The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  “I want you guys to feel comfortable coming to me if there’s anything you need,” Arrieta told them. “If you have anything with your hips, stiffness in your back, anything, that’s the time when I want you guys to feel comfortable coming to me. Just ask me, ‘What are the one or two movements on this reformer that can help me prepare that day?’ ”

  The offer to help his teammates illustrated just how far Arrieta had come in his career. The classic underachiever had become a leader.

  “One of my biggest motivating factors obviously is to make myself as good as I possibly can be in all areas of my life, but also to benefit my teammates,” Arrieta said. “This is something I talked about at the [Texas Christian University] alumni banquet. I talked about how, when my career first started, I was trying to be the best I could be for myself, and I think that’s how a lot of guys are initially. You want to be the best player you can possibly be on an individual level. I talked about how that’s drastically changed for me, based on relationships that I’ve developed, how I’ve grown and matured mentally and physically, not only as a player but as a person—getting to know teammates’ families and getting to know their kids. I want them to know I will help them anytime.”

  The construction of a championship team is granular. The final picture is a Seurat painting. As with many tiny dots of color, there are millions of reasons and thousands of cascading events that help explain how in five years the Cubs morphed from a 101-loss team into a world championship team. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a handful of those reasons and events that were more significant than the acquisition and transformation of Jacob Joseph Arrieta, better known as Jake to the baseball public, and, because of his competitiveness and hirsuteness, Beast to his family and friends.

  Theo Epstein, sitting on a cache of hitting prospects with designs to draft even more, knew his plan to rebuild the Cubs was nothing but a sleek sports car without wheels unless he came up with elite starting pitching. He had none of it in 2012, his first season with Chicago. He tried 12 starting pitchers that season, relying mostly on Jeff Samardzija, Travis Wood, Paul Maholm, Chris Volstad, Ryan Dempster, and Matt Garza. Then he found Arrieta.

  The story of how his team turned the worst starting pitcher in the history of the Baltimore Orioles into a Cy Young Award winner for the Cubs is emblematic of all of the Cubs’ best practices rolled into one: the shrewd evaluation of talent; the emphasis on the growth of the whole person, not just the player; and the culture of teamwork, both in the front office and at the playing level. The story begins with Epstein casting a wide net of opinion that stretched far beyond metrics.

  After the 2012 season, as he does each year, Epstein took a Change of Scenery survey. He asked his 40 or so scouts and baseball operations people to submit a list of names of major and minor league players they believed would flourish with a change of scenery and why. Clashes with a manager, problems at home, an injury kept quiet, a positional logjam—anything could be holding back a player that didn’t show up in traditional metrics. As the lists came in that year, one name kept turning up more than others: Jake Arrieta. The Cubs’ intelligence was clear on Arrieta: he was healthy, he had an excellent work ethic, he had an elite power arm, but he was stymied in Baltimore, where he had spent six years in the organization, much of it going back and forth between the Orioles and the minors while listening to enough different pitching coaches to fill a choir. Arrieta’s time with the Orioles would only worsen in 2013, which gave the Cubs the opening they needed.

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  Jake Arrieta was blessed with a great arm, the kind of blessing that becomes a curse when the pitcher does not deliver well enough and quickly enough, according to expectations.

  “I heard from day one, even in college, ‘You have the best stuff on the team. Your stuff is incredible,’ ” Arrieta said. “I almost got tired of hearing it.”

  Arrieta grew up in Plano, Texas. His father, Lou, had been an outstanding ballplayer himself, with a full ride waiting for him at the Air Force Academy. That’s when he met his future wife, Lynda. Jake came along quickly when Lou was 18 and Lynda was 19. That was the end of Lou’s college plans.

  “My dad put it all aside and went to Dallas to drive an 18-wheeler for several years,” Arrieta said.

  Lou eventually took a job with his father’s construction company in Dallas before becoming a senior estimator with another company. Every day when Lou came home from work, Jake would be waiting for him. Lou would grab a bucket of baseballs, they would walk across the street to a Little League field, and Lou would throw batting practice to his son until it was too dark to see his pitches.

