So they won the World Series?

Many that is true, but an incomplete statement.

ESPN Stats & Info @ESPNStatsInfo
Cubs have won 21 of 25. 1st time Cubs have won 21 or more in a 25-game stretch since they did in 1938.

Hi JORR.

So they won the World Series?

They've won the World Series....of my heart.

The Cubs have the NL ROY, MVP, and Manager of the year.

This is okay. We don't want you. Go me jaded elsewhere. You are the exact fucking reason the Cubs were able to get away with being the lovable losers for so long.

As long as you had Santo and Ronnie Woo Woo and the drunken bleachers and WGN and better attendance than the South Side, GO CUBS! The actual baseball team? Secondary...

I state again...we don't want you. This is a baseball organization trying to win...not your little time capsule for nostalgia.

Laurence Holmes is a fucking weirdo, a nerd in denial, and a wannabe. Not a very good radio host either.

The office Tom Ricketts inherited when he took over the Chicago Cubs in 2009 was a windowless room beneath the upper deck of Wrigley Field. A closet just outside his door contained all of the team’s computer servers, which were covered by a cafeteria tray to shield them from the water that would leak through the ceiling when it rained.

The Cubs were still processing season ticket orders by fax machine. They kept up on trade news by employing someone to scan the Internet for articles and deliver printouts to executives’ desks. Some of their staffers were barely on e-mail. And space was so limited that half of them worked in trailers in the parking lot.

“I’m not sure which was more embarrassing for us,” Ricketts said in an interview this week. “That half of our people were in construction trailers or that the people in construction trailers actually had better offices.”

This was the baseball stone age from which the Cubs have emerged to reach the National League Championship Series, where they’ll face the New York Mets beginning Saturday. The talk now is about whether the team can finally break the famed Curse of the Billy Goat and win its first World Series since 1908. But the resurgence of the Cubs has less to do with mythology than with how they transformed themselves into a modern sports business.

The Cubs of the 2000s were not altogether bad. They reached the NLCS in 2003 and won their division in 2007 and 2008. But even as their previous owner, Tribune Co., spent lavishly on major-league free agents, their infrastructure was crumbling.

The Cubs’ minor-league system became neglected. Wrigley Field, which opened in 1914, became increasingly antiquated. The entire operation was a relic, and not in a charming way.

When Ricketts, the son of T.D. Ameritrade founder Joseph Ricketts, led a family bid to purchase the team for around $900 million, he set out to change that in a couple of ways. The most visible was in the renovation of Wrigley, which began late last year after a lengthy dispute with owners of neighboring rooftop businesses.

Two massive video boards went up earlier this year—one overlooking left field and the other in the right-field corner—part of a multiyear project that will make the ballpark more of a cash cow for the team. And the trailer offices are long gone.

The Cubs moved staffers to temporary offices in a building down the street in 2012, and construction is underway on a new office building adjacent to the ballpark.

But the most dramatic overhaul had more to do with how the team operates than its surroundings. While slashing the major-league payroll, the Cubs spent nearly $6 million on technology upgrades. Those have enabled executives to collect and carve up data on prospective customers and prospective sluggers alike.

When Ricketts hired Theo Epstein as president of baseball operations in late 2011, the Cubs started using technology in ways they never had before. They built a proprietary computer database called Ivy, which houses everything from scouting reports to advanced statistics. They trained scouts to shoot and instantly upload video of amateur players.

These were not revolutionary advances within the industry. But for the Cubs, it felt like the space age. The team’s previous information hub was a lone secretary who kept player contracts in file cabinets.

Under Epstein, the Cubs became one of the first teams to use neuroscience computer tests to evaluate prospective draft picks. The tests, which resemble crude video games, measure how adept hitters are at recognizing pitch types and deciding whether or not to swing.

The Cubs also overhauled a staple of player evaluation for decades: the scouting report. Traditionally, scouts have been left to evaluate amateur players on their own and then file a document assessing his baseball skills and offering a gut feeling on his character. But the Cubs require scouts to document all the ways they arrived at an evaluation in real time.

