EXTRA: Want a piece of the Cubs?

Have you ever fantasized about owning a piece of the Chicago Cubs?

Helping to pay to fix up Wrigley Field could get you a minority partnership in the ball club?

 

Personally, I can’t comprehend why anyone in their right mind would want to. But to each his own, and now it seems there’s a chance you might actually be able to buy a bit of the ball club that represents Chicago in the National League.

NOT THAT YOU’D get your chance to do anything in the way of changing the way things work at Clark and Addison streets.

For, as reported by Comcast SportsNet and Crain’s Chicago Business, nothing is definite yet. But the Ricketts family that owns majority control of the team reportedly is considering selling a few shares of the team.

Their intent is to come up with the $500 million it is estimated it will cost to do a series of renovations on Wrigley Field to ensure that the building will be structurally sound enough to be in use for several more decades, while still having amenities that will allow it to compete with the newest stadiums and all their special (cash-generating) features.

The Ricketts family is wealthy. And my guess is that part of the reason they got so much money is because they don’t go around spending it if they can get someone else to.

SO THE FACT that the Rickettses want a remodeled stadium doesn’t mean they’re going to mortgage the family fortune to get it done.

Get a series of investors to put up the cash, and reward them with shares of the ball club. Not enough for them to have control. But enough that they can go walking around with their chests puffed out saying, “I own the Chicago Cubs!!!”

I suppose it’s no different than the Chicago White Sox situation, where there are many people who own a part of the ball club – some of whom have been around since the days when Bill Veeck ran the team. But they’re all pledged loyal to Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, and they don’t try to run anything.

I suppose it’s the next step up from those personal seat licenses some professional sports franchises sell to people. You have to cough up a significant amount of cash in order to have the right to buy tickets to individual games.

SO THE NEXT time you venture to Wrigley Field (I want to say that the last time I went there, they played the Montreal Expos – it’s been awhile), just think. You may wind up finding yourself sitting next to an “owner” of the team.

You can guzzle back your Old Style-brand beer (why some people feel such a love for it that the ball club reached an agreement to keep it, despite the dominance of Anheuser-Busch products throughout the ball park is something I’ll never comprehend) while listening to him tell you what he’d do differently – if only he had a real say in the team.

Just something to think about, if you’re amongst those willing to put up with the predicted 48-degree temperatures and overcast skies just to see the Philadelphia Phillies give the Cubbies a Friday afternoon Opening Day pounding!

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EXTRA: Wrigley up for Wed. vote

Wrigley looking less and less like Wrigley should

The City Council is likely to give its approval to a renovation plan that supposedly would bring Wrigley Field into the 21^st Century – structurally and technologically, ensuring that the Chicago Cubs will remain in the Lake View neighborhood for decades to come.

The aldermen meet Wednesday, and negotiations literally kept going through Tuesday.

FOR WHAT IT’S worth, 44^th Ward Alderman Tom Tunney is now a supporter of the project – although I suspect the council would have voted for the ballpark project even if he had maintained his objections.

For the record, Tunney can claim to have persuaded the Cubs to back away from one feature of the renovation – construction of a pedestrian bridge over Clark Street. He seems to think the structure would have been garish-looking.

Although personally, I think it might have been practical – similar to that bridge that takes people over 35^th Street and directly into U.S. Cellular Field. It keeps all those Chicago White Sox fans from clogging up 35^th Street traffic while trying to cross the streets to get to the parking lots.

Including the “sacred” lot upon which people park their cars on what was once the playing field of Comiskey Park.

A BRIDGE PROBABLY would have made some sense. But it isn’t going to happen. For the Cubs, I’m sure they think this is a minor concession – since they’re getting so much else of what they want.

Most sacred of parking lots

Those video boards (the tackily-named “jumbotrons”) and advertising signs that will block the views of some of the rooftops across the street from which some people pay about $150 per person to watch a ballgame from outside the stadium.

Which means they’re getting a crummier view of baseball than you get from the uppermost seats of the upper deck at U.S. Cellular – but then again, some people have money to burn, I guess.

At least we can stop wondering if a suburb is going to get to claim to have Major League Baseball within their boundaries. It was always a long-shot within the Chicago area (even though ball clubs like the Los Angeles Angels and Texas Rangers are suburban-based in their metropolitan areas).

ALTHOUGH THEY MIGHT have another chance in about a decade or so.

