The Cubs Way

by Tom Verducci

  “But again, it’s the seventh game. You have no game tomorrow. You have veteran players. You just have to trust them. It goes back to trust.”

  Rain. Not in torrents and sheets did it arrive, but just barely on the side of too hard and too much to play baseball. It was almost midnight. Umpire Joe West, the crew chief, ordered play stopped and the field covered by the tarpaulin. He walked past Joe Maddon as he exited the field through the Cubs dugout.

  “They don’t think it’s going to be that long,” West told him.

  “Good.”

  The Cubs quietly filed out of the dugout and began walking back to the clubhouse, their heads dropped and their faces blank. It wasn’t quite the lost look Maddon remembered from the 2002 Yankees, and the look he warned them before the postseason he never wanted to see from one of his teams, but it was the look of a team that knew “something bad” had happened to it. The Cubs blew a three-run lead four outs away from their first World Series title in 108 years, and now they would have to try to win an extra-inning World Series Game 7 as the road team—something that had never been done before.

  “Guys, weight room! Won’t take long!”

  A strong voice suddenly pierced the quiet. It belonged to Jason Heyward, the Chicago rightfielder who struggled to hit all year after signing a $184 million contract, who began the World Series on the bench, and who was hitting .106 for the postseason, including four more hitless at-bats in Game 7. Heyward was calling a players-only meeting.

  To get from their dugout to their clubhouse at Progressive Field, visiting players walk out the rightfield end of the first-base dugout, down a short, wide hallway, turn left to go up one short flight of stairs, then turn right up another short flight of stairs and through double doors. To the right of the hallway, directly behind the dugout, is a weight room about 50 feet long by 25 feet wide. One by one the Cubs traipsed into the weight room, where they stood shoulder to shoulder or found places to sit on or lean on equipment.

  Maddon walked past the weight room on his way to his office, where he was going to check the weather app on his iPad. The door to the weight room was glass. Maddon turned his head in that direction as he walked by.

  “I saw the boys run into that weight room,” he said. “I liked the idea the guys got together.”

  The room filled. Then someone asked, “Where’s Chappy? Somebody go get Chappy.”

  One of the Cubs’ in-uniform support personnel walked back to the dugout. There, Chapman sat alone atop the bench. He was told, in Spanish, there was a players-only meeting and that he should come right away. The hulking man Maddon said was built “like wrapped steel” stood up slowly, as if wounded or exhausted. At the time, to get out of the rain from my spot in the first-base camera well, where I was stationed for the Fox broadcast, I stood in the Cubs’ dugout toward the rightfield end. Chapman turned to me. He was crying. Tears ran down his face. As he walked past me, as if to comfort or steady himself, he reached his right hand toward my left hand and gently held my wrist. The pain he wore was visible.

  Chapman slowly made his way to the weight room. He was the last one in. He stood next to Ross, who was standing guard at the door. Chapman was still crying.

  “When we got in,” Rizzo said, “it was like, ‘Ahh, we just blew a three-run lead in the World Series and there’s no game tomorrow.’ The mood was definitely down. All of us were just kind of pacing, and then Jay starts speaking.”

  Heyward started in.

  “I know some things may have happened tonight you don’t like…”

  Uh-oh, Ross thought to himself, is this going to be about Maddon? In fact, after the meeting and before the 10th inning began, Ross would tell teammate Matt Szczur, “At first I was afraid it was going to be negative, and I thought this is nothing any of these young players needed to be hearing.”

  “But it wasn’t that at all,” Ross said. “There was no negativity.”

  “We’re the best team in baseball and we’re the best team in baseball for a reason,” Heyward said. “Now we’re going to show it. We play like the score is nothing-nothing. We’ve got to stay positive and fight for your brothers. Stick together and we’re going to win this game.”

  Other players began to speak up.

  “Keep grinding!”

  “Chappy, we’ve got you! We’re going to pick you up.”

  “This is only going to make it better when we win.”

  Ross turned to Chapman. The reliever had only been with the team for three months, and tended to be quiet around his teammates. Ross saw Chapman still in tears, and knew the big man cared much more deeply than he let on.

