Years ago the popular sociologist Vance Packard told me that he hated to have one of his books paired with another in a review. “All a review like that ever says is, ‘This book is better than that one,’ ” he complained, “and you can’t use a quote like that in an ad.”
So here goes. The Cubs Way, Tom Verducci’s new book about the Chicago Cubs’ astonishing ascent from chronic losers to world champions, is the best baseball book in at least a decade: thoughtful, interesting, literate, deeply reported, and entirely persuasive. And it’s better—way better—than David Kaplan’s new book on the same subject. Kaplan hosts the Cubs’ pregame and postgame shows on Comcast Sportsnet, which means that he’s gotten used to the sort of achingly anodyne platitudes that players, managers, and front-office personnel confine themselves to in broadcast interviews. The bland, cliché-ridden interview is the game-day genre in which sports figures are trained and of which they are masters, and it’s fine as far as it goes.
The problem is that books are a different genre, and simply dumping dozens of vapid and lengthy quotations from notebook to page doesn’t cut it. It’s bad enough to hear (but much worse to read) second baseman Ben Zobrist saying that “we just need to play our game and we need to keep it simple,” first baseman Anthony Rizzo declaring that “we’re living the dream,” or ex-Cub pitcher Kerry Wood announcing, “It’s epic. It’s amazing”—and so on.
When Kaplan leaves off the quotation marks and offers his own take on things, matters seldom improve. For example, he reports that “Pilates, weight training, a strict diet combined with multiple hours a day of stretching, and a mental approach that is hyper focused have all contributed to making [Jake] Arrieta one of the toughest pitchers to get a hit off.”
Compare that unilluminating generality to Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci’s account of what Arrieta actually does on days when he is pitching. Five hours before he takes the mound, Arrieta stretches for 40 minutes, rides a stationary bike for 20 minutes, finds a quiet place to watch video and meditate for two hours, spends 20 minutes on a Pilates reformer, works with stretch bands in the weight room, puts on his uniform, lowers his heart rate by listening to mellow electronic music, begins his on-field warm-up with a few sprints, yoga poses, and pushups, and only then starts throwing with tosses that range from 40 to 250 feet before he bears down on the bullpen mound.
After reading Kaplan, all I knew was that Arrieta does a bunch of stuff; after reading Verducci, I understand what it means to be a starting pitcher on game day.
Tom Verducci’s reporting is more than granular; it’s also analytic. Cubs president Theo Epstein tends to get lumped in with all the other brainy “numbers-crunching wizards” who have flooded into baseball since Michael Lewis published Moneyball (2003). Verducci liberates him from the stereotype. What Epstein knew that the other stats guys did not was that he could no longer “fish in uncrowded waters for undervalued players” as he had with the Boston Red Sox before every other baseball executive learned to play the sabermetrics game.
He realized that in the new era, the “one edge” he and soulmate Jed Hoyer, the Cubs’ general manager, “could exploit was found in a very old-school resource: people.” To build a team—not just a collection of individual stars—Epstein fleshed out the data by emphasizing the unquantifiable quality of character. In other words, he sought players who would rack up impressive OPSs—the sum of a hitter’s on-base and slugging percentages—and also “care about winning, care about each other.” And while everybody else was drafting pitchers, Epstein focused on position players who, because they’re out there every day, can do more for a team both on the field and in the locker room than the typically more self-possessed, once-every-five-days moundsmen.
In 2011, taking over a Cubs franchise whose last World Series victory occurred while Florence Nightingale, Mark Twain, and the Ottoman Empire were still around, and that had just lost 91 games, Epstein resolved to build the Cubs on a foundation of four yet-to-be-found “impact” players who could hold down the top or middle of the batting order.
Signing big-name free agents and paying them huge salaries based on their past success was not the route he wanted to take, although he made exceptions for starting pitcher Jon Lester and closer Aroldis Chapman. Instead, Epstein resolved to find future stars of good character when they were young and wait the necessary three-to-five years it would take for them to develop in the minor leagues. Rizzo (a cancer survivor) was the first; third baseman Kris Bryant, outfielder Kyle Schwarber, and shortstop Addison Russell followed. Epstein acquired his first star pitcher in a different way, as the result of an in-house “change of scenery” survey of the league that enabled him to see that moving from the inhospitable Baltimore Orioles to the Cubs might be all it took to unleash the high-strung Arrieta’s talent.
Waiting for these players to develop while the Cubs were losing a combined 289 games during Epstein’s first three seasons was the most disciplined act of all, made possible by a supportive new owner, Tom Ricketts, who was as patient with Epstein as Epstein was with his young prospects. In 2016, a year after signing the winning Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon, all the parts came together: The Cubs won 103 regular season games (8 more than any other major league team), swept through the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League playoffs, and defeated the Cleveland Indians in the seven-game World Series.
The Cubs World Series lineup, at times, included six players who were 24 years old and younger, all of them talented enough to play at the game’s highest level and poised enough not to panic or turn on each other when the team fell behind the Indians by three games to one. Epstein’s patience in building the team gave it a root system that should enable the Cubs to thrive for years to come.
Michael Nelson, Fulmer professor of political science at Rhodes College, is the author of Resilient America: Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and
Dividing Government.