Keep in mind that U.S. Cellular is in its 23^rd season of baseball, and it seems that modern-day stadiums are expected to last 40 or so seasons before being replaced.

Considering that the White Sox wanted to move to a suburban location back in the 1980s, they may get another chance. Unless our political people maintain their current mindsets – in which case the Sox will play at 35^th and Shields and the Cubs will be at Clark and Addison until the day Planet Earth comes to a fiery end.

The real question is will either ball club have made it back to the World Series before then?

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Cubs move talk a whole load of bunk?

Am I the only one who thinks all the talk these days about the Chicago Cubs “moving” (all over the front pages of newspapers and on broadcasts and websites) is a whole lot of nonsense?

How much will Wrigley change if Ricketts gets his way?

 

If ever there was a time when our government officials ought to take a hard line and not let themselves get intimidated by a professional sports team, it is this time now.

FOR THE RECORD, Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts made comments implying he’d consider moving his family’s ball club if city and Lake View neighborhood officials aren’t more sympathetic to the renovations they want to make so that Wrigley Field becomes more like other new stadiums – as in containing features that the team can justify charging top dollar for.

Is this just a reiteration of the previously-expressed threat to push for a new stadium to be built at a suburban location? Is Ricketts really threatening to move the National League’s only charter member to play in its original city (the Braves were in Boston and Milwaukee before moving to Atlanta 46 years ago)?

Or is it just a load of hot air that means nothing?

Because when I listen to what Ricketts actually said, I don’t hear anything that’s new. Other than a would-be bully being upset that the other kids in the schoolyard are actually standing up to him!

PERHAPS THAT LINE is a bit harsh. Because I personally could care less what the Cubs do. Considering that I don’t really care much what they do on the field, why should I care where that “field” is located?

Yankee Stadium lost a lot of character ...

I just don’t hear any credible threat. If anything, we were a lot closer back in 1988 to losing the Chicago White Sox than we ever will be to losing the Cubs (we Chicagoans couldn’t be so lucky as to get rid of that “lovable loser” image the Cubs hang around our collective necks).

The day that the Cubs sign a lease to play in another city’s stadium (even if that “city” is just a dinky suburb like Schaumburg, and which the White Sox actually did with St. Petersburg, Fla.) is the day that the talk of moving should be countered seriously.

Until then, it just doesn’t mean much.

... when it was renovated, and even more when it was replaced

BECAUSE I SENSE that Ricketts and his siblings aren’t dumb enough to think they’d be better off playing anywhere else other than the humble abode of one Elwood J. Blues.

That century-old building is so much a part of the ball club’s character that they are the one team that ought to seriously disregard thoughts of playing anywhere else. No matter now unique or fine the new structure might turn out to be, there are too many people who go to see the one-time Cubs Park.

Just ask all those people who wear “Wrigley Field” jerseys to ballgames!

It’s like the New York Yankees, who had the sense in the early 1970s to not think of going to New Jersey and arranged for an overhaul of Yankee Stadium. Let’s only hope that the Cubs aren’t foolish enough to ruin the character of Wrigley in the same way that the Yankees did with their building that wound up servicing the team through 2008.

THAT’S THE REAL reason I’m skeptical of all the Wrigley renovation talk that focuses around giant video boards and the need for video advertising boards and a “Captain Morgan” club for people to spend more of their money in.

Just as much a part of Wrigley lore

Because at least the Yankees could still claim the playing field of the renovated park was the same place where the immortals like Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle played winning baseball for so many decades.

What could the Cubs claim if they turn Wrigley into a commercialized mess? A story about how a black cat once pranced on this field and freaked the Cubs out to the point where they lost.

Or maybe it will come back to Babe Ruth? Future Cubs fans will say, “On this field now surrounded by commercialized nonsense, Babe Ruth hit a home run that caused our Cubs to lose, yet again!”

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Cub-like delusions stretch on and on. Or, is Captain Morgan the Cubs' savior?

“The Cubs are coming out of hibernation!”

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I still remember that advertising jingle from the early 1980s.

Soon to have Captain Morgan (below) and other corporate images in abundance to bolster the building's profitability.

 

The Chicago Cubs had just been sold by the Wrigley family to the Tribune Co., and long-time baseball man Dallas Green (who had just won a World Series as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies) had been hired to be general manager and turn the Cubs into a “winning” organization.

