As Vanderbilt claimed the No. 1 ranking in the 2007 polls and established itself as one of the premier college baseball programs in the country, the team regularly held players-only meetings led by a backup catcher who rarely played.

That group featured David Price, the No. 1 selection in that year’s draft and a future Cy Young Award winner with the Rays and World Series champion in Boston. Price’s teammates that season included four other eventual first-round picks. Casey Weathers, who went to the Rockies at No. 8 in the Price draft, was later traded to the Cubs in the DJ LeMahieu deal. Pedro Alvarez, the second pick in 2008 and a one-time All-Star in Pittsburgh, hit 162 home runs in the majors. Mike Minor has pitched more than 1,300 innings for the Braves, Rangers, Royals and A’s. Ryan Flaherty, a former Cubs prospect, is now on San Diego’s big-league coaching staff.

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Even with all that talent, those players-only meetings ran through Carter Hawkins, who started one of Vanderbilt’s 67 games that year, finished with two hits in 14 at-bats and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in human and organizational development.

“You could sort of see the writing on the wall that he was going to do things in baseball if he wanted to,” said Derek Johnson, the Reds pitching coach who spent 11 seasons at Vanderbilt, helping convert the Commodores program into a pitching factory.

Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer sought those leadership qualities and communications skills when he hired Hawkins, 37, away from Cleveland’s front office to become the 16th general manager in franchise history. Since that Game 7 in Cleveland five years ago, the Cubs have gone through the World Series hangover, two seasons disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the departures of potential Hall of Famers Joe Maddon and Theo Epstein, and a mass exodus of talent that included Yu Darvish, Kyle Schwarber, Craig Kimbrel, Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant and Javier Báez.

In recent years, the Cubs have implemented new systems and structures throughout their baseball operations department, making substantial changes within scouting and player development, the major-league coaching staff and areas such as medical, athletic training, sport science and technology. The Cubs need someone who can help break down those silos, synthesize information that is available to all 30 clubs and bridge some of the gaps between the theoretical stuff marketed at baseball think tanks and the practical knowledge that players can use in real games. The methodical, unpredictable process of building “The Next Great Cubs Team” will continue this week at Major League Baseball’s GM meetings in Southern California.

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“It’s not different than any other sport or industry,” Hawkins said. “People want to feel heard, they want to feel cared for, they want to feel invested in. But those things don’t happen overnight and you don’t just have trust with someone who walked through the door. It’s an accumulation of trust deposits over months and years. What’s the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago. What’s the second-best time? Today. So start planting that tree, start building that garden of trust and investment. Hopefully, it goes two ways. You can create this web of investment amongst people, but there’s no trick to it. There just isn’t. You just have to legitimately and deliberately want to connect and understand people and hear them. It has to be real. If it isn’t, it doesn’t work.”

Hawkins doesn’t always speak in corporate proverbs, which is something his wife, Lindsay, reminded him before his Oct. 19 appearance on 670 The Score. As Hawkins told the “Mully & Haugh Show” the day after his first media event at Wrigley Field: “My wife, as I was walking out of the hotel room this morning, she said, ‘Don’t say ‘processes’ again. You said ‘processes’ way too much yesterday.’ I said, ‘OK, I got you.’ Yeah, if you had chosen ‘processes’ on your buzzword bingo yesterday during the press conference, you would have been a big winner.”

Hawkins and Lindsay have twins, Henry and Ivy, and they are expecting their third child around the start of spring training next year. Hawkins grew up in a well-connected, high-achieving family, the son of Scott and Susan, two graduates from the University of Georgia School of Law. Scott, who also has an MBA from Harvard Business School, ran a real-estate development firm in Atlanta. Hawkins’ sister, Justice Sarah Hawkins Warren, earned her undergraduate and law degrees from Duke University and now serves on the Georgia Supreme Court.

Coming out of Westminster, a private high school in Atlanta, Hawkins wasn’t necessarily regarded as a top-tier prospect. Johnson, the Vanderbilt assistant coach who first transitioned into professional baseball with the Cubs as a minor-league pitching coordinator, remembered watching Hawkins dive for a foul popup into a mud puddle on a rain-soaked field during a tournament in Memphis. That moment sold the Vanderbilt staff on Hawkins’ willingness to do the dirty work.

“Like every player that goes to college baseball, whether it’s Vanderbilt or whether it’s a DIII (program), they think they’re going to be a professional baseball player,” Hawkins said. “And I did until David Price walked through the doors and made it pretty clear to me that one of these things doesn’t look like the other.”

