David Kaplan - The Plan: Epstein, Maddon, and the Audacious Blueprint for a Cubs Dynasty

I want to dedicate this book to my late father, Marshall. Because without his love of baseball and the love of sports that he instilled in me and my brother at a young age I would not be doing what Im doing today. Hey Dad, can you believe it? The Cubs won the World Series! I miss you and I love you.

Contents

Foreword by Anthony Rizzo

Being a part of the Chicago Cubs first World Series championship team since 1908 will be an experience that I will cherish for the rest of my life. To get to this point, however, our team had to go through a lengthy overhaul that involved the entire franchise. I made my debut with the Cubs in 2012, and those early days were incredibly tough. That year we lost 101 games, yet as soon as I joined the team I could feel a positive vibe throughout the organization. I just knew that the Cubs were in the process of building one of the best teams in Major League Baseball.

I truly believe that the Chicago Cubs are one of the most incredible organizations in the entire world of sports. With the Cubs, it all starts right at the top with Tom Ricketts and the Ricketts family. They give us everything that a club needs to be successful and that is all you can ask for from ownership. Our front office, headed up by Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer, and Jason McLeod, are proven winners and they have built the best team in baseball by adding great young players who play like veterans and outstanding veterans who play like youngsters. I am confident that the mix of talent that we have will lead to many more winning seasons and hopefully several more World Series championships.

David Kaplan, who has been around our team for over 20 years, gives the reader a real perspective of how the Chicago Cubs were able to go from being called the lovable losers to the best team in baseball. We ended a drought of 108 years without a World Series title and we did it by playing for each other and playing for our fans and the city of Chicago.

When we arrived in Mesa, Arizona, in February 2016, our team knew what we could accomplish and what was expected of us. Our manager, Joe Maddon, told us that we had to meet those expectations head-on. Thus, our mantra, Embrace the Target, was born and we did just that all season long. We got off to a 256 start and we met every challenge along the way against tremendous competition. Although a 162-game season is a grind, every player who wore our uniform, our coaching staff, and our front office never took our eyes off of the ultimate prize, winning a World Series championship.

This is an accomplishment that many didnt believe could happen. It did happen, and this is David Kaplans story of how he watched us become champions.

Anthony Rizzo

World Series champion and three-time All-Star first baseman,

November 2016

Special Introduction by Allan H. Bud Selig

The author, David Kaplan, has masterfully captured the drama of one of baseballs most compelling stories, the resurgence of the Chicago Cubs over the past few years. Mr. Kaplan, a distinguished and popular Chicago sports broadcaster, artfully describes how a franchise, known as the lovable losers for its unparalleled record of futility that had existed for more than a century, is transformed into the World Series champion.

After 108 years of despair, dating back to the Cubs previous World Series victory in 1908, hope, which had been the allure that had driven fans to root for the Cubs in the first place, no longer is fleeting, if not rare. It is now so abundant and thick that you can reach out and touch it. The unbending loyalty of Cubs fans is remarkable. And they are not just from Chicago. There are Cubs fans everywhere, in every corner of our great country. Finally, they have been rewarded.

As it should be in baseball, the players receive and certainly deserve the bulk of the credit when a team is successful. But in the case of the Cubs, a great deal of credit is also due to the foresight and vision of the Ricketts family and especially the Cubs chairman, Tom Ricketts.

This is Mr. Kaplans story, one that began more than a decade ago, when Tom Ricketts, a die-hard Cubs fan, first had his eye on the purchase of the Cubs. During the summer of 2006, before the Cubs were even for sale, Tom, knowing he would need the approval of his family to make his dream come trueparticularly his father, the patriarch of the familythrew a giant family party across four rooftops facing Wrigley. Before the day was out, he had convinced his father and the rest of the clan that owning the Cubs would be good for the Ricketts.

The author describes how Tom spent the next few years working behind the scenes to buy the club. Finally, in 2009, the familys purchase of the Cubs from the Tribune Company came to fruition. As Commissioner, I recognized the value of the Ricketts family and knew it would be a positive influence on the game, and was instrumental in gaining baseballs approval of the sale. The Cubs had just completed a season in which they had finished out of the playoffs. That, unfortunately, began a streak of five consecutive losing seasons and Cubs fans surely felt like it wasin the immortal words of Yogi Berradj vu all over again.

But through the next few years, Mr. Kaplan reports, Tom had begun working on a long-term plan for rebuilding the club as well as rejuvenating Wrigley Field. As a former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, I know how difficult it is to build a ballclub from the bottom up. It takes a great deal of intelligence, creativity, hard work, and patiencenot to mention a bit of luck. After enduring several difficult seasons, Mr. Kaplan details how the Cubs began to turn it around following the 2011 season. Thats when Tom made the first of his brilliant front office hires, bringing Theo Epstein to Chicago from the Boston Red Sox as the Cubs President of Baseball Operations.

Even before his purchase of the Cubs, Tom had begun to reach out to me, usually for advice and historical perspective about the game. After the 2011 season, it was clear he was looking for a general manager. According to the author, Tom had already conducted a study of every franchises minor league system and their draft records to determine who was signing and developing the best young talent. In his view, that franchise was the Boston Red Soxand Theo Epstein was the reason.

It turned out that Theo was ready to move on after a decade in Boston. Once Tom got permission from the Red Sox to talk to Theo and made his pitch, I got involved as an intermediary in the discussions between the two clubs and helped make it happen. The hiring of Theo caught a lot of people in baseball by surprise. Theo had been a fixture in Boston. Hired as its general manager in 2002 at the age of 28, he became, at the time, the youngest GM in the history of the game. Theo was an immediate success and became a legend overnight when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, his first season with the club. It was Bostons first World Series victory in 86 years and finally brought to an end the curse of Babe Ruth that had plagued the club and the city for all those years. In 10 years with the Red Sox, Theos club won two World Series championships and reached the playoffs six times.

As Mr. Kaplan describes, it wasnt going to be easy for Theo to duplicate that kind of success in Chicago. He and his brain trust began putting together the pieces, player by player, over the next few seasons. But he needed the right person to run the club on the field, and that person was Joe Maddon, who joined the Cubs as manager prior to the start of the 2015 season. And they havent looked back since. Joe had significant success as manager of the Tampa Bay Rays even though he had to deal with the financial constraints that all small market clubs must deal with.