by Tom Verducci
Epstein was impressed with Edwards’s athleticism, which allowed his thin frame to generate power, and the natural cutting action on his fastball, which reminded him of the famous cutter of Mariano Rivera. By 2015, convinced that Edwards was not built to withstand the rigors of starting 30 times and pitching 200 innings in the big leagues, the Cubs converted him to a reliever. His average fastball velocity jumped from 91.9 miles per hour in 2014 to 94.1 in 2015, then jumped again in 2016 to 95.8.
In 41 relief appearances for the Cubs in 2015 and 2016, Edwards struck out 56 batters in 402⁄3 innings. Among the 122 pitchers who made their first 41 major league appearances with the Cubs, the String Bean Slinger allowed the fewest walks plus hits per inning of all of them (0.86).
Justin Grimm (2013). A struggling rookie in the Texas rotation at the time of the trade that included Edwards, Grimm was throwing 92 miles per hour and working to develop a changeup or slider to complement his fastball-curveball combination. As with Edwards, the Cubs converted him to a reliever and told him to can his changeup and slider. His velocity spiked to 95 miles an hour and his curveball use doubled. Batters hit just .152 and .161 against his curveball in 2015 and 2016, respectively.
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The Cubs used every available means to find pitchers. It was one of Epstein’s strong suits, dating to his early days in Boston when he dispatched a team of interns to photocopy 30 years of batting records filed away at the NCAA offices.
“He gathers information better than anyone I’ve ever worked for,” Borzello said. “He wants as many opinions as he can get from people he trusts before he makes his decision. Ultimately, he weighs everybody’s opinions before he signs a player or trades for a player. You’re going to be asked and he wants your opinion.
“He hires people that are going to stand up for their own opinions. He doesn’t surround himself with yes-men. He likes hearing what you have to say and why. Ultimately he makes the decision, but he’s really good at getting the information he wants from everybody.
“When you work other places you learn it’s not always like that. It could just be that they decide, ‘We’re going to do this’ or the circle of people being asked is small. With Theo you always feel like he knows he has people working for him who can be a resource, who know people, like if you want a background check on somebody. I may know a clubbie or a bullpen catcher who caught this guy. So it’s not just the stat sheet he’s looking at. It’s, ‘What’s his personality like? What’s it like when things are going good? What’s it like when things are going bad?’ ”
While scouring for pitchers and information before the 2016 draft, for instance, Epstein and his scouts found a 6-foot-7 junior right-hander named Stephen Ridings at tiny Haverford College. Haverford is a prestigious liberal arts school near Philadelphia with just 1,200 students and an excellent Division III baseball program. Haverford had just won its second Centennial Conference championship in three years. It has produced exactly one major league player, Bill Lindsay, who was born in 1881 and played his last game exactly 100 years before.
At the start of 2016, Ridings was a relative unknown in scouting circles. He primarily had been a middle reliever with sketchy command and a mediocre 85-miles-per-hour fastball during his first two years at Haverford. After gaining strength over the winter, however, Ridings suddenly began throwing in the low- to mid-90s, and once hit 98. The Cubs scouted every one of his starts, including his opening start, when he was on no other team’s radar.
Several teams invited Ridings to predraft workouts, which usually involved having him throw a bullpen session. Few teams rated Ridings highly, in part because he had pitched in Division III and had inconsistent mechanics. The Cubs, however, invited him to throw on the game mound at Wrigley Field. Why the game mound? They wanted to analyze his form and his pitches with TrackMan, the state-of-the-art pitch-tracking system installed in all major league parks to provide information such as the speed, spin rate, and spin axis of pitches, and the release point and stride of the pitcher.
When the Cubs looked at the information on Ridings from TrackMan, they were giddy with excitement. Two metrics especially stood out. Ridings threw with such a long stride that he ranked among the most extreme outliers in Major League Baseball. Ridings released the ball a full seven feet in front of the pitching rubber, placing him with Cubs reliever Aroldis Chapman and Yankees starter CC Sabathia among the pitchers who release the ball the closest to home plate.
