The Chicago Cubs players Addison Russell, left, and Ben Zobrist celebrate a victory in April. The team is attempting to win its first World Series in more than a century. Photograph by Jonathan Daniel / Getty

Theo Epstein, the president of baseball operations for the Chicago Cubs, was running behind. “I just need a few minutes,” he said. “Have you eaten?” The still boyish former wunderkind, now forty-two, had one more matter to tend to before turning to our scheduled chat, so he deposited me in the staff cafeteria of the Under Armour Performance Center, the team’s new spring-training complex, in Mesa, Arizona. As he was leaving, he waved over an earnest, clean-cut young man to keep me company. “Meet Sean,” he said, patting the kid on the shoulder. “He’s our defensive specialist.”

Sean Ahmed didn’t look like a guy ready to bare-hand a bunt and start a double play. The thirty-one-year-old was dressed in a polo shirt, jeans, and gym shoes, and he looked like one of the thousands of young geeks you might find sitting on exercise balls and staring at computer screens in Silicon Valley. With his degree in economics from the University of Chicago, he could have been one. Instead, he spends long days modelling data, some from advance scouts, who watch video to forecast where balls are likely to be hit each time a particular batter faces one of the Cubs’ pitchers; the Cubs can then position fielders in those places, giving the team a competitive edge. “My mom emigrated from Turkey, so she doesn’t really get the baseball thing,” he said with a resigned smile. “There was always that tension between becoming a doctor and, well, you know . . .”

Doctors do important work, but very few people can help a big-league team prevent one hit a week, which is what the Cubs coaches estimate that Ahmed has done. He’s one of eight mathematicians and computer whizzes in a data-analytics unit that Epstein has assembled since he came to Chicago, in 2011, to do for the hapless Cubs what he did for the Boston Red Sox: build a championship team. “Actually, you should know that I considered working for the Obama campaign and was really tempted,” Ahmed said, perhaps sheepish about having chosen the Cubs over the loftier-sounding pursuit with which I was once associated, having spent a decade as Barack Obama’s senior political strategist. “But, you know, these opportunities don’t come around too often.”

I didn’t blame him. The Cubs’ quest for greatness is the most pleasing campaign of 2016. The last time the Cubs won a World Series was during the Roosevelt Administration—Teddy's, not Franklin's. The hundred and eight years that the team has gone without a title is the longest championship drought in American sports. Even on those rare occasions when the Cubs have shown some serious mettle, freakish events have conspired against them. I was at Wrigley Field, in 2003, when the Cubs were five outs from clinching the National League pennant, until a clueless—and instantly infamous—fan named Steve Bartman reached over the stands and touched a foul ball, depriving the team of a crucial out. The Florida Marlins went on to stage an eight-run rally, winning the game and, from there, the series. Fiascos like that one left Chicagoans talking again about the so-called Curse of the Billy Goat: back in 1945, the last time the Cubs were in the Series, a flamboyant self-promoter named Billy Sianis, the proprietor of the Billy Goat Tavern, allegedly cursed the team to eternal doom after Murphy, his pet goat, was barred from Wrigley Field.

But as fall approaches, the Cubs are on an epic roll. They have by far the best record in baseball—by Labor Day, they had outscored their opponents by a prodigious two hundred and twenty-nine runs, a differential that puts them among history’s élite teams. Their manager, Joe Maddon, an aging hipster and baseball savant, has led the team through the slumps, injuries, and mental fatigue inevitable in a long season, deftly pacing the players for a playoff run. They won twenty-two games in August, the most for the Cubs in a single month since that last pennant-winning season, in 1945. Now the street venders who mass between Wrigley Field and the nearby Red Line train station on game days are hawking a red, white, and blue T-shirt that pays homage to Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo, the team’s formidable young sluggers: “Bryant/Rizzo ’16. Make Chicago Great Again.”

Anthony Rizzo bats against the Oakland Athletics, the team that transformed baseball with its approach to data analytics. Photograph by Michael Zagaris / Oakland Athletics / Getty Photograph by Michael Zagaris / Oakland Athletics / Getty

Torn down to the studs and assiduously rebuilt by Epstein, this once creaky franchise now strikes me as baseball’s version of the Obama campaigns that I helped to lead—young, hungry, joyful, and bent on using new tools to challenge conventional theories about how to win.

The search for competitive advantages in baseball used to be easier. In the early two-thousands, Billy Beane, who was the general manager of the Oakland A’s at the time, famously fashioned his low-budget team into a surprising contender by using data analytics to find hidden gems among the players whom other teams had rejected. This was the dawning of the “Moneyball” era, as Michael Lewis would dub Beane’s techniques in his best-selling book.

Epstein became Boston’s general manager, in 2002, after Beane declined the job. “It was a different time,” Epstein recalled. “You could get ahead by just understanding some simple truths about the game that weren’t widely accepted yet, like valuing on-base percentage, for instance”—which accounts not only for a batter’s hits but also his walks—“over batting average.” In Boston, Epstein won two World Series, in part by digging deeper into data, drawing on the burgeoning field of sabermetrics (named after the Society for American Baseball Research). Sabermetricians examine the various statistics a baseball game produces, with an eye toward figuring out which skills and outcomes really determine who wins and loses. When a batter puts the ball in play and it results in an out, what really made that happen, and how can we quantify it? Now most major-league teams ask those sorts of questions; yesterday’s winning insights have become today’s common practices. And so, in rebuilding the Cubs, Epstein has relied not only on statistical analysis but psychology, even neuroscience—anything to push his team ahead of the pack.

“All combined knowledge of baseball probably represents three per cent of the game—ninety-seven per cent is unknown,” Epstein told me this spring. “So we’re constantly asking each other questions, testing hypotheses, challenging other people’s opinions—asking if there’s a better way to do things, a better way to capture data, gather data, work with data, testing out old scouting axioms to see if they can be proven by the numbers or disproven by the numbers.” To longtime fans, the notion of the hidebound Cubs as a laboratory for innovation is an astonishing development. The transformation began with the return of the team, in 2009, to private ownership. For nearly thirty years, the Tribune Company, which bought the team from the Wrigley family, in 1981, had used the Cubs primarily to furnish programming for its television and radio properties. The company tried to keep the team competitive through the periodic signing of free agents, but as a public company confronted by the tyranny of quarterly reports—and later by the collapse of its newspaper revenues—it simply could not make the long-term investments required of a winning baseball franchise. Then the Ricketts family, prominent in the brokerage of stocks and bonds—and in political circles—acquired a majority interest in the team. The family promised a new approach.

“We don’t believe in curses,” Tom Ricketts, the Cubs chairman, told me when I visited Mesa this spring. Ricketts, with his dark, combed-back hair and angular face, clad in his standard uniform of chinos and a button-down shirt, looks like a cross between Ted Cruz and Mister Rogers. “Since World War II, we’ve only had, like, twenty winning seasons. If you want to break ‘the curse,’ you’ve got to start winning baseball games. I think it was just years of poor management.” That was evident in ways big and small. “When we took over, half the staff was working in trailers outside Wrigley Field, and they had the_ better_ offices. There was this same legacy of underinvestment that you could see throughout the whole organization.”