The interview with Giants general manager Scott Harris for this story and podcast took place during Spring Training, before camps were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Scott Harris’ life was going pretty well.

A 25-year-old living in New York City, Harris was working for Major League Baseball as the league’s coordinator of baseball operations while concurrently working toward an MBA from Columbia Business School.

“I expected to be [at MLB] for several more years,” Harris said on this week’s episode of the Executive Access podcast. “Sometimes opportunities come a lot earlier than you expect them to.”

For Harris, that opportunity was in Chicago.

The Cubs reached out to Harris about a position as director of baseball operations. Harris might not have been thinking about leaving the Commissioner’s Office any time soon, but a move to the club side was something he believed would happen at some point.

“I’m an extremely competitive person,” Harris said. “I sort of needed to get back to a team and start competing for something.”

Harris flew to Chicago to meet with Theo Epstein, who was entering his second year as the Cubs’ president of baseball operations, as well as several key members of the club’s front office.

“As soon as you walked into the doors in Chicago, you started to realize this is a pretty compelling culture” Harris said. “Every person I talked to, whether it was Theo, Jed [Hoyer], Jason [McLeod], Randy [Bush], Shiraz [Rehman], they would always talk about what it’s going to be like ‘when we win the World Series.’ It wasn’t ‘if we win the World Series,’ or ‘we hope to win the World Series.’ It was, ‘This is what it’s going to feel like when we win the World Series.’ As a 25-year-old kid, how could you not want to be a part of that?”

The Cubs offered the job to Harris, who called his parents to share the news.

“I called my dad [and] he just said, ‘Yes, take the job, drop out of school. Take the job immediately,’” said Harris, whose father is a lifelong Cubs fan. “I called my mom and she said, ‘You can’t take it now. I know it’s a really exciting opportunity, but you can’t take it. You have to finish school. This will be there.’ I was like, ‘Mom, this job is not going to be available later.’”

Harris promised his mother he would finish business school in Chicago and took the job. He did so at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, but that’s a whole different story he shares on Executive Access.

Less than four years after making the move, Harris found himself sitting at lunch with Jared Porter, the Cubs’ director of pro scouting, on a late-October day in Cleveland. They were hours away from watching their team take on the Indians in Game 7 of the World Series, hoping to see the 108-year championship drought come to an end.

“We were sitting across from each other at lunch, not really talking,” Harris said. “Neither of us had an appetite; I sort of felt like I was going to puke. Sometimes in this game, executives overestimate their ability to affect team performance in-season, but you do have tools to affect team performance -- between making trades, sending players out, calling up different players from the Minor Leagues. But when you’re in the World Series, you truly have no instruments to affect the performance on the field at all anymore. You’re basically sitting on your hands, hoping the tea is good enough. During all the twists and turns of Game 7, I was a basket case.”

The Cubs emerged victorious in an epic Game 7 to win the World Series, fulfilling the words Epstein and his front-office friends had uttered when Harris went for his interview four years earlier.

“It was fun to think back about every moment when you were sitting in a room somewhere and the decision was made to draft Kyle Schwarber, draft Kris Bryant or trade for Jake Arrieta,” Harris said. “It was a huge sense of accomplishment in that clubhouse after the game.”

Listen to the entire interview on Executive Access, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Art 19 or wherever you get your podcasts.