The other metric that TrackMan revealed about Ridings was his odd release point. Though Ridings is 6-foot-7, because he throws with a long stride and doesn’t move his arm far away from his body, he actually throws with a low release point. The ball comes from an area closer to his head than most hitters are accustomed to seeing.
Hitters learn to expect where a pitch will be by a mental process called “chunking,” in which the mind synthesizes thousands of pitches into an expected path—based on release, velocity, and spin. Pitchers who throw in a way that is much different than the majority of pitchers—such as submarine pitchers, knuckleball pitchers, split-fingered fastball pitchers—own an advantage because the way they throw doesn’t fit in the “chunking process.” In 2014, for instance, the Giants won the World Series with key relief work from Yusmeiro Petit, who flummoxed hitters with a fastball that traveled only 89 miles per hour. Despite its lackluster speed, it was hard to hit because he threw from an odd release point—closer to his head than the standard release point.
Perhaps 20 years ago a scout might have written that Ridings had a fastball with “late life.” But in 2016 the Cubs could use laser-guided, military-grade technology to compile hard data to measure his fastball. When the Cubs considered his stride length, his unusual release point, his velocity, and his spin rate, they determined that his fastball was the type of fastball that would confound hitters. They used data to see a Division III pitcher with a swing-and-miss fastball. The Cubs surprised other clubs when they took Ridings in the eighth round, much higher than teams expected. (Flush with young position players, Epstein and Hoyer pivoted in that 2016 draft: starting with their first pick, in round 3, they used 13 of their first 14 picks on four-year college pitchers.)
In Mike Montgomery’s case, Epstein saw a pitcher still learning how to use the stuff that in 2008 made him a first-round draft pick of the Kansas City Royals. Montgomery labored in Triple-A for four consecutive seasons before getting a chance to stick with the 2016 Mariners in their bullpen.
“I felt like if I could just get my velocity up to the mid-90s, that was the key,” Montgomery said. “I gained about 15 pounds over the winter and changed some things in my delivery to use my lower half more. I thought I started to figure out some things right before the trade. I know some people on the Mariners’ coaching staff weren’t happy they traded me.”
In 2016 Montgomery’s velocity shot up from 91.2 to 94.3 miles per hour. If, as Epstein projected, Montgomery eventually would transition back to starting, such velocity would be exceedingly rare from a lefty in the rotation. In 2016, only one qualified left-handed starter threw that hard: Danny Duffy of Kansas City, who came up through the Royals system with Montgomery.
The Cubs would make one immediate tweak with Montgomery: they wanted him to throw his curveball more often. Montgomery’s curve was a nasty one, but he had been using it in the old-school manner of a complementary pitch. Most pitchers learned the traditional foundation of pitching: pitch off your fastball, sprinkle in your secondary pitches. As teams dove further into data, however, they pushed pitchers with exceptional off-speed pitches to use them more as feature pitches than complementary ones. Clayton Kershaw, Rich Hill, and Drew Pomeranz, for instance, became better pitchers once they threw their best pitch, the curveball, more often.
After Maddon saw Montgomery for a few outings with the Cubs, he was asked September 1 if Montgomery reminded him of Pomeranz, who became a breakout All-Star in 2016 because of his heavier curveball usage.
“No, not Pomeranz—Kersh
aw,” Maddon said. “You’re talking about a tall left-hander with mid-90s velocity who can drop that breaking ball at any time on both sides of the plate, plus he has a great changeup. You just don’t see left-handers with that kind of stuff very often, other than Kershaw. I’m not saying he’s Kershaw right now, but his stuff reminds me of Kershaw. I believe he is a 15-game winner waiting to happen.
“I like Montgomery, I really do. Montgomery, if this guy ever really thinks he’s good, he could be really good. I really like him. Physically, this guy is really talented. The moment he really believes it, he can be very, very good. And if that happens this month, so be it. I’ll take it.”
