Book Read Free

The Cubs Way

Page 34

by Tom Verducci


  “I had Montgomery up, to get out of the inning,” Maddon said. “I think Edwards got up, too, to try to get out of the inning before we turned it over to Jon. That would have been too quick to get Jon ready.

  “It just looked like Kyle was a little bit off. I didn’t see the movement you normally see from the side. I was concerned, because if it’s going to get bad on him real early then it could get real bad and it’s hard to recover from a big number. So I was…I didn’t know what to think. In June it’s a different story. But it’s the last game of the year. You just can’t take any chances that he’s going to settle down or not.”

  The count was 3-and-0 to Lindor. The young Cleveland shortstop had seen 48 pitches in his fledgling big league career on 3-and-0 counts. He didn’t swing at any of the first 47. Then, on the last weekend of the season, after Cleveland already had clinched the American League Central, in a meaningless game in Kansas City against a pitcher named Brian Flynn, Lindor decided, for the heck of it, to swing at a 3-and-0 pitch. He slammed a three-run homer. Of such insouciance ideas are born.

  Now here he was in the seventh game of the World Series with a 3-and-0 count against a pitcher barely holding on to his place in the game. Hendricks threw a sinker, almost to the exact spot down and in where he missed for ball three. Lindor, for the second time in his big league life, decided to swing at a 3-and-0 pitch. He fouled off the borderline pitch. Hendricks came back with the same pitch—the third straight sinker, all between 87 and 88 miles per hour and all to nearly the same spot. This time Lindor flied out to leftfield.

  The next batter was Mike Napoli, one of five Cleveland starters with a Matrix number highlighted in blue on Maddon’s funkadelic lineup card—denoting the matchups that most favored Hendricks. (Those blue Matrix hitters would be as cold as Maddon’s math predicted, going 1-for-9 against Hendricks in the game.) With the count 0-and-2, Hendricks threw one of his cut changeups, but it cut too far away from Napoli for the hitter to be tempted to swing.

  Hendricks came back with his other changeup, the traditional fade changeup. It was one of the worst pitches he would throw all night. The pitch stayed in the strike zone, above the knees and on the inner half of the plate, running right into Napoli’s barrel. Napoli hammered it. By the time he could start running, however, it was cradled in the glove of third baseman Kris Bryant, who barely had to move to catch the line drive for the third out.

  “That’s another thing,” Maddon said regarding his worry over Hendricks. “He had pitched well at Napoli, and then all of a sudden when Napoli turns it loose like that I was a little concerned.”

  The third inning so spooked Maddon that even after Hendricks escaped it he ordered Lester to start throwing. Lester would throw in the bullpen for the next two innings, throwing a virtual game out there.

  “He threw a ton,” Ross said. “I don’t know what that was all about.” Ross caught Lester in the bullpen in the fourth inning, then handed the job to bullpen catcher Chad Noble as he left for the dugout, preparing to enter the game at any time.

  —

  Virtual smoke wafted from the main circuitry of Klubot in the fourth inning, such was the obvious toll of the extreme workload. Unable to put away hitters or command his pitches, he labored through 24 pitches, of which he managed to get the Cubs to swing and miss at just one. The resultant damage was another two runs.

  Kluber failed to finish off Bryant, leading off the inning, on four two-strike pitches, the last of which Bryant laced for a single. He then hit Rizzo with an 0-and-2 pitch. Bryant advanced to third on a force-out by Zobrist, and scored, daringly so, on a shallow fly ball by Russell. Kluber gained another two-strike count, this one to Contreras, and hung a curveball, which the thankful catcher roped for an RBI double. The Cubs led, 3–1.

  It was downright shocking to see Kluber powerless to put away hitters. During the season he held batters to a .121 batting average with two strikes. Among all qualified pitchers, only Arrieta was tougher to hit with two strikes than Kluber.

  Francona sent Kluber back out for the fifth inning, virtual pools of leaked oil collecting on the mound. The manager did so with half a heart. Über reliever Andrew Miller already was throwing in the Cleveland bullpen.

