. I’ll do anything. I’ll make a catch. I’ll run the bases. I’ll get a hit.”

  He began to break down emotionally.

  “Just trust me,” he said. “I win. I’m a winner. I know how to contribute to winning. I want to be a part of it. Trust me. I won’t let you down.”

  “He got emotional,” Epstein said. “His grandparents had just died and he had just won another gold medal for Team USA and he was crying at times during the meeting.”

/>   They were sold. The Cubs took Almora with the sixth pick of the draft. They signed him to a $3.9 million bonus. Epstein was thrilled with the pick, but he knew that as an 18-year-old high school pick Almora needed four or five years of development. Almora was a potential impact player, but his development curve was too long for Epstein to count him as one of the four impact players he knew he needed by 2016. Epstein still needed three impact players to add to Rizzo.

  He would get one of them in the draft the next year.

  The Cubs “earned” the second pick of the 2013 draft by losing 101 games in 2012, Epstein’s first year in Chicago. It was the third-most losses in franchise history, trailing only the 103 losses from 1962 and 1966. Epstein had arrived in Chicago to such fanfare that at the start of the season the Chicago Sun-Times published a photo illustration of Epstein walking on water—Lake Michigan, to be exact. By the end of the season the newspaper had reprised the image to show Epstein with all but his head under the same waters. The headline read “S.O.S.” with a subhead that warned, “Forget walking on water. Cubs boss Theo Epstein might sink if he doesn’t focus on the present.”

  The 2013 draft was, of course, loaded with pitchers, and other teams continued to gobble them up. Twenty of the 39 picks in the first round, including supplemental picks, would be pitchers.

  Finding big-bodied pitchers who threw in the mid-90s, even in high school, was becoming easier and easier. Because of advances in youth coaching and training, the development of velocity began earlier and reached higher heights. The supply of hard throwers kept growing, but baseball teams kept drafting them as if the supply were shrinking—except the Cubs.

  Two big-bodied throwers, in particular, stood out in the 2013 draft class: Mark Appel from Stanford University and Jon Gray from the University of Oklahoma. The Astros again owned the first pick in the draft, the Cubs owned the second, and the Rockies owned the third. The Cubs had Appel, Gray, and a third baseman from the University of San Diego, Kris Bryant, rated as the three best talents in the draft. Epstein, Hoyer, and McLeod met with all three players. They met Bryant in late May in the lobby of a hotel in Stockton, California, where San Diego was competing in the West Coast Conference baseball tournament, a tournament San Diego would win as Bryant hit his 31st home run, far and away the most in the nation.

  Wanting to build his team around high-character position players, Epstein was leaning away from the pitchers and toward Bryant all along. But that day in Stockton solidified his decision.

  “It was like, ‘How can you not love everything about the guy?’ ” Epstein said. “He’s a machine. We all came out of that meeting like, ‘If we have daughters, that’s the guy we’d like her to marry.’ He can handle any situation, he knows exactly what to say, he’s a genuinely good person, he cares about baseball, he’s awesome, but always looking to get better. I don’t think there’s a situation that could throw him off his game, on the field or off the field.

  “He’s the safest stock, the best bet, that there is. He was just so polished. We came away thinking, That’s a face of a franchise right there. And we want it to be ours.”

  Houston, however, controlled Bryant’s fate. The Cubs would not get their franchise player if the Astros took Bryant with the first pick. And Chicago did not see another impact position player in the draft like Bryant. So for weeks leading up to the draft, the Cubs created a smokescreen. Their executives and scouts downplayed their interest in Bryant. They played along with the big narrative in baseball that everybody wants pitching and that Appel and Gray were The Next Big Things to come along to a big league mound. The Rockies, picking third, were so convinced by this chatter that the Astros would take Appel and the Cubs would grab Gray that they began to focus heavily on Bryant.

  “[Rockies GM] Dan O’Dowd just assumed we were taking Gray,” Hoyer said. “He said, ‘We thought Bryant was ours’ and they were over the moon about it.”

  The Astros bought into the established narrative about prioritizing pitching. They took Appel with the first pick. Appel also was attractive to them because he grew up in West Houston and because, as a college senior, he did not have much leverage in negotiating his signing bonus. Houston saved $1.45 million by signing him under slot money for $6.35 million, money they could use to sign other players.

  “This is the most significant investment the Astros have made in their history in an amateur player and we hope we’re investing a lot in him in the future,” Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow said when he announced the signing. “We believe it’s going to be a long-term relationship. This is the beginning step. It’s not the end. It’s very exciting.”

  Appel never threw a pitch for the Astros. They traded him to Philadelphia in a deal to acquire a relief pitcher, Ken Giles, after Appel struggled for three seasons in their minor league system.

