Somewhere between the announcement and the recording, nobody went back to rewrite the jacket copy for The Cubs Way. It still says that Tom Verducci will have full access to Theo Epstein, Joe Maddon and the players, and that he will show how Epstein went beyond Moneyball thinking, as though the reporting were still in front of him. The reporting was finished long ago. The audiobook runs 13 hours and 2 minutes, Verducci reads it himself, and the tense of that paragraph is the first sign that the page around this recording was assembled out of spare parts.
Our Take on The Cubs Way
That the Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series after 108 years is the least interesting fact in the book, because everybody pressing play already knows it. What Verducci documents is a method: a front-office manual, literally called The Cubs Way, that Theo Epstein used to rebuild an organization around character and chemistry as much as on-base percentage, and a manager in Joe Maddon who ran themed road trips and late-arrival game days to keep a young roster loose. Rizzo, Russell, Lester and Arrieta turn up as case studies in that argument. Lee Kirby compresses the whole arc into one line, describing a franchise carried from lovable losers to one of Major League Baseball's best organizations in five years.
When that same reviewer quotes the book by name, a subtitle surfaces that this page never shows. The record stops at three words. The version Lee Kirby cites keeps going, into Zen, into the building of the best team in baseball, into the breaking of a curse. That second half is what tells you which kind of book you are buying. Without it the title reads like a team history. With it you can see the management study underneath, which is what Chuckles was reacting to in wondering whether Epstein had come out of a top management school.
Why The Cubs Way Works as an Audiobook
Every self-narrated book raises the same question, and the credit here answers it before you start: author and reader are one name. Verducci is a senior baseball writer at Sports Illustrated and an analyst at FOX Sports, so the voice carrying this much dugout reporting is a voice trained on air, and it shows in how the long chapters are paced. The gain is authority. When the narration describes the room during Game Seven, the man describing it was in the room, and no gap opens between the reporter and the reading. The jacket copy backs the credential up without overselling it: twice named National Sportswriter of the Year, and co-writer of The Yankee Years with Joe Torre.
This structure suits listening better than it first appears. Ryan Burke describes the pattern accurately: the chapters alternate, one taking up a fresh subject, the next advancing another game of the series, from the beginnings of the Epstein and Hoyer era through to game 7. The braid gives you a countdown to hold onto across a long recording, and it guarantees that every stretch of front-office theory has a ballgame waiting on the other side of it.
Weak Spots in The Cubs Way
Where the audio edition costs you something is chronology. Chuckles, the one four-star grade on the page, finds the volume of information hard to digest and blames the frequency with which the author bounces around in time. On paper you flip back to reorient yourself. In a car you cannot, and a book that keeps jumping between a 2011 front office and the last innings of Game Seven will strand you now and then. It is the most useful remark anyone here makes about taking this book in, and nothing marks that review as a listener's. Dale L W Watt describes the same habit approvingly, saying that Verducci sets up the time to tell his story the way he wants to, so the two reviewers agree about the technique and disagree entirely about whether it works.
Both the jacket text and the edition come with something a recording cannot really use: a bonus PDF of Joe Maddon's World Series Game 7 lineup card. As an artifact it is lovely. As a feature of an audio product it is a sheet of paper reproduced for the one audience that chose the format without pages. Listen in the car and you will never open it, and if you do open it you are reading names the narration has already spoken.
One reviewer calls it a novel outright. Ferran Pons, writing from Spain, expected a self-help book, found what that review calls a very engaging novel, and says the World Series came back to life while reading. Dale L W Watt reaches the same conclusion less warmly, granting that this is no great work of literature while allowing that some of the writing is pretty. Both are circling one quality: reporting with a narrative motor, holding attention the way a story does without pretending to be one.
Who Should Listen to The Cubs Way
Whether you follow baseball matters less than whether you enjoy watching an organization work. The management spine, hiring for character, writing a philosophy down and then enforcing it through every level of a company, holds up for anyone who has tried to turn a struggling group around. Lee Kirby, who notes that Cubs fans are once again waiting until next year, recommends it past the faithful to every baseball fan, and that is the right call.
Most of the caution is about scale. The cast is enormous, the timeline moves in both directions, and a listener who cannot yet tell Rizzo from Russell will spend the opening hours assembling a roster by ear alone. Nothing in this edition trims that cast down: it is 13 hours and 2 minutes of a very full book, reported at close range by someone who was standing there, and the fullness is the appeal and the obstacle at the same time. The jacket text is less careful than the book: it promises a broader look at the almost supernatural element to the team's repeated loses, spelled exactly that way.
If you want the purely emotional version, the 108 years and the Curse of the Billy Goat and the release at the end of it, this is not quite that book. Those beats are all present, but the heart of it sits in the process that produced them. Come for the front office and the clubhouse rules, stay for the Game Seven chapters, and accept that the lineup card in the bonus file is the one souvenir this format cannot hand you.
Quick Take
- Read by: Tom Verducci reads his own reporting, an air-trained voice on thirteen hours of inside access.
- At its heart: A 108-year drought, front-office method, clubhouse culture over statistics, a manager who kept a young team loose.
- Vibe: Densely reported, warm about the team, restless in its chronology.
- Short version: Excellent on how the rebuild was actually done, thinner on the romance of the drought itself.
Before You Listen
Is the bonus PDF included with The Cubs Way audiobook?
Yes. The edition ships with a downloadable file reproducing the lineup card the manager filled out for the seventh game of the series. It is a print keepsake bolted to an audio product, so you need a screen to see it, and nothing in the recording depends on it. Nice to have, easy to skip.
Tom Verducci reads it himself. Does that help the audiobook?
Tom Verducci narrates his own book. He covers baseball for Sports Illustrated and works as an analyst for FOX Sports, so the delivery is broadcast-trained rather than theatrical. For reporting built on access, hearing the reporter say he was in the room during Game Seven carries a weight a hired reader could not supply.
Do you need to follow baseball to enjoy this?
Not really. Chuckles reads it as a study in leadership and emotional intelligence, and the book's spine is organizational: how you hire, what you value, how a philosophy gets written down and enforced. The obstacle is roster density, since dozens of players and executives arrive quickly and by ear alone.
