CHICAGO —  Every so often, Cubs pitcher Ben Brown will grab his phone, pull out his messages app and begin to fire off a text to his former teammate and a club icon, Kyle Hendricks.

Hendricks is now a member of the Los Angeles Angels and will get the ball Sunday to face his former team.

Most times, Brown stops himself and changes his mind. Sometimes, though, he fires the text away.

“I don’t want to bother him too much,” the 25-year-old second-year pitcher said. “But I’ll let him know I miss him, thinking about him. I think he had a really good game recently, texting him about that, too.”

When Brown worries that he’ll be bothering him, he’ll reach out to Angels catcher Logan O’Hoppe, a long-time friend and check in on Hendricks that way.

Hendricks left that kind of impact on Brown, even if they only overlapped for one year in the majors. At his peak on the mound, he was one of the best pitchers in the game, a man who was handed the ball in Game 7 of the World Series in which the Cubs snapped a 108-year title drought. Off the field, he was a cerebral pitcher who worked tirelessly between starts at his craft, but was always a first-class teammate, one that any other players flocked to and learned from, either directly or indirectly.

“He was always famously routine based and all that stuff – I feel like was well-documented – but he was always, no matter where he was at in his day, ready to have a conversation or get in depth on just things he was working on or things he was seeing,” Nico Hoerner, his teammate from 2019 through 2024, said. “And I just thought that was really cool, that he was a little reserved and on his own routine, but he was always super excited to talk about the game.”

For Brown, watching Hendricks between starts was just as beneficial and entertaining as seeing him toe the rubber every fifth day.

“The time he spent working was incredible,” Brown said. “He was doing scouting reports on his iPads for, I feel like, hours a day. I think those are things that obviously the fans didn’t see that, and the media doesn’t see that.”

There were lessons learned for players on the field, most in the public eye, but really not noticed by most people. Last season, second-year catcher Miguel Amaya became a friend to pitchers; they enjoyed throwing to him and were impressed by his work behind the dish.

Some of that was learned in his rookie season in 2023, when he worked heavily with Hendricks. That year, and to start last season, Hendricks would call his own game using PitchCom, pushing the buttons on his waist for Amaya to hear and receive. That helped Amaya develop in a critical aspect of being a catcher: game-calling.

“I was able to learn how to be able to mix his pitches,” Amaya said. “He’s not a pitcher who throws 95 mph, but with the [89, 90] mph that he throws, he gets outs and he gets hitters off balance with his changeup.

“To be able to learn how he liked to mix his pitches was something very important for me because there were moments in the future where I then called his game.”

The lessons from “The Professor” weren’t limited to his teammates, either.

“Kyle is a special person, and he’s one of those people that I’m lucky to have had a year with Kyle Hendricks,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “When you see a really good player that’s had a great career, that’s done some amazing things for this franchise, you want to know, ‘How did he do that?’

“And to get a window in that for a year of how he did it was fun.”

Just how did he do it, then?

“Just incredible at kind of controlling the game, like a master at kind of controlling what’s happening in the game and his energy in the game. High-skill level, of course, but that’s probably the thing I was amazed at the most, just kind of how he controlled those things and then how his teammates recognized and almost sought him out for that. We talk about players that are elite at things, and he was elite at that.”

That’s what made last season so bittersweet, especially as it wound down and you knew the end of his tenure was likely near. He wasn’t the Game 7 caliber pitcher, but he found ways to adjust and get major league hitters out. Despite posting a 5.92 ERA on the year, he finished the year with a 2.89 ERA in September, pitching a 7.1 inning, 2-hit outing at Wrigley Field against the Cincinnati Reds, walking off to a thundering ovation.

Players, coaches, the organization, and, most importantly, the fans enjoyed watching Hendricks and appreciated what he did for the Cubs and Chicago.

“It’s another thing that makes you appreciate our fan base, for sure, because I think you could really feel it from them, too, just like all the joy that he had been a part of with the World Series team and all the winning that he did here,” Hoerner said. “There was so many stars in that era of Cubs baseball, but I think people just really, really appreciated him for the moments that he gave them, whether it was that start against the Dodgers [in the 2016 NLCS], or game seven or whatever it is, and he’s deeply etched in a lot of people’s memories and joy with this organization.

“Just an incredible run that he had here.”