  One day Jake, a right-handed hitter, tried to pull every pitch over the leftfield fence. He constantly “stepped in the bucket,” opening his front side in an exaggerated manner to try to pull the pitch. Lou told him to stop. Jake kept trying to pull home runs. So Lou threw his next pitch right at his son, and then another, and another.

  “He started drilling me,” Arrieta said, “and after the third or fourth time I had a few choice words for him and flipped him the bird. And he chased me around the field for like 30 minutes. I tried to tire him out until he couldn’t run anymore.

  “Now, being a father going to work every day and coming home tired, I know how difficult it can be to have the energy and do that two to three hours a night. I don’t know how he did it. I don’t. But every day I thank him for it. He coached me in every sport until I was 14. He was dedicated and allowed me to have every opportunity to play this game.”

  The boy noticed traits in his father that he would adopt as part of his own identity: a fierce work ethic and imposing physicality.

  “I learned how to be resilient and how to be relentless in how I work from him,” Arrieta said. “I can remember as a kid—I was probably 12 years old—and I always did chores with my dad, especially in the yard, mowing the lawn, raking leaves, trimming trees and bushes. We really bonded over that. One of the things I really enjoyed was taking everything out of our garage, cleaning it out, and putting everything back in nice and neat and perfect the way I saw it. As I cleaned the garage out, I would Rollerblade in the garage in circles with dumbbells in my hands for at least an hour.

  “I didn’t develop physically until I think my sophomore year in high school. That was something that kind of bothered me. Looking back, it was just a matter of time that I hit my growth spurt and filled out. But my interest in fitness and nutrition started when I was about 10 to 12 years old, and I slowly got into it.”

  As a junior at Plano East High School in 2003, Arrieta didn’t pitch all that much. He was stuck behind three senior pitchers who threw in the 90s for a team that reached the regional finals. Plano East, hurt by graduations, fell the next year to 11–19. Arrieta did pitch as a senior—he also played third base—but wound up with more home runs (three) than wins (two). Arrieta was not named to the first team all-district team, nor was he named to the second team. He was listed as an honorable mention.

  The Cincinnati Reds took a flier on Arrieta that year with a selection in the 31st round of the draft. He had no interest in signing.

  “I wasn’t ready,” he said. “Both parents wanted me to go to school. The draft kind of changed my outlook a bit. In a sense I thought, maybe if I got to a JUCO for a year I’ll keep developing and growing and be ready after that.”

  Arrieta attended Weatherford Junior College, and though he didn’t have a big year statistically, his velocity climbed to the mid-90s and he earned a spot in the Texas Collegiate Summer League. One day that summer, Texas Christian University coach Jim Schlossnagle planned to scout a relief pitcher on Arrieta’s team. TCU assistant coach Todd Whitting told the coach, “You don’t have to get there until the fifth or sixth inning.”

  “If I’m going,” Schlossnagle said, “I’m going to watch the whole game.”

  Arrieta happened to be the starting pitcher that game. Schlossnagle had never seen him pitch before. By the second inning Schlos
snagle turned to Whitting and said, “Forget the reliever. Who is this Arrieta guy?”

  “I’m not sure,” Whitting said.

  Schlossnagle immediately wanted Arrieta on his team. Even before the game was over, he approached Arrieta and spoke through a chain-link fence between the two of them.

  “Listen,” Schlossnagle told Arrieta, “my best pitcher just left and about 130 innings went with him. I need you to come on campus and be our Friday night starter.”

  Arrieta quickly agreed to attend TCU.

  “I tell everybody, to this day, that’s the best opportunity I’ve been given my entire career,” he said. “For somebody like that to have the faith in me after seeing me pitch just once—I never looked back from that moment. I took that not only as an opportunity but as a wake-up call. It was an opportunity to take my career to the next level at a really prestigious private school. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money. I wouldn’t have been able to go to TCU. I probably would have gone to Oklahoma State or a small school, but from the first day I stepped on campus I wanted to be the best I could be academically and on the field.”

