The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  “My only concern was Kipnis and Lindor—Lindor hitting left-handed,” Maddon said. “That was my concern. And the fact that Jon already had been warming up. And I talked to Rossy.

  “So okay, my concern is shelf life. How much do you warm him up and not use him? Warm him up and sit him back down? He’s not used to that. Before the game I was about Kyle to Jon to Aroldis. That was it. I just wanted those three guys.”

  So Maddon turned back to Ross.

  “If the inning gets to Kipnis, Jon is coming in,” he told him, “and you’re coming in with him.”

  Hendricks pushed his streak of consecutive outs to seven by getting Crisp and Perez. He worked the next batter, Carlos Santana, to a 2-and-2 count when he threw a beautiful changeup, one that passed over the middle of the plate and above the knees of Santana. It was, to most observers, strike three, a pitch to end the inning and send Hendricks and Chicago into the fifth inning with a 5–1 lead. One observer, the most important one of all, disagreed.

  Before the series began, Major League Baseball officials told Maddon that the assignment of the umpires was driven by data accumulated over the course of the season. Sam Holbrook, they told him, rated at the top when it came to balls and strikes. That’s how, they told him, Holbrook was assigned home plate for Game 7 of the World Series.

  Holbrook made his major league debut in 1996 at the age of 30. Three years later he took part in an ill-fated strategy during a labor dispute in which 22 umpires had their resignations accepted. For three years Holbrook found work as a welder, meter reader, and stockbroker. He was rehired in 2002. Holbrook worked home plate in Game 2 of the 2010 World Series, a 9–0 win for the San Francisco Giants and pitcher Matt Cain. That same year, his wife, Laura “Susie” Glass, was diagnosed with cancer. She lost her fight just before the 2014 season. Holbrook spent the entire year on the bereavement list. He returned in 2015, and in 2016 rose to the top of charts on ball-and-strike calls.

  Hendricks had pitched twice before with Holbrook behind the plate, in 2015 and 2016, and both turned out poorly for him: 0–2 with a 6.35 ERA.

  Contreras held the 2-and-2 changeup to Santana in his mitt over the plate, but Holbrook wasn’t buying it. “Ball,” came the call.

  Instead of walking back to the dugout, Hendricks would have to throw another pitch. He missed high. Ball four. Maddon walked out of the dugout and signaled for Lester. Why?

  “Because of Kipnis,” Maddon said. “If it wasn’t Kipnis, if it was another righty or a switch-hitter I thought he had a better chance with, I probably would have left him out there. But Kipnis, he’s just really good. It could be 5–3 and then it’s an entirely different thought.

  “So Jon was ready, they told me he was really good, and Lindor I like hitting right-handed more a lot. The guy that bothered me was Napoli. But he already had that good at-bat against Kyle. So once he walked [Santana] with two outs, and Jon was ready and they said he was good, my thought was I’d much prefer him on Kipnis rather than Kyle. And then here comes Lindor and I have to go to Jon anyway if it got through Kipnis.”

  But Maddon had insisted before the game that he would not bring Lester into a “dirty” inning, not with his yips throwing to the bases, not with his lack of experience coming out of the bullpen. It was the very last thing Maddon and Epstein talked about before the game and it could not have been any clearer: Lester would not enter the game in the middle of an inning.

  The same question again: Why?

  “So I thought, Even though there’s a runner on first base—I had talked about the dirty inning—it was 5–1, Santana was on first, and he wasn’t going anywhere,” Maddon said. “I wasn’t worried about any of that. I told Jon, ‘Don’t worry about it. He’s not going anywhere.’ So it was Kipnis.

  “I didn’t think it was a dirty inning: two outs with a four-run lead, Santana on first. I didn’t think it was dirty. That’s where I was at with that. Honestly, I didn’t think [it was dirty]. I told Jon, ‘Man, there’s nobody on. You’re just getting this guy out. Don’t worry about that guy at all because he’s not going anywhere.’ But I didn’t have any concern over that.”

  What would Maddon have done if Holbrook had called the third strike on Santana? Who would have started the sixth inning?

  “I probably would have sent Kyle back out,” Maddon said. “But if Kipnis had gotten on, I probably would have gone right to Jon on Lindor.”