Montgomery quickly became another in Epstein’s long line of pitchers who performed better with the Cubs than elsewhere. Part of the explanation for these breakthroughs was the run-prevention infrastructure the Cubs put in place in 2015. By 2016 it was a mature system humming at optimal efficiency. The 2016 Cubs ranked as one of the greatest defensive teams of all time. Start with this: it wasn’t easy to put the ball in play against their pitchers. The staff allowed the fewest balls in play in any full season since the live ball era began in 1920. And when balls were hit into play, the Cubs’ defense turned 72.8 percent of those batted balls into outs, the highest conversion rate since the 1990 Athletics.
Heyward in rightfield and Rizzo at first base each won Gold Gloves. Dexter Fowler, playing a deeper centerfield than usual, improved his play on defense. Infielder Javier Baez was a wizard with the glove wherever he roamed, especially when it came to his extraordinary skills at tagging runners. Bryant improved at third base, where coach Gary Jones schooled him in playing lower to the ground and curbing his habitual tapping of the ball in his glove before throwing it.
The Cubs defended the field with athletic players who seemed to be in the right place almost all the time. Judging by batting average by hitters on balls in play, every starter never was better at suppressing hitters in any full season of their careers: Jason Hammel (.271), Lackey (.259), Lester (.258), Hendricks (.252), and Arrieta (.242), all of whom were far below the league average (.301).
“This is a nice example—a pretty extreme example—of what happens when you marry pitching and defense,” Epstein said. “It’s a beautiful thing when it works together. It’s hard to quantify some of it, like the confidence it breeds in a pitcher. When it works, they aren’t afraid of contact. And when you’re not afraid of contact, you can be more efficient and more effective. When you’re confident that balls in play are going to be outs, it’s easier to game-plan.”
Said Hoyer, “We ended up being an elite run-prevention team. Years ago if you told me we would win in 2016, I’d probably have guessed we just mashed people. We scored runs, but it wasn’t like we were the 2004 Red Sox and destroyed you. We started out with all these bats as our core, but ultimately pitching and defense carried us.”
Another key part of the run-prevention infrastructure was tailoring the right game plans for pitchers. Montgomery provided yet another example of making the best use of a pitcher’s stuff. The Cubs traded for him knowing his wicked curveball had been underused. In June with Seattle, for instance, Montgomery threw his curveball just 18 percent of the time, even though nobody managed to get a hit off the 45 curveballs he threw that month. By October with Chicago, Montgomery had doubled his curveball usage to 36 percent. Batters hit .111 off the pitch.
With Montgomery, Epstein’s batting average continued to be phenomenal on pitching acquisitions. The Cubs won 103 games in 2016, the most for the franchise since the 1910 team won 104 games. Of those 103 wins, 102 were credited to pitchers Epstein acquired from other teams after Tom Ricketts hired him after the 2011 season. The only homegrown win belonged to Rob Zastryzny, a second-round pick under Epstein in 2013.
Chicago would use 11 pitchers in the World Series. Epstein acquired every one of them from other organizations.
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Two days after the season ended, and three days before the Cubs were to begin the National League Division Series against the Giants, Maddon held his third and final team meeting of the year. He held it before a workout at Wrigley Field.
“Understand this right now,” Maddon told his players. “Something bad is going to happen. It will. And when it happens, we have to keep our heads and we’ve got to fight through it.
“Too many times in the past, in the postseason, I know we’ve got the other team by the look in the other team’s eyes. There’s a distant look. They’re anticipating bad. It’s almost like a concession look. I never want us to be that team. So know that something bad is going to happen. Know it is. Expect it to happen. And when it happens, we have to keep our heads and fight through it.”
The speech was inspired by the first major league postseason series in which Maddon participated. It was the 2002 American League Division Series. Maddon was the bench coach for the Anaheim Angels. They were playing the New York Yankees, who had won four World Series titles and five pennants in the previous six years. This Yankees team, however, was a team in transition. Stalwarts Scott Brosius, Paul O’Neill, Chuck Knoblauch, and Tino Martinez all were gone from the 2001 pennant winner.
The series was tied at one game each when the Yankees held a 6–3 lead on the Angels, heading into the sixth inning of Game 3. The Angels rallied to win the game, 9–6, scoring three runs in the bottom of the eighth.