  Arrieta went 23–7 in his two seasons at TCU. Baltimore took him in the fifth round of the 2007 draft. Arrieta signed too late to pitch that season, but in 2008, his first pro season, he tore up the Class-A Carolina League (2.87 ERA in 20 starts) and earned an invitation to Orioles spring training camp in 2009, along with fellow pitching prospects Chris Tillman and Brian Matusz.

  “I’ve been watching pitchers for a long time,” Orioles manager Dave Trembley said then, “and I would say those three guys are as good as I have seen at any one time coming up through somebody’s system.”

  Trembley was fired by the time Arrieta made his major league debut in 2010 under Juan Samuel, the interim manager between Trembley and Buck Showalter. Thus began four turbulent seasons for Arrieta in which he shuttled between Baltimore and the minor leagues, worked with four different pitching coaches in the majors and minors (Rick Kranitz, Mark Connor, Rick Adair, and Rick Petersen) and constantly tweaked his mechanics to try to please whatever coach he worked with at the time.

  The relationship with Adair, who took over for Connor midway through the 2011 season as Orioles pitching coach, never clicked. At the time Adair took over, Arrieta pitched with his natural cross-fire style—stepping toward the right-hand batter’s box and throwing across his body—from the first base side of the rubber and with his hands at his belt to start his delivery. A month later he was pitching from the middle of the rubber and swinging his hands over his head. A few months after that, the Orioles banned pitchers in their organization from using the cutter, one of Arrieta’s best pitches, out of fear it sapped fastball velocity.

  By the next April, Arrieta still pitched from the middle of the rubber, but his hands were back at his belt. By May he was back on the first base side of the rubber. By September he had trimmed his windup to a modified stretch position. By the next year he was back to the middle of the rubber with a huge change: Adair took away his cross-fire step in favor of having him stride directly to the plate. The Orioles wanted Arrieta to be a conventional four-seam fastball/overhand curveball pitcher. Over the two calendar years, trying to be that pitcher under Adair, Arrieta went 6–16 with a 6.30 ERA.

  “There were so many things in Baltimore not many people know about,” Arrieta said. “I had struggles with my pitching coach. A lot of guys did. We got to a point—three or four guys, Tillman, Matusz, [Zach] Britton—that guys were just really uncomfortable in their own skin at the time, trying to be the guys they weren’t. You can attest how difficult it is to try to reinvent your mechanics against the best competition in the world.

  “I feel like I was playing a tug-of-war, a constant, continuous tug-of-war, trying to make the adjustments I was being told to and knowing in the back of my mind I can do things differently and be better than what I was showcasing on the field. It was such a tremendous struggle for me because, as a second- and third-year player, you want to be coachable. I knew I got [to the majors] for a reason and I was confused about why I was changing that now. You feel at that moment everybody has your best interest in mind, but you come to find out that’s not necessarily the case.”

  So lost was Arrieta that on one night, June 3, 2012, in St. Petersburg, he found himself back in the clubhouse after getting knocked out in the fifth inning by Tampa Bay and he could not recall how it happened. All he could remember was how he was consumed by thoughts about his mechanics on the mound. Am I balanced? Is my front side where it needs to be? Is my landing spot good? The actual game was a blur. He had to look at the video the next day to know how he gave up four runs.

  “And I was looking at somebody who wasn’t myself,” he said.

  The low point was yet to come. That happened in June 2013. Arrieta was 27 years old and banished to Triple-A Norfolk. His ERA in seven starts for the Orioles that year was 7.32, and for his Orioles career it was 5.46, the worst for any pitcher with 60 starts since the franchise moved to Baltimore from St. Louis in 1954.

  When the Orioles demoted Arrieta to the minors that year, Showalter said, “I can’t sit here and tell you that anything going on there physically is going to be a big difference. Most of us are looking at how we’re failing him.”

  So down was Arrieta while in Norfolk that he told his wife he was about ready to quit baseball.

  “I’m thinking about not playing any more after this season,” he told her. “I’m close to my business degree from TCU. I’m really good with people. I can easily go into business.”