  Instead, with Santana on first base and the fifth inning still breathing, Maddon not only brought in Lester but also replaced Contreras with Ross, Lester’s personal catcher.

  “Think about it,” Borzello said. “Willson goes in knowing he’s catching Kyle Hendricks, and that’s it. Of the three catchers, most people would say he’s far and away the best player. And we’re pulling him out and bringing in David Ross to catch Jon Lester, and that means you may have Miguel Montero to finish it.

  “The domino effect of taking Kyle Hendricks out of the game was huge. That was the plan going in. It’s just that I don’t think that’s ever happened where you would knowingly have a line change with your pitcher and catcher. And now Chapman is probably going to have to be caught by Ross, not Contreras, when it’s time for him to come in the game.”

  The spotlight immediately found Ross. Kipnis hit a cutter from Lester off the end of his bat, sending the baseball skittering, as if wounded, into the grass in front of home plate. Ross picked it up, struggled to find a proper grip as he wheeled, and threw it far askance of where Rizzo expected it at first base. The throwing error put Santana on third and Kipnis on second.

  Just two pitches later, Lester bounced a curveball while pitching to Lindor. After hitting the dirt, the ball bounced off the convex grill of Ross’s goalie-style catcher’s mask and ricocheted toward the Cubs’ dugout on the first base side. Ross tried to plant his left foot to pivot to his right, but his foot gave way. He stumbled on his 39-year-old legs. By the time he recovered, fetched the ball, and threw to Lester, both Santana and Kipnis scored. It was the first two-run wild pitch in the World Series in 105 years. The Indians had just turned a comfortable 5–1 Chicago lead into a 5–3 game without managing to hit the ball more than 30 feet.

  “First I get a terrible grip and I throw it in the crapper,” Ross said. “I let the game speed up on me. I’m the one guy that should be calm, and I throw it away. Then the ball hits my mask and I trip over my own feet. I feel like a fool out there.

  “I just get in the game and five pitches later two runs are in. I pride myself on keeping runs off the board, and look what happened.”

  Maddon had no second thoughts about injecting Lester into the dirty inning.

  “Kipnis looks bad against Jon,” Maddon said. “He swings and misses. Then he hits the ball off the end. And the ball just rolls far enough that David can’t throw him out.

  “Then it hits him in the mask.

  “Those are the things that are so unpredictable. Of course, it’s no fun to watch that, but Jon did his job. He gets Kipnis to hit a dribbler and he strikes out Lindor. You get a dribbler guy on first and then you get a wild pitch and two runs score. That’s pretty unpredictable right there….Again, I have no concerns about what we did. It worked out exactly like I thought, other than they score two runs on a wild pitch, because Jon gets us to Aroldis.”

  Hoyer, watching with Epstein from the scouts’ seats behind the plate, could not believe the change of events.

  “The 2-2 pitch by Hendricks was tremendous,” he said. “We were out of the inning with nothing, feeling great about things, but wait…Then all of a sudden a walk, and Lester comes in and gives up an infield hit, error, wild pitch…Wait a second, we just gave up two runs and nothing happened! That was an unnerving feeling. I felt like the game was in our control, and then we just literally handed them two runs.”

  When Ross came to the bench, Borzello met him with a worried look. The coach thought Ross, whose concussion history helped drive his retirement decision, may have been concussed by the wild pitch
, if only because of the way the baseball staggered him.

  “Now I’m thinking, Uh-oh, we’re going to be down to just Montero now with a long way to go,” Borzello said.

  “It’s my ankle,” Ross told him. “I tried to get up and my ankle gave way.”

  Ross clearly was agitated. His haste on the dribbler by Kipnis gnawed at him.

  “I didn’t get a good grip on the ball,” he told Borzello. “I should have taken my time. Kipnis has a bad leg and I didn’t process it.”

  “Relax,” Borzello said. “It’s okay. We’re winning. Let’s talk about the next three hitters.”

  They didn’t have much time. Ross was due to hit second in the sixth inning. Russell, in another at-bat extended after it reached two strikes, popped out.

  Ross had faced Miller once in the past six years: an at-bat in the seventh inning of Game 1 with the bases loaded and two outs. Miller struck him out on a full-count slider in that at-bat.