If a scout meets with the parents of a player they might want to draft in eight months, he has to detail that interaction in Ivy, which allows executives to suggest questions to follow up on.

“It’s a living document,” said Jason McLeod, the Cubs’ head of player development and amateur scouting. “I want to read about it as we’re going, not get handed a piece of paper on draft day.”
Related

Inside the brick building that houses the Cubs’ temporary offices, there are entire departments that didn’t exist before. There are around half a dozen people in the baseball research and development group. And there is a three-person mental skills department, which teaches sports psychology to players from the major leagues all the way down to the Cubs’ academy in the Dominican Republic. Minor-league players receive written performance reviews, like employees in a regular company.

Despite all the changes, the Cubs still faced widespread skepticism. In 2013, amid a two-year stretch in which they lost 197 games, a man delivered a box to Wrigley addressed to Ricketts with a severed goat’s head inside. But Ricketts maintained a steely pragmatism.

“The mythology is kind of fun,” he said. “But the fact is, the reason the Cubs haven’t won is because they haven’t had very many good teams, and when they have had good teams, they haven’t had good luck.”

The postseason is essentially a crapshoot, so the idea was simply to build an organization that could roll the dice as often as possible, however ugly the process was. “Having a team that gets there often is what’s going to get us over the hump, not eating goat stew,” Ricketts said.

As it happened, the Cubs stockpiled elite young hitters at a time when they were becoming more of a scarcity. Two of them, Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo, were All-Stars this year. Another, 22-year-old Kyle Schwarber, leads the team with three postseason home runs.

In Game 4 of the NLDS, Schwarber hit a towering home run that came to rest, improbably, on top of the right-field video board. It was a perfect symbol of the Cubs’ modernization.

The Cubs likely would not have drafted Schwarber in the first round out of Indiana University last year without an analytical projection model that answered this question: How is a left-handed hitter who controls the strike zone the way he does and hits for power the way he does, playing in the Big Ten and in these types of stadiums, likely to develop?

Likewise, the ball would have landed on Sheffield Avenue if not for the construction project the Cubs fought for years to push through.

The ball remains on top of the video board. The Cubs have encased it in plexiglass and will leave it in place for the rest of their playoff run, proof that in baseball, some renovations really do finish ahead of schedule.

E-MAN: The Cubs Player Development Program has changed in various ways under the new regime.

The Cubs now have a "Player Development Plan" for each minor league pitcher and player, which basically lists and explains (in detail) what each individual pitcher or player is trying to accomplish, and the pitcher's or player's development & instruction history up to that point in time. So when a minor league coach or instructor works one-on-one with a particular pitcher or player during the course of Minor League Camp, Extended Spring Training, the minor league regular season, and/or Instructs, the coach or instructor knows exactly what that player is working on, what problems the pitcher or player may be having, and what instruction the player has received from other coaches & instructors.

For example, I can recall vividly pitchers & players at Fitch Park back in the day telling me that one coach would tell the pitcher or player one thing, and then a month later another coach would tell him something different, sometimes exactly the opposite. And then the kid would sometimes ask ME(?) for advice (like "What should I do?" or " Who should I listen to?"). Needless to say, a lot of players would end up either getting totally confused, or would just stop listening to everybody and try to go it alone. The lucky ones might find one particular coach or instructor who would become the player's "guru" (so to speak), and that would work (but just for that player or pitcher).

Also, the philosophy of instruction varied from coach to coach. Some coaches would yell at players (sort of like a boot camp drill instructor), while others would be almost passive and wait for the player to approach the coach, and then others would just do bizarre stuff. Like I can recall a particular coach who was serving as game manager at Extended Spring Training one year, and he decided to bench players DURING A GAME (by having the player's slot in the batting order get skipped next time up) if the player got called out on strikes. This was not conducive to getting good results. (When you see a slot in the batting order being skipped in a Minor League Camp, EXST, or instructs game , it's usually because a catcher is needed to warm -up a pitcher in the bullpen, or because a player has finished his work for the day, or to get another player an additional AB, and NOT because the player got called out on strikes in his the previous AB!).