  As it turned out, Francona allowed Kluber to throw just one more pitch. It was one pitch too many. It was a slider to Baez, the hitter who had been unable to locate breaking balls all series if you gave him a GPS device. This one, though, invited violence. It was a hanger, a ball that spun up in the zone and had no bite. For days on end Maddon had been coaching Baez before games about letting the ball travel deeper on its path to the plate—to conquer his anxiety at the plate by buying himself more time in the hitting process, which meant hitting the ball the other way. Baez finally made good on all his manager’s tutorials. He cranked it over the rightfield wall, an opposite-field home run.

  Kluber left on the wrong side of a 4–1 game. He had faced 18 batters and struck out none of them. It was the first time in 145 career games he failed to strike out a batter.

  As Miller warmed up, Rizzo walked up from behind to Ross, who was standing on the top step of the dugout by the rail. He threw his arm around Ross’s shoulder and, smiling, made a confession.

  “I can’t control myself right now,” Rizzo said. “I’m trying my best.”

  “It’s understandable,” Ross said.

  “I’m an emotional wreck.”

  “I hear you. It’s only gonna get worse. Just continue to breathe. That’s all you can do, buddy. That’s all you can do. It’s only going to get worse.”

  Rizzo, the clubhouse leader who quoted movies the way English literature scholars quote Shakespeare, pulled from the Ron Burgundy archive.

  “I’m a glass case of emotions right now!”

  “Yeah. Wait ’til the ninth with this three-run lead.”

  Recalling the conversation, Rizzo said, “At first, yeah, I meant it. I’m a wreck every pitch. When I said the ‘glass case of emotions,’ I was just lightening the moment. It’s just that so much goes into every pitch. You try not to think about the outside noise as far as what’s on the line. But I don’t care who you are, there’s always some self-doubt and some nervous energy. It’s so hard to block it all out when it’s the biggest game possible. It was like that every night.”

  If you wanted to understand the brotherhood of the Cubs, the relationship between Rizzo and Ross was a good place to start. They first met in October 2008, when Ross was playing for the Boston Red Sox in the American League Championship Series against Tampa Bay. Rizzo was recovering from the chemotherapy to treat his cancer. The two of them shared the same agent, Ryan Gleichowski. Rizzo wanted to attend Games 6 and 7 in St. Petersburg.

  “My agent said, ‘I may need you to leave tickets for one of my minor league guys,’ ” Ross said. “So I met him there. It was the first time we met. My agent always raved about him, what a great guy he was.”

  Six years later, Ross was guesting as a postseason studio analyst for ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, when Rizzo swung by to make a few appearances. They went to lunch and hit it off. A few weeks later, Rizzo called Ross, who lives near Tallahassee, Florida, to ask for a field pass for the Notre Dame–Florida State football game. Rizzo knew that Ross’s brother-in-law was the chief of police there.

  “Sure, but with one condition,” Ross told him. “I have to be there with you.”

  Said Ross, “We ended up talking shop the whole game. The wife and kids were in the stands. What stood out in our conversation was he’s really mature in a lot of ways. He can relate to the old and the new. He’s young, but he can relate to everybody.

  “I was a free agent at the time. We talked a little bit like, ‘Man, it would be awesome to play together.’ ”

  Rizzo turned to Ross and told him, “We need somebody like you.”

  Ross signed with the Cubs and they became fast friends. Rizzo loved learning about the strategies and intricacies of baseball from Ross, whose experience as a catcher
helped Rizzo understand how pitchers wanted to attack him. Ross considered Rizzo to be the most important player on the team, not only because he played every day and was a run producer, but also because he connected with all players, regardless of their age or background. Knowing Rizzo’s importance, Ross made it his responsibility to ride Rizzo, making sure he kept grinding at his job, because if Rizzo eased off his work ethic it would send clues to the rest of the team to do the same.

  “I ride him hard,” Ross said. “Honestly, I don’t know why he likes me. I’m on his ass all the time.”

  The two became so close that Rizzo gave Ross a Father’s Day card during 2016. Rizzo signed it, “Thank you for everything you have done for me! Love, your son, Anthony.”

