Come to the Cubs, the miracle worker named Theo Epstein told Jon Lester when they sat down in December to discuss the possibility of reprising what was once a beautiful relationship in Boston. We have seen the future, and we’re going to be really good.
But when, Exalted Oracle, Lester inquired, weighing the specter of pitching at Wrigley Field, for a team that won 73 games in 2014, finished last in the National League’s most formidable division and had never been adept at convincing a devoted fan base that prosperity was only a spring training away.
“I didn’t want to go through another down year and worry about rebuilding for next year,” Lester said.
Jed Hoyer, the No. 2 man in the front-office team of Epstein, the Cubs’ president, assisted in the presentation, which included video of the team’s emerging players, charts of their developmental progress and statistics to support Epstein’s contention that baseball’s most lovable losers were really, truly Kansas City Next.
“I said, ‘Look, I’m not going to make any promises about 2015; I want to be honest with you, given our relationship and everything that’s at stake,’” Epstein said. “I told him, ‘We’ll be young, but we’ll be really talented, and if we get a few breaks and we stay healthy, there’s no reason why we can’t be like the Royals.’”
Sounds like a fair, honest appraisal, but Lester, long familiar with Epstein’s exorcism of failure at another old house of home-team horrors, had enough reason to believe.
“I think the biggest thing that sold me, especially not only on these young guys, but the whole organization, was just how arrogant he was about it, and I mean that in a good way,” Lester said.
The six-year, $155 million offer of Ricketts ownership family money surely inspired him, too, but ultimately, it was Epstein’s reputation, preceding him to the table, that dissuaded Lester from returning to Boston, or going anywhere else.
Now that he’s been tabbed by manager Joe Maddon — Epstein’s other high-profile hire last offseason, Lester at this point might nod and say, “Of course,” if Epstein told him that for his next trick, he would make serious presidential contenders of Lincoln Chafee and George Pataki.
Lester said that knowing Epstein personally after his ascension to the majors in 2006 helped him distinguish between the con and the candor. No doubt there was also the benefit of the doubt.
Of Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo and the Cubs’ other young comers, Lester became convinced that “they weren’t going to be a bust when the scouting report gets out and going to get exposed and all that stuff.”
Who knows what happens when Epstein’s nurtured lineup of impressive young hitters collides with the Mets’ prized collection of hard-throwing hurlers? The time-honored adage is that good pitching trumps good hitting, but let’s for a moment project the Cubs in the World Series and even winning it for the first time in, oh, 107 years.
“I mean, it’s got to end sometime, right?” said Lester, who was a 20-year-old southpaw dreamer in the lower echelon of the Red Sox chain when that organization’s 86-year championship drought ended in 2004 with a flood of happy tears. Lester rose to pitch valiantly in the 2007 and 2013 World Series triumphs that helped define a decade as a near Fenway dynasty.
He has seen enough in Chicago to believe that history has a solid shot of repeating itself at the intersection of Theo and Wrigley.
“I’ve seen it before, been part of it before,” Lester said. “And now getting brought in with these guys and seeing what he’s done again with all these young kids is pretty special.”
On the surface, the first three seasons under Epstein were pretty much the Cubs being the Cubs. But, Epstein conceded, what he achieved in Boston “just helped get us some patience, which was much needed, given the plan.”
This season, the Cubs won an electrifying 97 games, third-most in the division but also in baseball.
At present, Epstein understands if the baseball nation in general and Cubs fans in particular believe, like Lester, that they are watching a Red Sox rerun.
“It comes up a lot, the obvious parallels,” Epstein said. “The fan bases are similar, with the World Series drought, obviously, and the comparable ballparks.”
Now 41, Epstein was only 30, a Boston-area-reared, Yale-educated master of the baseball universe when the Red Sox did the unthinkable: They rallied from an 0-3 deficit against the hated New York Yankees to reach the 2004 World Series, where they swept St. Louis. He became New England royalty, even after resigning a year later on Halloween and, as Theo Lore has it, dodging reporters at Fenway Park, at the wheel of a Volvo in a gorilla suit.
He returned soon after, sipped Champagne again in 2007, and left four years later for Chicago.
Lester left Boston in late July last season, traded to Oakland for Yoenis Cespedes in what now becomes another quirk of Cubs-Mets karma. In his news conference Friday, he referred to them as “storied franchises,” leaving out the sob syllable, but acknowledging that one of these teams could soon create quite a legacy.
If it happens to be the Cubs, Lester knows that what awaits them in Chicago is what the 2004 Red Sox have become in Boston.
“Those guys are legends,” he said. “Dave Roberts stole one base, and this guy hasn’t paid for a meal or drink since.”
On top of them all would be Epstein, the 800-pound gorilla in the front office and aspiring all-time baseball Ghostbuster.
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