  The Cubs, thankful, signed Bryant to a $6.7 million bonus. Gray fell to the Rockies.

  “That was a turning point for us,” Hoyer said. “Everybody was really excited. There was one position player that was in the top three and we got him. We knew we had a really good player. But we didn’t think he’d be this good this fast. We didn’t have any idea about how quickly he would make adjustments. It was incredible. We kept pushing him, waiting for him to struggle, and he just didn’t struggle.”

  Bryant, in annual succession, was College Player of the Year, Arizona Fall League Most Valuable Player, Minor League Player of the Year, National League Rookie of the Year, and, in 2016, National League Most Valuable Player.

  “What’s most impressive,” Hoyer said, “is that, as good as he is, I think he’s going to figure out what he didn’t like about his game and go fix it. He’s someone that truly wants to be great.”

  Two years on the job, Epstein had acquired two of the four young, high-impact, high-character position players to build a championship-ready team for 2016: Rizzo and Bryant. The next year, in the June draft, he would add a third: Schwarber. And less than a month after that, Epstein found his fourth young, high-impact, high-character player in a place known to be difficult to acquire such gems: he went back to the trade market.

  In May 2014, in preparation for the July 31 trade deadline, Epstein and Hoyer split up the teams they talked to about possible deals. Epstein’s biggest chip to trade was Jeff Samardzija, a pitcher who had rejected the team’s offer of a contract extension worth nearly $80 million. One of the teams assigned to Hoyer was Toronto. The Blue Jays had expressed strong interest in Samardzija as far back as spring training. Hoyer talked to them about young pitchers Daniel Norris, Aaron Sanchez, and Marcus Stroman.

  One of the teams assigned to Epstein was Oakland. The Athletics were in the thick of the American League West race and needed a starting pitcher. Beane let Epstein know he was interested in Samardzija.

  “I’m not sure you guys have enough,” Epstein said to Beane, “unless you want to talk about Addison Russell.”

  “We would consider that,” Beane said.

  The hair on Epstein’s arms nearly stood on end. Russell was only 20 years old and rated by Baseball America as the 14th best prospect in baseball. As a high school shortstop in Florida, Russell played on the same 18U USA Team as Almora. The Cubs had acquired loads of information on Russell and were especially impressed with his makeup, but they regarded Almora as the safer pick because of his longer track record of success. They had data on Almora going back to when he was 15 years old.

  Also, in his junior season Russell fell out of shape and ballooned to 225 pounds. He grew so big that scouts wondered if he would have to move off shortstop, a doubt that decreased his value. Russell did drop his weight to 190 by his senior year, but by then his stock had slipped slightly. Russell fell to Oakland with the 11th overall pick.

  “To defend our scouts,” Hoyer said, “we were drafting sixth. And once you have a hiccup on a guy, you don’t have much time to overcome it. We liked him a lot, but he was written off as not quite good enough for six.”

  Russell hit .36
9 in his first year in pro ball, 2012. That fall Epstein and Hoyer watched Russell play Instructional League games against Chicago’s prospects.

  “He destroyed us,” Hoyer said. “Watching this guy hit doubles in the gaps, we hadn’t seen the same player in high school. He was just so impressive. We went back and dug into all the reports again. Reading the reports, he was super young back then, had the ability to play multiple positions, and every scout who went to go watch him mentioned how attentive he was in the field. He was locked in on every single pitch.”

  In reviewing their original reports on Russell, the Cubs had no questions about his character. Russell was the oldest of four siblings raised in Pensacola, Florida, by his mother, Milany, and his stepfather, Wayne Russell, who has been part of his life since he was a toddler. With both parents often working, Addison took on many responsibilities in the raising of his two younger sisters and his younger brother. He always played against older competition, yet seemed to be one of the more mature, quietly confident players.

  (So humble and reserved is Russell, in fact, that in time Maddon would encourage him to be more outgoing. Once Maddon began managing him, in 2015, he found Russell to be too quiet for a middle infielder. To get Russell more engaged with the coaching staff and teammates, Maddon gave him a reading assignment: Stephen King’s 11/22/63, the historical novel about the Kennedy assassination. Maddon asked Russell to report back to him every 50 to 100 pages to discuss it. It was Maddon’s way of not only connecting with a 21-year-old who had played only 14 games above Double-A, but also helping develop the communication skills of someone he regarded as a future leader. The book gave them plenty of opportunities to chat—it runs 849 pages.)

  Once Beane mentioned that Russell could be had, Hoyer said, “Then we went into overdrive scouting Russell. He had been out with a hamstring injury. We scouted his rehab in Arizona. We followed him every step of the way.”

  After the draft in June—when Epstein obtained Schwarber—Beane and Epstein spoke again. Beane told Epstein he would not trade Russell for Samardzija straight up.