The next day the Yankees held a 2–1 lead in the fifth inning. The Angels stormed back again. They scored eight runs in the fifth inning—smashing line drives all over the yard against pitcher David Wells—and eliminated New York with a 9–5 win. To this day, Maddon can still see the faces on the Yankees players as Anaheim rallied in both games. He saw the look of defeat on them. Yankees captain Derek Jeter would later tell reporters, “This isn’t the same team,” in response to questions about how the battle-hardened Yankees could crumble in Anaheim.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Maddon said. “I’m in the dugout and I look out on the field at these Yankees and it’s, ‘Holy shit. We’ve got ’em!’ which I never knew about because it was my first playoff.
“So I want my teams to never have that look. How do you not have it? You have to be prepared for something shitty to happen and when it does, it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world.”
It didn’t take long in the 2016 postseason for something bad to happen to Maddon’s team, and it went by the name of Johnny Cueto. The Game 1 starter for San Francisco was the Cubs’ worst nightmare, a pitcher who threw balls that looked like strikes, confusing the young Chicago hitters into a losing guessing game. Cueto’s changeup was particularly devious. He threw 23 of them. The Cubs tried to hit 13 of them, and they missed seven times, never managing to get a hit off the pitch.
Through seven innings the Cubs extracted only two hits off Cueto. Only six times did they even hit the ball with enough authority to get it out of the infield. From his perch at the dugout railing, Maddon felt a very bad vibe. He watched as hitter after hitter was retired meekly, and he knew the Cubs’ postseason lives came down to one thing: we’d better not see Johnny Cueto again.
Giants manager Bruce Bochy had four starters lined up for the Cubs: Cueto, former Cub Jeff Samardzija, postseason legend Madison Bumgarner, and left-hander Matt Moore. If the series went the distance, Cueto would get the ball again in Game 5 in a winner-take-all game. Maddon decided right then in Game 1 he wanted no part of seeing Cueto again, even if Lester was matching Cueto zero for zero on a windy night at Wrigley.
Then something happened with one out in the eighth inning that could happen nowhere else but Wrigley. On a full count from Cueto, Baez smashed a high fly ball to leftfield. It felt and looked like a home run to Baez, who quickly began to celebrate. But the baseball ran smack into a great wall of wind. Giants leftfielder Angel Pagan drifted underneath it, thinking more and more that he might catch it as it surrendered its fight against the wind. Then, just as Pagan reached up, his back to the ivy, the ball plopped into that wire “bask
et” jutting out from near the top of the wall. It was a phenomenon unique to Wrigley Field: a home run that neither cleared the wall nor was a live ball, inside-the-park varietal.
The home run was a gift from the original Bleacher Bums, the rowdies who populated the Wrigley bleachers in the 1960s as manager Leo Durocher’s Cubs began to play well enough to be taken seriously as contenders. Fortified by sunshine and beer, and with their numbers growing as the Cubs actually began to win, the Bums hassled opposing outfielders, threw objects on the field, reached over the wall to touch balls in play, and, when the urge struck, walked across the top of the wall just for the heck of it. Not surprisingly, given the amount of beer consumed in the bleachers, and the relatively narrow width of the wall, it wasn’t unusual for Bums to tumble off the wall and onto the warning track.
In 1970 the Cubs decided to do something about the unruly behavior. They became the first team to install video cameras to monitor the crowd in a baseball park. They also constructed the wire “basket” as a defense against fans interfering with play and falling onto the field. Thirty inches below the top of the wall, and angled at 45 degrees, a 42-inch wire screen was installed. The basket effectively shortened the distance needed for a home run at Wrigley Field by three feet. Forty-six years after it was installed to quell the hijinks of the Bleacher Bums, the basket helped win the Cubs a playoff game, 1–0.
Maddon still needed two more wins in the next three games to avoid seeing Cueto again. The Cubs gave him one of those wins in Game 2, by a 5–2 score, when Travis Wood, the winning pitcher, became the first reliever to hit a postseason home run since Rosy Ryan of the 1924 Giants. San Francisco rebounded with the comeback against Aroldis Chapman in Game 3. Five outs from elimination, the Giants rallied against the closer before finally winning in the 13th inning against Montgomery, who was working his fifth inning.