Lester: I always had 2015 World Series in mind
NEW YORK - When Jon Lester spoke during his introductory news conference 10 months ago, he talked of coming to the Cubs to win.
Team President Theo Epstein had wooed Lester on the promise of the Cubs being in serious playoff contention by 2016.
"He kept bringing the conversation back to 2015," Epstein said Friday after the Cubs worked out at Citi Field in preparation for Saturday night's Game 1 of the National League championship series. "He said, 'Hey, I've just been through a season in Boston where we tried to break in a lot of young players, and it got me in last place, and it got me traded. So I'm not looking to go through that again.'"
So here we are, in 2015.
Lester is taking the ball in Game 1 of the series that will determine whether the Cubs will make it to the World Series for the first time since 1945.
Did he envision that?
"Yeah, I think we all have that in our mind," he said. "I think all 30 teams come into spring training with the mindset you're going to win the World Series that year. It's just a matter of obviously playing good baseball and having a little luck on your side, and now we're sitting here.
"So, yeah, I wouldn't have come here if I didn't think that we had a chance to win. I didn't want to go through another down year and worry about rebuilding for the next year. I wanted to win now."
The Cubs are four wins away from the World Series, and they seem to have a couple of advantages. They polished off the St. Louis Cardinals Tuesday to wrap up the division series in four games while the Mets went five to beat the Dodgers, playing Thursday night on the West Coast.
The Cubs also have been able to set their pitching rotation with Lester going in Game 1 and staff ace Jake Arrieta pitching Game 2 and getting an extra day of rest. The Mets had to use Jacob deGrom in their series clincher over the Dodgers. They'll start Matt Harvey, hardly a slouch, against Lester.
Cubs manager Joe Maddon said he isn't sure any of it makes a difference in favor of his team.
"We're going to find out," Maddon said. "There is something to be said for playing those kinds of (close) games and getting that within your system like the Mets have done. They did a great job against the Dodgers.
"I really don't know. Everybody always looks for the advantages or what team would you rather play and all that good stuff. For me, it really doesn't matter. What matters the most is we play our game and we play our game well. All these other considerations, I really don't try to analyze them too much because they're so nebulous, and there's no real reason, other than just trying to contrive a reason."
This series will spawn a lot of narratives, some of them sound and some of them faulty. The easiest is that this is a matchup between a Cubs team rich in young hitters while the Mets have young pitching. During the regular season, the Cubs had a lower ERA than the Mets, but the Mets hit more home runs than the Cubs.
Neither the Cubs nor the Mets were preseason favorites to meet in the NLCS. Lester, who won two world championships in Boston when Epstein was the general manager there, said his old boss was quite convincing in selling the young talent the Cubs now have.
"It didn't take much for him to convince me about these young guys," Lester said. "He sat there and gave me highlight after highlight and number after number on these guys and what they projected them to do and what position they wanted them to play.
"I think the biggest thing that sold me, especially on not only these young guys, but the whole organization, was just how arrogant he was about it, and I mean that in a good way. He was very confident in what he has done to this point or that point to get this team to the next step and I thought that was the most impressive part - just how confident he was in these guys because these guys were not going to be failures."
Epstein agreed with Lester's assessment, but he would substitute another word for "arrogant."
"I prefer 'confident,'' Epstein said, laughing. "Confident without remorse, I guess."
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