This year, the Chicago Cubs won 97 regular games and reached the National League Championship Series, due in large part to the contributions of their two rookie sensations, third baseman Kris Bryant and catcher/outfielder Kyle Schwarber.
Gary Van Tol, the manager of the Cubs’ Class A Short Season team, the Eugene Emeralds, coached Bryant and Schwarber when their careers began to blossom in Chicago’s minor league system.
“Being in the trenches with these players, you learn a lot about the way they’re wired — their personalities and their make-ups,” Van Tol said. “The one thing about Kris and Kyle is they’re great players but they’re better people. Their motivation, their work ethic, the way they prepare, their coachability, their eagerness to learn — those are what you want your first-round picks to be.”
The Emeralds were the Class A short season affiliate of the San Diego Padres from 2001 until September 2014, when they signed a new Player Development Contract with the Cubs organization. The Cubs’ previous Class A Short Season affiliate was the Boise Hawks, the team Bryant and Schwarber played for and Van Tol managed in 2013 and 2014.
Both Bryant and Schwarber’s times in Class A Short Season, the lowest minor league classification above the Rookie league, were brief. Bryant spent three weeks in Boise before he was called up to the Cubs’ Class A Advanced (High-A) team, the Daytona Tortugas. Schwarber lasted just one home stand before he got the call-up to Class A Kane County Cougars during the team’s bus ride to Eugene.
Bryant posted a .354/.416/.692 slash line in 18 games for Boise. Schwarber hit an otherworldly .600/.625/1.350 in five games with the Hawks.
“We tried to keep them around as long as we could,” Van Tol joked. “We felt very strongly about their potentials and their skill sets.”
Bryant, who will likely be named the National League Rookie of the Year come mid-November, hit .275/.369/.488 in 151 games as a member of the Cubs’ big league team in 2015. Schwarber hit .246/.355/.487 in 69 games.
Bryant and Schwarber are largely considered the franchise’s present and future. Following their disastrous 61-101 2012 season, the Cubs used their first-round pick in the 2013 Amateur Draft to nab Bryant second overall. They selected Schwarber fourth overall in 2014 after their 66-96 2013 campaign.
2012 was the year the Cubs hired former Boston Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein as their President of Baseball Operations. Chicago had suffered three straight losing seasons prior and Epstein, who became the youngest general manager in the history of Major League Baseball when the Red Sox hired him at age 28, had already helped Boston win two World Series titles, including its first in 86 years.
“When Theo Epstein came over from the Red Sox, that’s when the commitment was to basically start from the ground up, to get as many players in the system as we could and develop from within,” Van Tol said. “It was going to take some time, patience and the right people to be on the same page to follow through with that plan.”
In addition to drafting Bryant, Schwarber and a number of top prospects, Epstein and general manger Jed Hoyer made several key transactions to enable the long-term success of the franchise, such as trading for first baseman Anthony Rizzo and starting pitcher Jake Arrieta, and signing international outfielder Jorge Soler, starting pitcher Jon Lester and manager Joe Maddon. According to Van Tol, Theo’s plan was for the Cubs “not to be a one-hit wonder — have a great year, then fall off and not be able to sustain that consistency.”
“Theo and Jed were able to bring in some important pieces to player development and scouting, and really start from scratch in terms of how we evaluate players and the type of players we want within our organization,” Van Tol said. “Now, we rank as, if not the top, one of the top farm systems in all of Major League Baseball.”
Such an overhaul doesn’t happen overnight. Few people thought the Cubs would own the third-best record in baseball in 2015 after they finished fifth place five years in a row and fired two managers in that span. Van Tol thought nobody on the outside expected the Cubs’ rise to success to be as meteoric as it was this year. To the guys in the clubhouse, however, Van Tol said it came as no surprise.
“I think everybody would say we’re ahead of schedule based on what the big league club did this year,” Van Tol said. “When you look at the guys we have at the big league level, their ages and the number of years we have them under contract and the talent we have coming up, it’s an exciting time. I think what you saw this year is really a small piece of what’s in store.”
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Eugene Emeralds manager Gary Van Tol remembers former players who appeared in this year’s MLB Playoffs
Kenny Jacoby
November 2, 2015
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