That dry sense of humor and self-awareness would pay off handsomely down the line in Nashville, a city that has become a hub for people within the baseball industry. Hawkins got in on the ground floor of what head baseball coach Tim Corbin was building at Vanderbilt, a program on the rise that made five College World Series appearances between 2011 and 2021 and won two national titles. Besides Johnson, an early hire for the Epstein/Hoyer regime in Chicago, Vanderbilt recruiting coordinator/hitting coach Erik Bakich went on to become the head baseball coach at Michigan, overseeing his own team in the 2019 College World Series. Hawkins’ teammates at Vanderbilt included Phillies pitching coach Caleb Cotham, Blue Jays bullpen coach Matt Buschmann, Giants first base coach Antoan Richardson and Orioles third base coach Tony Mansolino. Hawkins recognized that Vanderbilt recruited at an elite level without resting on that talent alone.

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“DJ just had a really deliberate plan for each pitcher and deliberate goals for his pitching staff overall,” Hawkins said. “That was really interesting, just the mindset of the pitchers was that of viewing it as a team within a team. And their willingness to change year over year. There wasn’t one year where they did everything the same. They were constantly looking to improve, I found that fascinating. Those concepts stood out and are really effective today in all different aspects of baseball.”

In that environment, Hawkins adopted a simple mindset: Just do whatever you can to help the team win. Johnson estimated that Hawkins caught “17,000” bullpen sessions at Vanderbilt, and part of that routine was by design. Johnson trusted Hawkins’ feedback from behind the plate, and pitchers felt comfortable throwing to him.

“He wasn’t the most talented player, but he was very ingrained in his craft and trying to get better and very eager to learn about the game,” said Cliff Godwin, the former director of operations for the Vanderbilt baseball program who’s now the head baseball coach at East Carolina. “I really don’t think Carter Hawkins has a big ego whatsoever. In any profession, as you continue to move up, that’s a lost art.”

Within the small world of baseball, Godwin did an extensive debrief with Hawkins before Cleveland drafted East Carolina pitcher Gavin Williams with the No. 23 pick in this year’s draft. While Hawkins will be involved in all aspects of the Cubs organization — and insistent on the idea that there’s no “secret sauce” — his tenure may well be defined by how fast the team starts to develop pitchers and if Cleveland’s model can be replicated and enhanced with big-market resources.

Perhaps no “secret sauce” is true in the sense that there is not just one approach to pitching development. Rather, it’s being willing to shift mindsets and embrace whatever changes may come along as the game continually evolves. That’s where Cleveland has separated itself, incubating talent in the minor leagues and the front office and turning over the major-league roster to consistently stay competitive.

Blue Jays president and CEO Mark Shapiro helped set the foundation before he left Cleveland after the 2015 season. There are reasons why president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti and GM Mike Chernoff have remained in Cleveland, even while the Mets run through repeated executive searches. Twins chief baseball officer Derek Falvey was once Hawkins’ roommate in Cleveland. Hawkins also credited Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins for teaching him how to be a leader in Cleveland’s player development department.

Hawkins referred to Tom Wiedenbauer — who played professionally for eight years and had a cup of coffee in the big leagues — as his “baseball godfather” for helping him understand the aspects of the game that he may not have fully appreciated as someone who never played at the highest level. Hawkins started as an advance scouting intern in 2008 and never stopped learning.

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“When he first got to Cleveland — they all did that there — they sought other people and their knowledge,” Johnson said. “He came to Vanderbilt with some people who worked with him and picked our brains. He went to many other places and did the same. He’s a guy who took advantage of his resources. I’ve had countless discussions with him through the years on various aspects of pitching. They did a good job over winters of going out to different places and learning about pitching from experts.”

Shane Bieber gets all the credit for winning the 2020 American League Cy Young Award, but he started as a fourth-round pick out of UC Santa Barbara, joining a 2016 draft class that also included Aaron Civale and Zach Plesac. Cleveland’s roster churn involves coaching up a fading prospect like Cal Quantrill, who has excelled since being acquired in the Mike Clevinger deal with San Diego at the 2020 trade deadline. The organization’s reputation is such that the Padres confirmed Ruben Niebla as their new pitching coach — after 21 seasons with Cleveland — before finalizing the hiring of manager Bob Melvin away from Oakland.

Cleveland absorbed ideas from Ron Wolforth’s Texas Baseball Ranch, Kyle Boddy’s Driveline Baseball facility, Randy Sullivan’s Florida Baseball ARMory and Lantz Wheeler’s Pitch-A-Palooza event.

“I always felt like Cleveland did a really nice job of sending their guys there then taking the information and turning it into Cleveland content,” Johnson said. “Carter was at the front of that and he really surrounded himself with a lot of really good pitching people, too, who helped him along the way.”

It should all be part of the same mindset, whether it’s an offseason workout at Vanderbilt or an advance meeting before the 2016 World Series or a strategy session about the next collective bargaining agreement.

“The only thing that should never change is that you’re always changing,” Hawkins said. “To do that, you have to constantly be getting and embedding new information. You can’t just implement that information. Step one is gathering it so you can assess and build a plan. That’s what we did, and what the Cubs are doing, and what we’ll continue to do in terms of asking: How do you continually evolve to stay ahead of the curve?”

(Top photo: Dan Mendlik / Cleveland Indians)