  “Hey, man, we wouldn’t be here in the World Series without you,” he told Chapman. “This ain’t over.”

  As the players gathered in the weight room, Epstein and Hoyer had left their seats to walk to a room behind home plate that MLB established as what it called “the rain room,” where officials could update executives from both teams about the latest weather information. One of the MLB executives there was Peter Woodfork, senior vice president of baseball operations, who had worked under Epstein in Boston, and was with him at the 2003 Pearl Jam concert the night Epstein first met Eddie Vedder, and was with him in the Cape Coral 2004 spring training house, Phi Signa Playa.

  Already in the room were Indians president Chris Antonetti and Indians general manager Mike Chernoff.

  “It was surreal,” Epstein said. “Chris and I looked each other in the eyes and both thought the same thing, without having to say it. At that point everything was tied. The World Series was tied and the game was tied. We both knew somebody was going to win and somebody was going to lose. The moment was surreal.”

  The room also defined “state of the art” in baseball. Epstein was 42 years old, Hoyer was 42 years old, Antonetti was 41, and Chernoff was 36. None of them played professional baseball. They were graduates of Yale, Wesleyan, Georgetown, and Princeton, respectively. They represented the new generation of great minds in the game, a new way of thinking.

  The meeting was short. The news on the weather was good: the rain should not last long. Epstein and Hoyer left the room, by way of the field and the Cubs’ dugout, to pass along the weather information to Maddon. Epstein had been anxious and down ever since Davis hit his home run. His thoughts remained dark, worried that the hard work of so many people in the Cubs organization over the previous five years stood to be wasted after blowing the lead. As Epstein and Hoyer left the dugout and entered the hallway, both of them noticed the players gathered in the weight room. They stopped.

  “Go tell Joe what’s going on with the weather,” Epstein said.

  Hoyer continued to the stairs that led to Maddon’s office. Epstein lingered in the hallway and eavesdropped on what was being said in the meeting. The darkness over him suddenly lifted.

  “I saw our guys meeting and it snapped me back,” he said. “It reminded me of how much I admired them and how tough they are, how connected they’ve stayed with each other, and the great things human beings can accomplish when they set out to achieve for other people, not for themselves.

  “That’s something that made this organization what it is now. From my position, I can see it: the sacrifice the scouts make when they drive the extra miles to get that last look at a player, the minor league coaches putting in extra hours, the big league coaches crushing video, the players working on their weaknesses, picking their teammates up—you get to see that stuff all the time. That’s what makes a great organization. That’s Cub.

  “Right then I thought, We’re winning this fucking game!”

  Hoyer met with Maddon, briefing him on word that the game should be resuming in a matter of minutes.

  Just before he left, Hoyer told Maddon, “Let’s win one inning. We win one inning, we win the World Series.”

  Maddon smiled.

  “No doubt,” he confirmed.

  Said Hoyer about Maddon’s outlook, “He was good. Everyone got to take a deep breath with the delay,
Joe included.”

  The entire delay took only 17 minutes, not much longer than the time it takes to fully cover the field with the tarp and remove it. As Maddon prepared to return to the dugout, he reached into a backpack next to his desk and pulled out the faded periwinkle blue Angels cap—the outdated one with a wings logo—and stuffed it into the back of his waistband and underneath the hoodie he was wearing. It was time for his father, Joe the Plumber, to watch the end of another World Series Game 7, just as happened in 2002.

  Downstairs, a different team came out of the weight room than the one that had entered it.

  “No doubt, it reset us,” Rizzo said. “It had been just guys hanging their heads a little bit. The rain delay really helped as far as being loud and outgoing and loose as we always are. It was just a different feel.”

  “What’s fitting,” Ross said, “is Jason Heyward called it, the guy who struggled the most out of our starters and was dealing with the most. He could have just been wrapped up in himself and not been a vocal leader. But Jason is the kind of guy who never takes a pitch off, never takes an at-bat off. For him to call a meeting, for him to be the one to speak up, was huge.