  “I knew Andrew, just from watching,” Ross said. “I watched a lot of video on him. I knew how nasty he was. I knew he was more of a stuff guy than a command guy.”

  Miller started Ross with two nasty sliders, one for a called strike and one that Ross fouled off. The next pitch was a fastball, well wide of the plate.

  “I just saw slider, slider, fastball,” Ross said. “I saw the fastball real well. In my mind, I had no chance on the slider.”

  The next pitch figured to be the slider, Miller’s go-to two-strike pitch. Miller peered in toward Perez for the sign. Miller shook his head. He didn’t want to throw the pitch Perez wanted. An alarm went off in Ross’s head. He remembered all the video he watched on Miller. One nugget of information suddenly came to the fore.

  “When he shook when he was ahead, I saw on the video, it was a fastball,” Ross said. “Maybe not 100 percent of the time, but mostly. I thought, If he throws me a fastball again I’m going to hit it.

  “When he shook like that I thought, He’s going to his fastball. Listen, I think like a catcher too much. But I’m thinking, The catcher must be calling a slider. That’s his money pitch. If he shakes, it’s going to be a fastball 90 percent of the time. In my heart and in my gut I felt like it was going to be a fastball. I wouldn’t say I completely sold out for fastball, but I was 90 percent sure.”

  Miller threw a fastball. It split the middle of the plate, low, “where I like it,” Ross said. Ready for it, Ross drove it high to centerfield.

  “I knew I got it all, but I was choked up on the bat, so I didn’t know if I had enough leverage to get it out,” he said.

  Cleveland centerfielder Rajai Davis turned and ran for it.

  “I saw him eyeing it,” Ross said, “and I thought, If he robs this ball, I’m just going to keep running out of the stadium.”

  The ball carried and carried and carried until it dropped on the other side of the wall. Home run. At 39 years old, Ross became the oldest player to hit a homer in the seventh game of a World Series. Ross was wearing a microphone for Fox. As he rounded the bases, the mic picked up…nothing. Ross, one of the biggest chatterboxes on the team, was dead quiet sprinting around the bases.

  “It felt like relief more than excitement,” he said. “I didn’t show a whole lot of excitement. My teammates were so much more excited for me. I know how hard he is to catch. I caught him in Boston. To hit him is even tougher. To do that, and to hit a home run in Game 7, I was like, ‘Okay, that’s one,’ because I was more worried about the runs I let in.

  “I was just glad I got one back to help the team get closer to the win. I got to third and Jonesie was real serious and I was like, ‘Holy crap, I just hit a home run.’ And I run home and Dexter is doing the crotch high-five thing they do for me, and J-Hey is super excited. Everybody is going crazy in there, and I’m going, ‘Wait a minute. It’s only the sixth. We’ve got a long way to go.’ I was so focused on the end result that I really couldn’t enjoy what was going on.

  “Then I thought, I’ve got really good numbers with the lead all year. This is what I’m really good at. We got this World Series. Don’t mess it up.”

  The home run was the first allowed by Miller in six years on a 1-and-2 count. It also was another two-strike dagger for Chicago. Kluber and Miller would throw 25 pitches with two strikes until they finally obtained a third one, to Baez for the last out of the sixth.

  “The thing that gets lost is people were concerned about Aroldis being tired,” Maddon said. “Miller is well rested and we kicked the shit out of Miller. It’s about hitters. I was really surprised we did as well against Miller as we did. But David’s home run was very large there. It was a very big play.”

  The home run by Ross pushed the Chicago lead to 6–3, which Lester, who was as sharp as Ross predicted from his bullpen warm-up, protected with ease. Maddon’s pitching script remained in play: Hendricks to Lester to Chapman. He began to think that Lester looked so strong that he might pitch all the way through the eighth inning, leaving Chapman for his preferred role: start the ninth inning, clean.

  —

  In the seventh inning, before Cleveland batted, Maddon left the dugout. He came back in time for the start of the half inning. The same pattern happened in the eighth inning, and again in the ninth inning. Nerves?

  “Bathroom,” Maddon explained. “I was fine. Honest to God. I planned the game out before it begins. Everything was working. Everything was right on. Outside of the wild pitch everything was right on. So I was good.