  Ross and Rizzo were also the two biggest influencers in the clubhouse, a leadership status never more apparent than when Chicago faced elimination in the World Series. It was Ross who began to turn the tide in the immediate wake of the Game 4 loss, when he heard someone throw their glove into the back of a locker and the room filled with dejection and negativity.

  Rizzo picked up on Ross’s lead in setting the right tone the next day. An hour before Game 5, he broke out his pregame inspirational and comedic presentation, quoting motivational lines from movies with no clothes on. The Cubs won, so Rizzo did it before Game 6, too. They won again, so he did it before Game 7 as well.

  After batting practice was over, and only an hour before the seventh game of the World Series, Rizzo stripped off all his clothes, cranked the theme from Rocky on the clubhouse stereo one more time, jumped on top of a coffee table, and began quoting lines from the movie and throwing his best shadow-boxing punches. Pitcher Hector Rondon, joining in on the hijinks, picked up an aerosol can of shoe cleaner and sprayed it in the direction of Rizzo’s groin.

  Startled and angered, Rizzo stopped and yelled, “What the heck, man!”

  He cut the music and stormed off toward the bathroom, where he went into the showers to clean off the spray.

  “I’m thinking, Dang, what’s he doing?” Ross said. “We can’t have this negative vibe right before the game. I go by there. I can tell he’s a little irritated. He is irritated.”

  Ten minutes went by. Rizzo finally emerged from the shower. He walked back silently to his locker with a towel around this waist. The room was quiet and uneasy.

  Ross walked up to Rizzo and broke the silence.

  “Hey! It’s not how many times you get knocked down…it’s how many times you get up!”

  Rizzo chuckled.

  “You know what?” he said. “You’re right!”

  Said Ross, “He rips the towel off, runs up, turns the music on again, and he jumps back on the coffee table and starts doing the Rocky motions again and shadow-boxes.”

  —

  After Rizzo and Ross shared their Ron Burgundy moment in the dugout, it was time for the Cubs to try something they hadn’t accomplished all series: dent the Cleveland bullpen. Andrew Miller, Bryan Shaw, and Cody Allen combined over six games to go 1–0 with a 0.69 ERA. They had struck out 43 percent of the batters they faced while allowing one run in 13 World Series innings. They were dominant.

  Fowler, who had homered off Miller in Game 4, the lefty’s last outing, greeted Miller in the fifth inning with a single. Miller restored order by getting Schwarber to hit into a double play.

  Bryant, as he did against Kluber in the fourth, pieced together another gallant at-bat. With the count 2-and-2, Miller threw Bryant five consecutive sliders, his signature pitch and his go-to option with two strikes. Batters hit just .133 off Miller’s two-strike slider during the regular season. But Bryant refused to yield against all five of them. He took one for a ball, fouled off the next three, and then took the last one, which barely missed the outside corner, for ball four.

  Rizzo was next, and with the count 1-and-2, Rizzo knew what was coming next from Miller: the slider. He was 0-for-3 against Miller in the series, including two strikeouts.

  “I was looking to not look like an idiot off Miller,” Rizzo said. “He had my number the whole series. Really, I was just trying to see a ball that [looked like it] would hit me, because I’m so on top of the plate off him—off lefties.”

  Rizzo’s entire postseason changed in the fifth inning of NLCS Game 4, when he switched from his Marucci model bat to one that belonged to teammate Matt Szczur. To that point, Rizzo was 2-for-26 in the postseason, and his first two at-bats in that game were typical of his struggles: rookie pitcher Julio Urias blew fastballs by him for strikeouts, one at 95 miles per hour and one at 94. Upon borrowing Szczur’s bat, Rizzo immediately hit a home run, and then a two-run single, and then another single.

  The press ate up the story. The bat, as the story went, was identical to Rizzo’s own model in size and weight but was full of amazing karma. Chalk it up to another godwink in this magical year. Szczur, who wasn’t even on any of the playoff rosters, became a minor national star simply by lending his equipment.

  The story sounded great, but there was one catch to it: it was built on a white lie.