  Said Arrieta, “But then the next hour I’d go, ‘How crazy an idea is that that I would stop playing this game that I love so quickly?’ But those really are some of the thoughts lots of players go through when they get adversity on a consistent basis. It was difficult to fail on such a frequent basis. It became hard.

  “They wanted me to throw in a direct line to the plate. So if 80 percent of left-handed pitchers throw across their body, what’s the difference for a right-hander? There is none. People don’t have answers for that. I developed the way I threw. I look at pictures when I’m 10 years old, pitching off a mound, and I threw across my body slightly.”

  As the Cubs’ good fortune would have it, the Orioles established themselves as a contender in 2013 and Baltimore general manager Dan Duquette needed a veteran starting pitcher to chase down Boston in the American League East. By late June, Duquette opened trade discussions with Chicago general manager Jed Hoyer about Cubs right-hander Scott Feldman. Epstein and Hoyer had signed Feldman straight out of the bargain bin of free agents just seven months earlier: it took only a one-year, $6 million contract to get a 29-year-old pitcher who was 6–11 with a 5.09 ERA the previous season. Now the Orioles were knocking loudly on the Cubs’ door ready to give up talent to get him. Feldman was simply a placeholder for Chicago. He wasn’t part of the rebuild, not at his age and not when he was eligible to leave as a free agent after that season.

  Hoyer remembered the Change of Scenery survey. He asked Duquette right away for Arrieta in return for Feldman. Duquette, knowing how Arrieta never flourished in the Baltimore system, quickly agreed. Hoyer was taken aback a bit by how quickly the deal seemed to be coming together. Most trade talks are much more rigorous tugs-of-war to try to even out the value going back and forth. Sensing more room to negotiate, Hoyer decided to make a play for another hidden power arm, reliever Pedro Strop, a right-hander with a 97-mph sinker who, like Arrieta, was underachieving with an ERA north of seven.

  Duquette balked. He told Hoyer he would need another player from him to make such a deal work. Talks hit a snag. Hoyer grew nervous. He desperately wanted Arrieta and at one point virtually had him in hand, but by pushing for Strop he risked overplaying his hand and losing Arrieta. Duquette might easily move on to another club to find the veteran starter he wanted. To get the deal back on track, Hoyer offered up Steve Clevenger, a 27-year-old backup catcher who had hit .199 for the Cubs over parts of three season
s. The sweetener to adding Clevenger was that the catcher grew up in Baltimore.

  On July 3, 2013, the clubs agreed to the deal. Epstein and Hoyer had just traded three months of control of a journeyman pitcher (Feldman) and a 27-year-old backup catcher (Clevenger) for nine years of combined service for two young pitchers with mid-90s velocity. Duquette called Arrieta in Norfolk that night to give him the news.

  “We appreciate everything you’ve done in an Orioles uniform,” Duquette told him. “We just think it’s appropriate to move on.”

  “Thank you,” Arrieta responded. “I enjoyed my time in Baltimore.”

  “I really did,” Arrieta said in hindsight. “I learned so much. I was a young, dumb kid coming to the big leagues and had to be whipped into shape from time to time. It got me to this point. I’m better for it. I’m stronger for it.”

  Soon he heard from the Cubs. The first to call was Chris Bosio, the Cubs’ pitching coach and a former right-handed pitcher who lasted 11 years in the majors with a cross-fire delivery.

  “Look, man, I’ve been through a lot,” Arrieta told him. “All I want to do is come over there and be myself and be a winner. That’s the guy I was my whole life, and now I want to put it on display for a new organization.”

  “Jake,” Bosio said, “we know what kind of stuff you have. We want you to come over here and be yourself.”

  The Cubs assigned Arrieta to Triple-A Iowa. Bosio monitored his starts by reading scouting reports and watching video.

  “He was having a really hard time with pitch efficiency,” Bosio said. “His stuff was nasty, and he wasn’t getting hit, but he was throwing like 110 pitches in five innings. And I was getting the feedback from [manager] Marty Pevey and Mike Mason, who was the pitching coach. I said ‘Listen, just try to get him more aggressive right now. There’s nothing I can do over the phone.’ But I know what I saw on the videotape and it was so exciting.