Theo Nathaniel Epstein is an American baseball executive, currently serving as the President of Baseball Operations for the Chicago Cubs of Major League Baseball (MLB). He is best known for ending two of the three longest championship droughts in major-league history.

Born in New York in 1973, Theo Nathaniel Epstein grew up as a Boston Red Sox fan in Brookline, Massachusetts. Always determined and focused, he had a clear goal of working in baseball, telling friends in high school and college that someday he would be the General Manager of the Red Sox. He attended Yale University as an American Studies major and had many extracurricular activities, such as managing the Men’s Hockey team, working in the sports information department and serving as the sports editor of the Yale Daily News.

He got his first job in major league baseball as a summer intern for the Baltimore Orioles in 1992. After graduating in 1995, he joined the San Diego Padres as a public-relations intern, and two years later he became the Padres’ director of baseball operations. That is when he started to perfect his data-driven analytical approach to players and how he established himself as an overnight prodigy.

In 2000, while working for the Padres, he graduated from University of San Diego’s School of Law, and two years later the Red Sox made him their general manager. When he first acquired the team, the Sox had finished second place behind the New York Yankees for five seasons in a row. He altered the team’s roster during his first year, and the Red Sox advanced to the American League Championship Series (ALCS). In 2004, Boston became the first major-league team ever to come back from a 3–0 series deficit, and they went on to win the World Series, their first title since 1918. He had helped to end an 86-year title-free streak.

In 2011 he left Boston to become the Chicago Cubs’ president. He went through a complete roster change, bringing in a multitude of talented young players. The new team overhaul paid off in 2015. They won 97 games and advanced to the National League Championship Series. In 2016, Chicago won 103 games, which was a major-league-best. They finished the season by bouncing back from a 3–1 defeat in the World Series to give long-suffering Cubs fans the team’s first title since Theodore Roosevelt was president. It was the franchise’s first World Series win in 108 years.