  “What I do is I go to the bathroom up in my office, so I can run a little bit…get away from it, refocus, and come back—almost like offense and defense. So I like to use the bathroom up in the office in Cleveland, so I go up and down the steps a little bit and come on back. It’s kind of refreshing.”

  Baseball is a wonderful game because it is built on simplicity—everyone takes turns at trying to complete a trip around the four bases—but it also invites a complexity of ideas about how best to accomplish or prevent that. For many children it is their initial gateway into sports, and from there fans earn a license to think they can manage a baseball game, sometimes even better than dues-paying baseball lifers like Maddon.

  The beauty of baseball is multidimensional, appealing to the eye and the mind. There is beauty, for instance, in its geometry, the space between the bases and the fielders; beauty in the arc of the season, which brings us out of doors to gather, until fall calls us back in; and beauty in its democracy, that each player hits in turn. But one of its greatest beauties is that, more than any other sport, it emboldens an expertise from those who watch it. Everybody can manage. That does not happen as easily in other sports.

  In real time, though, in the seventh game of the World Series, with a five-year rebuild on the line, and 108 years of waiting distilled to one game, only one man makes the calls that count. Maddon needed only to look at the spine of his lineup card to find guidance: be present, not perfect, and, to honor Zimmer, be irreverent. His task was to stay in the moment, without regard for everything that hung in the balance with this game.

  The first time Maddon saw Wrigley Field as a visiting manager, he fell in love with the daylight pouring through the grandstand and he daydreamed about Gladiator. Once he became Cubs manager, he would make a point during every game to look up from the dugout to the most extreme corner seat in the upper deck toward rightfield. He did so to remind himself how lucky he was to work in such an historic venue and for a fan base that loved the Cubs so much that the seat was always filled.

  But asked if he took a moment’s reflection during Game 7, Maddon said, “I don’t think I did. I’m that guy, but I don’t think I did. I was definitely in the moment. I was not all over the place. Please take it the right way: I didn’t feel unlike a regular-season game. I ran everything the same way, except maybe the bullpen might be different, pinch-hitting patterns might be different. Jon Lester’s not available to come out of the bullpen during the season. So these are the different things you think about.

 
“You have this weapon you don’t normally have, and there’s no tomorrow, so your mind-set, your thinking, is obviously different during the regular season. But before the game I told Bosio everything. I told Theo what I was thinking. I told David, ‘Be ready.’ I said, ‘When Jon goes down to warm up, I want you to warm him up,’ and then, after they warmed him up, he came back in the dugout the first time, I said, ‘How is he?’ He said, ‘He’s really sharp.’ That was nice to hear.

  “Then my concern with Jonny, not being a relief pitcher, you can’t warm him up, sit him down, warm him, sit him down. I know that’s what a starter does, but he’s not on regular rest. I don’t want to leave all of his best pitches in the bullpen. So if you’re going to utilize Jon, you have to utilize him. You just can’t be yo-yoing Jon Lester in that situation. That was a concern.

  “Believe me, man, talking about it now retrospectively, it was a real crazy moment. But in the moment? I was fine.”

  —

  As the eighth inning began, Maddon gave word to Bosio to have Chapman begin to warm. Lester kept cruising. He retired Lindor on a groundball and struck out Napoli. The Cubs were four outs away from winning the World Series. One of those outs, the last one Maddon would need out of Lester, appeared to come off the bat of José Ramírez. It was a groundball to the left of Russell, the shortstop. It was a play in the deep catalog of plays made by the rangy Russell. This one, however, remained unmade, the ball ticking teasingly off his glove for an infield hit.

  “The big thing there is, Ramírez hits the ball off Addison’s glove,” Maddon said. “Because I really wanted to see Jonny get through a solid eighth right there. I just wanted to give Aroldis one inning. That was the plan.”

  Said Ross, “Perfect pitch. Addison makes that play 9 times out of 10. He was shaded in the hole with Jon pitching in.”

  Hoyer agreed with Ross, saying, “He was shifted over in the hole. If he’s playing straight up he makes it easily. It made for a harder play. But, okay, I still felt like the game was in control. It felt stable.”