  “He doesn’t talk often, so when he does your ears perk up. ‘This must be important.’ When he said that, he was absolutely right. He reset the focus of who we are. We’re playing for one another. That’s a huge learning moment for the young guys.”

  It would not be until after the game that Epstein was told that Heyward called the meeting.

  “That’s amazing—that he stayed not only connected to this team but in the middle of everything and despite his offensive struggles he stepped up,” Epstein said. “It speaks to his character and professionalism.”

  Heyward is the son of parents who met while attending Dartmouth: Eugene, an engineering consultant for the Air Force, and Laura, a quality analyst for Georgia Power.

  “I’m fortunate to come from great parents and a great family,” Heyward said. “No matter how tough it was for me at times this year, I think I gave something to this team with my character, and I think this team gave something to me.”

  The players returned to the dugout. Shaw prepared to go back to the mound for Cleveland. Schwarber, due to lead off the inning, headed to the bat rack. “Borzy, I’ve got this,” he told Borzello. “Don’t worry. I’m telling you, I’ve got this. I’m locked in.” Rizzo, due up third, stood next to him and smiled. The same dugout that 17 minutes before was lifeless and tearful suddenly was alive with shouting and joking. Ross, sitting midway down the length of the bench, suddenly remembered what happened in the clubhouse before the game, when he rousted Rizzo from “the bad vibe” after Rondon mistakenly abbreviated Rizzo’s pregame jocularity by spraying him in the groin with shoe cleaner.

  Ross turned in Rizzo’s direction and yelled at him, “Hey, it’s not how many times you get knocked down…”

  On cue Rizzo completed the battle cry, yelling back, “It’s how many times you get back up!”

  Rizzo then launched into a clothed version of his pregame routine, yelling, “This is like Tyson-Holyfield!…This is a heavyweight bout!…This is going to make it that much better when we win!…”

  The dugout laughed at the encore performance.

  “He brings that energy, and that kind of goofy, funny energy that everybody gets,” Ross said. “It could be cheesy if you want it to be, but he’s the same guy. He does that a lot. It’s not like he gets anybody pumped up. He loosens the mood. It’s not like, ‘Yeah, let’s go get ’em!’ It’s more like, ‘Yeah, whatever he’s doing, he’s an idiot.’ And he’s got this huge, 12-year-old grin on his face. That baby face. The way he smiles, he’s just so likable when he smiles.

  “And we have a lot of those guys. Dexter, when he smiles, he laughs. And Jason Heyward when he laughs, everybody laughs. He’s got one of those contagious laughs. Javy Baez, when he laughs and smiles, he’s just one of those guys you can’t help but be in a good mood with him.”

  In 2008, as manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, Maddon was involved in the longest World Series rain delay on record. The Rays and Phillies waited two days to complete Game 5, which ended in Philadelphia winning the World Series. This one took only 17 minutes. He could tell immediately the difference it made in his players.

  “They were so jacked up,” he said. “Seriously, the rain absolutely permitted us to recalibrate. There’s no doubt about it. If you’re talking about a fortuitous moment in the history of time and place as it relates to baseball, that rain delay was the most perfectly timed ever. I’ve been involved in two rain delays in the World Series: the most nonfortuitous one in Philadelphia and the most fortuitous one for us in Cleveland.”

  The Cubs and the Indians in 2016 had combined to play more than 400 games, including spring training, and just when they were tied after nine innings in the final game of the World Series and after 176 combined years waiting to win another title, the heavens opened up—just hard enough and just long enough for the Cubs to hit the reset button. It was the ultimate dramatic pause in the telling of a story, a final godwink before fortune really turned for the Cubs.

  “Even at the time, it felt like an amazing stroke of luck for us,” Hoyer said. “I mean, which team needs the rain delay? Not them. It’s definitely us.”

  Said Epstein, “A little divine intervention never hurt.”

  As the two teams prepared to resume play, West, the crew chief umpire who worked his first major league game 40 years ago, walked past me toward his post on the rightfield line.

  “What do you think, Joe?” I asked him.