  I pulled Rizzo aside on the eve of the World Series, just after he had finished his media day obligations at Progressive Field, in which yet again Rizzo led people to believe that his bat and Szczur’s bat were similar, but for the incredible luck Szczur’s bat brought him. Rizzo made a confession to me, but only after he made me promise it was off the record while the World Series was being played. I agreed. Szczur’s bat was significantly smaller than his own: one inch shorter and two ounces lighter. Rizzo switched bats not for luck, but as a concession to losing strength and bat speed due to the length of the season.

  “It allowed me to free up my hands and not have to use my body,” he said. “Because at the end of the year I was so beat, I guess. In the beginning of the playoffs I was missing fastballs. I kept asking myself, ‘Why am I missing these fastballs?’ My swing is good. It could be psychological, but I think not. But I think taking the extra inch off and lightening my bat, I started to get to those pitches again.”

  Rizzo played along with the crazy “good-luck bat” story because he didn’t want opponents to know that he was using a shorter, lighter bat. He knew that because of the way pitchers beat him early in the playoffs that the scouting report on him said his bat was slow and that he could be beaten with fastballs. Meanwhile, with Szczur’s smaller and lighter bat, he actually was much quicker to the ball. It was a secret he enjoyed for the final 10 postseason games, during which he hit .432 with Szczur’s bat.

  Cornered in a 1-and-2 count against Miller, and seeing Miller for a fourth time in 10 days, Rizzo had familiarized himself with the sweeping, aggressive plane of Miller’s slider. If the pitch started over the plate, he learned, it was unhittable because it continued sweeping off the outside corner. The only slider that was hittable, especially because Rizzo stood on top of the plate, was the one that started at his body. That one would sweep into the strike zone.

  Swing at the ball that looks like it’s going to hit me, he told himself.

  As Miller unfolded his long frame, Bryant took off running from first base. The pitch was a slider. It was headed right at Rizzo. He started his swing as the ball swept to the outside half of the plate.

  “It was a pretty good pitch,” Rizzo said. “Maybe he left it up a little bit. I was able to get my arms extended off of him.”

  Because he was so committed to the pitch, Rizzo pulled it into rightfield for a single. Bryant never stopped running. He scored easily. At 6-foot-5, Bryant pulled off one of the more stunning baserunning feats in World Series history. He became only the third player in World Series history to score from first on a single. The other two were far smaller: 5-foot-11 Frankie Frisch in 1924 and 5-foot-7 Joe Morgan in 1972.

  The Cubs led, 5–1. At one point the sound system at Progressive Field played “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes. Hoyer and Epstein looked at each other and smiled. They took it as a sign of good fortune—in such heavy rotation, it had been their un
official theme song of the 2004 spring training at Phi Signa Playa in Cape Coral.

  The positive signs were everywhere for the Cubs. They had dented Kluber and Miller as never before in the series. Impressively, they had sent 23 batters to the plate against the two strikeout artists and nobody struck out. Through five innings, Kluber and Miller threw 19 pitches with two strikes and failed 19 times to get the third strike. Schwarber, Bryant, Contreras, Fowler, and Rizzo combined to reach base seven times on two-strike counts.

  They were B hacking ’em to death. Maddon watched this unfold like a proud father. He also watched Kyle Hendricks very closely.

  —

  Hendricks, like a boxer who survived a standing eight count, suddenly found his equilibrium. After the second error by Baez in the third inning, when the Chicago bullpen became a hubbub of haste and hassle, Hendricks retired seven batters in a row. After the 3-and-0 count to Lindor, Hendricks took care of those next seven outs by throwing an amazing 83 percent strikes (19 of his 23 pitches). Paper airplanes never flew with such precision.

  First Ross was in the bullpen to catch his buddy Lester there, but as the fifth inning began, Ross relocated to the dugout—with his shin guards on, ready at a moment’s notice for the “line change.”

  “How’s he look?” Maddon asked Ross about Lester.

  “He’s really sharp,” Ross replied with obvious enthusiasm. “Really sharp.”

  Maddon looked at his lineup card. Kipnis owned the highest Matrix number against Hendricks: .270 in a white box. He was due up fourth in the inning. Behind him was Lindor, a switch-hitter Maddon feared more from the left side.

 

‹ Prev