In addition, the new regime has implemented a sophisticated video (and audio) operation that records everything that happens on the field during games (including Minor League Camp, Extended Spring Training, and Instructs, as well as intrasquad activity & "sim" games, too, and sometimes even BP, infield practice, PFPs, and bullpen side-sessions), and members of the organization can call-up the videos from anywhere at anytime.

Minor League Field Coordinator Tim Cossins has made Instructs (I'm talking about the "basic" version, not advanced instruicts) about instruction and not about playing games against other organizations. Time that formally was spent playing games against other organizations is now spent working on drills and playing "sim" games that can be stopped in mid-inning (if necessary) for a "teaching moment." In fact, the Cubs are the only MLB club in Ariziona that does not play "basic" instructs games against other organizations. Every day is "Camp Day," full of instruction without worrying about stopping a drill so that the team can get BP in before the bus leaves for an AZIL game at another ball park. It works so well for the Cubs, I'm surprised more teams don't stop playing AZIL games and spend that time on instruction. (Again, I''m talking about "basic" instructs, not advanced instructs, which is really more of a "junior AFL").

The instruction itself has also changed, with more conventional "teaching" techniques, like what would be essentially a unique "lesson plan" for each day, and making the drills more fun for the players by finding more-interesting ways to present a particular drill and teach a particular skill.

Players are allowed to fail and make mistakes or errors without being verbally abused, while at the same having the nistake or error addressed by a coach or instructor immediately (instead of waiting for the next day, as happens when players are playing games most every day against other organizations).

The Cubs also make use of the auditorium at the Under Armour Performance Center after field work for what would be essentially "classroom" instruction, with use of multi-media to keep it interesting for the players (remember, a lot of these kids are teenagers!)

So with a Player Development Plan for each player (where coaches, instructors, and players are now on the "same page"), a video operation that allows members of the Player Development Department (the director, managers, coaches, and instructors) to actually see (in "real" time if desired ) what each player is actualy doing ON THE FIELD, a heightened emphasis on actual field instruction over playing games against other organizations, and classtroom instruction ("mental skills") that's presented in a fun and interesting way, the Cubs Player Development Department is on the cutting edge of professional baseball instruction.

While some might say that therefore the Cubs should develop more big league players, the Player Development Department can only do what it can do to help the player reach hisd potential. The player has to do his part, and the Scouting Department has to provide the players to the Player Development Department who have the talent and potential to become MLB players and pitchers.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Instead of covering an old mainframe in a closet with a lunch tray, why couldn't the Cubs find office space somewhere else in a city that doesn't lack office space?

Instead of covering an old mainframe in a closet with a lunch tray, why couldn't the Cubs find office space somewhere else in a city that doesn't lack office space?

I have a hard time believing the story about the rain catching lunch tray. Either they had offsite systems in Tribune headquarters or they have literally the worst IT people in the world.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Wow Julie, some breaking news LOL

Julie DiCaro ‏@JulieDiCaro · 2h2 hours ago
Hearing the #Cubs have engaged with multiple teams for young controllable starting pitching. Indians are reportedly one of them.

The victims are the American People and the Republic itself.

It worked so well Theo is now trying to copy the White Sox PLAN to get some pitching.

Oh, well. Genius is Kenny, not Theo.

Terrible post. Worse than the tweet.

The victims are the American People and the Republic itself.

It worked so well Theo is now trying to copy the White Sox PLAN to get some pitching.

Oh, well. Genius is Kenny, not Theo.

It is bad when JulieD outs the Cubs copying the White Sox.

Makes it sting even more I bet. Try and get your fanboy Elmhurst Steve to whitewash over that.

So they won the World Series?

I'm a big dumb shitlib baby

Wait 'til next year.