Leading OFF
Epstein’s value to Cubs cannot be overstated
Everything you need to know about the state of the Chicago Cubs could be found just above the upper lip of team President Theo Epstein.
A bushy, fraudulent mustache was on the face of the architect of the best regular-season Cubs team in more than a century as Chicago played a Friday afternoon game in September at Wrigley Field that didn’t really matter.
This time, the Cubs already had clinched.
And so it was Epstein — a baseball executive on the verge of the kind of résumé that doesn’t just get you elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame but talked about as perhaps the very best in the history of the sport — who set the tone ahead of a month that has been so unkind to the few Cubs teams to reach it.
“Have fun,” Epstein’s mustache was telling Cubs fans who generally respond to success by cowering in the corner, waiting for fate to strike them down. Enjoy this. It’s a particular mind-set Epstein knows a little something about.
And so his comments to the news media after that game — yes, another Cubs victory, the normalizing of the team as behemoth now complete — served as a virtual thesis statement for how to do this.
“Normally we’re in a suite and it’s a very standard type of deal, where we’re watching the game and keeping an eye on things,” Epstein said. “To enjoy the real Wrigley Field and sit out there, feel the breeze, be among the fans, have a beer, it was wonderful. Even better than I thought it was going to be.”
It is worth taking stock of just how valuable Epstein is in this situation, emotionally, for the Cubs. Sure, there’s the franchise he rebuilt, the super team of hitters he cultivated through the farm system, the pitchers he added along the way and the defense that has managed to improve the team ERA even as the underlying numbers suggest it hasn’t been as good as in 2015.
But for the Cubs and their fans, the month ahead offers challenges that won’t be measured in statistics. The wait of 108 years might be over. That number itself is a perfect ending, the number of stitches on a baseball, echoing itself of 1908 in the duration of time. Simply assuming the worst until the very last moment is no way to properly appreciate it should the Cubs finally destroy more than a century of lore and ill wind.
Baseball seasons are stories, and no one understands this more than Epstein, son of novelist Leslie Epstein, grandson and grandnephew of Philip and Julius Epstein, respectively, authors of the unforgettable screenplay for Casablanca.
This Epstein authored one of the great endings to a baseball franchise arc in the history of the game when he took over as general manager of the Boston Red Sox at age 28 and two years later watched his team defeat the New York Yankees, its hated rival, after falling behind in that best-ofseven 2004 American League Championship Series 3-0.
Or, put another way, the Red Sox trailed the Yankees in precisely the way Red Sox fans thought of their own precious team in relation to the so-called Evil Empire.
It is fair to wonder whether Epstein himself has regrets about not enjoying that ride more. It is clear he intends to do plenty of celebrating this time around, should the unthinkable happen.
The Cubs winning would be the end of a trilogy that has concluded in the first part of the 21st century, the end of three woebegone roads for some of the oldest franchises in the game. In a lovely bit of symmetry, the Red Sox and their 1918 disappeared from the list of the endlessly disappointed in 2004, and then came the Chicago White Sox and their 1917 the following year.
Now, just over a decade later, the Cubs look poised to end 1908 as a plaintive wail in Chicago, turning it into a chuckle, an old illness successfully defeated.
Should another team’s failures last a century from here, will baseball still resonate the same way it once did for that dry spell to matter quite so much?
All three of these droughts predated the end of the Deadball Era, dating to the moments before baseball had captured the American imagination itself. To an enormous extent, the entirety of baseball history revolved around the axis of the Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals winning. But more significantly, it is a sport where failure truly defines it more than success; it has been about the losing of the Red Sox, the White Sox, the Cubs.
So now here are Epstein and the Cubs, just as there was Epstein and the Red Sox. Theo Epstein, a rebuke to all who dismiss the Great Man theory of history. Who can deny him that perch once he has ended the misery, collectively nearly two centuries long across two time zones in two of the great American cities?
And who better to light the path of Cubs fans toward the pleasure of it all, with inherent mischief along the way? The son of Leslie Epstein, who once spent his book’s entire marketing budget waging a campaign in the classified ads against a book critic who’d been tough on him in the past. The grandson and grandnephew of the Epstein twins, here to show Chicago’s baseball fans that it is possible to watch the postseason with a twinkle in your eye.
Because Epstein knows what we now all know: There’s nothing spiritual preventing teams from winning it all. Your team has Jackie Robinson take the field at Fenway Park for a tryout in 1945, fails to sign him and doesn’t integrate until Pumpsie Green in 1959; well, you don’t deserve to win for a long time. If you thought the College of Coaches, rotating managers under Cubs owner Philip Wrigley, was a good idea, well, you probably have other limitations in your organization.
But Epstein’s teams are built to show up in the postseason with regularity. Lose in 2003, as the Red Sox did to the Yankees, come right back in 2004. Lose in 2015, as the Cubs did to the New York Mets, come right back in 2016. The reason it seems like the Cardinals and Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers are so blessed isn’t because they avoid emotionally draining losses — it’s that they are in the postseason often enough to counteract the acidity of those moments.
And so a man who once exited Fenway Park in a gorilla suit is here to make sure not only that Cubs fans get to see something they thought they might not see in their lifetime but that they can bask in the pleasure of it all along the way.
Because once this happens, and eventually it will, there aren’t going to be any more demons this significant to slay.
Theo Epstein has seen to that.