  “I think if you don’t love this, there’s something wrong with you.”

  The Cubs looked like a different team. On the first swing after the cleansing rain, Kyle Schwarber slammed a loud single through the shifted Cleveland defense on the right side, and ran to first base, pumping his fist and screaming into the Cubs’ dugout, as if he had sacked the quarterback on a middle linebacker blitz back at Middletown High. He left to a hero’s welcome in the dugout as Maddon sent Albert Almora Jr. to pinch-run for him.

  “We don’t win without Schwarber,” Maddon said. “We just don’t do this without him. We don’t. You can talk about everything else that happens, but we don’t win without him. Period. He goes up, does that little rocking thing with his hands, and literally beats the shift. The energy in our dugout, all of that…but Schwarbs set the whole thing up.”

  Kris Bryant continued a remarkable night of hitting persistence when, after getting in a 1-and-2 hole, he took one pitch from Bryan Shaw and drove the next deep to centerfield. Bryant arrived at spring training as the Rookie of the Year but unhappy that he struck out in 31 percent of his plate appearances. He dedicated himself to being more selective at the plate and slightly tweaking his powerful, uppercut swing so that his barrel stayed in the zone just a bit longer. He cut his strikeout rate to 22 percent, an enormous improvement for a sophomore player. The fly ball he hit off Shaw came on the 34th pitch he saw in Game 7, 15 of which came with two strikes, and only 1 of those resulted in a whiff.

  Such persistence was all the more remarkable because Bryant fought cramps in his body all night. He received treatment for cramps in his right arm between innings. His legs throbbed.

  “Never had cramps on any level playing baseball,” Bryant said. “Just a lot of nervous energy in Game 7, I guess.”

  As Bryant’s fly ball soared, Almora broke about halfway to second base, where he was prepared to take off if it landed in the outfield or hit the wall. That’s when he noticed that Davis, unhurried, was gliding after the deep fly ball, as if he had a good read on it.

  “I’m a centerfielder,” Almora said. “I can read when a centerfielder looks like he’s got a play and when he doesn’t. I saw the way Davis was running and knew he had it lined up.”

  At the same time, somebody in the Chicago dugout yelled, “Tag up! Tag up!”

  It was Heyward, continuing to make smart contributions despite his slump at
the plate.

  Almora dashed back to first base. Davis caught the ball near the wall. Almora tagged and sprinted to second base. He ran the go-ahead World Series run into scoring position with one out. It was a terrific, smart baserunning play by a rookie, but one that was not all that surprising given the strong will of that teenage player who sat with Epstein and McLeod in his Hialeah, Florida, living room in 2012. Almora back then essentially begged the two Cubs executives to draft him. His words were prophetic:

  “I’m telling you, 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.”

  Epstein, Hoyer, and McLeod all noticed the synchronicity of what had just happened, though none had to say it aloud. With Game 7 of the World Series tied in the 10th inning, their 2014 first-round pick singled, their 2012 first-round pick ran for him, and their 2013 first-round pick hit a two-strike fly ball to move him into scoring position. The Cubs were in position to win the World Series because of their first three first-round selections.

  Almora’s smarts put Cleveland manager Terry Francona in a bind. To get the next two outs without a run scoring he could choose to pitch to Anthony Rizzo and Ben Zobrist or, by intentionally walking Rizzo, Zobrist, and Addison Russell. Rizzo wasn’t sure what to expect, but both he and Francona knew that he was swinging a sizzling bat—but among the two of them only he knew that bat was a smaller, lighter one than usual.

  “I don’t know there,” Rizzo said about whether he was expecting to be walked. “It was one of those things. Earlier in the series I kind of knew going up to the box, ‘Okay, they’re going to walk me here.’ But this time, there was only one out, I was more locked in, and I wasn’t completely sure if they were going to do it or not.

  “This is where Rossy comes in again, from what I’ve learned always talking to him about these kind of situations. It’s like, ‘I’m not going to let this guy beat me.’ And that was it right there. They were not going to let me beat them when there’s a base open. So I definitely understood it.”