TRUE ENOUGH, THE Cubs did win a pair of division titles in the 1980s. But the streak of seasons without a National League championship remains unbroken – let alone the streak of seasons without a World Series win.

You can’t win the series if you don’t even make it!

And that division title of 1984 also gave Chicago sports fans one of the ultimate Chicago Cub moments – the sight of that ground ball skipping through first baseman Leon Durham’s legs. Bill Buckner let the same thing happen to him two seasons later in the World Series while playing for the Boston Red Sox.

But it was probably his ex-Cub status, more than any Red Sox “curse,” that caused it to happen.

The Cubs' goat

I COULDN’T HELP but think of all of this when I learned of current Cubs owner Tom Ricketts (his family bought the ball club from the Tribune types just a few years ago) talking of the deal negotiated to permit a renovation of Wrigley Field that will allow for the addition of features meant to make the stadium a more profitable facility.

“If this plan is approved, we will win the World Series for our fans and our city,” Ricketts said. “We need this project in order to bring our fans a winner. The financial impact of this proposal will help us do that.”

That’s some pretty bold talk coming from the operator of a ball club that was one of the worst in the National League last season, and isn’t all that much better this year.

The Cubs goat in Boston

I know some are convinced that one-time Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein is destined to do some serious re-building apart from the renovations to take place at Clark and Addison streets. But we forget that the Boston and Chicago North Side situations are nowhere near comparable.

THE RED SOX just had to overcome the New York Yankees for a single season to dump their jinx. The Cubs have to overcome more than a century of ultimate failure that caused sportswriter George Castle to write a book labeling them, “The Million-to-One Team” (as in the odds the Cubs overcame in order to lose so consistently across generations).

Personally, I’m not convinced that this move will have anything to do with making the Cubs significantly better on-field.

Tribune Co. ran a profitable operation of a ball club by putting the emphasis on turning the ballpark experience into something so unique that people wouldn’t pay any attention to those pesky ballplayers in baby blue on the field bobbling all those ground balls.

So I have no doubt that all the proposed changes to Wrigley Field (including 35,000 square feet of advertising, construction of a new hotel across the street and a two-story restaurant and bar in the building carrying the “Captain Morgan Club” corporate name) will add to the financial bottom line of the Chicago National League Ball Club.

BUT THAT DOESN’T necessarily translate into more “W’s” in the standings. Ricketts’ comments WILL be long remembered amongst sports fans in Chicago – particularly if the on-field victory eventually comes so many decades in the future that there’s no way it can be tied to the upcoming renovations.

The ballpark in its original, pre-Wrigley Field, condition. Image provided by Chuckman Collection.

 

Whose real purpose is to ensure that the 99-year-old structure is sound enough to remain in use for those many more decades of play!

Not that it really matters much. In the end, Chicago baseball fans got to experience a World Series just a few seasons ago. We have had it in our time.

As for those Chicagoans who preferred not to get excited about the Ozzie & Co. production of ’05, that was their choice. I hope they enjoyed their ivy on the walls.

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Great Goat Conspiracy??!? How droll

Do you know what bothers me the most about the incident this week in which someone tried to send the severed head of a goat to the owner of the Chicago Cubs?

Somewhere, out there, someone thinks they were oh, so clever – instead of the nitwit that they truly are.

The new image of Tom Ricketts?

 

SERIOUSLY. SENDING A head to Tom Ricketts? Even though he never got it because it was delivered to Wrigley Field and security had enough sense to check the package first!

Somebody has been watching way too much of The Godfather. I sense somebody thinks that Ricketts himself was going to scream like a little baby – just like actor John Marley’s “Jack Woltz” character.

The only real question is what provoked this incident. Was it the fact that somebody thinks the Cubs are asking too much of Lake View neighborhood residents in trying to get approval for a proposed upgrade of Wrigley Field – one meant to make the century-old building usable for another few decades?

Or is it just the fact that a week into the season, the Cubs haven’t played all that well and have a losing record?

SENDING A SEVERED head might sound a bit drastic a reaction to the Cubs not playing so well. Then again, Cubs fans have never been the most rational group of people on Planet Earth.

Who’s to say why the head was sent, except for the fact that they had to feed off an image from The Godfather – which is among the three films I usually list as all-time favorites (M*A*S*H and All the President’s Men are the others).

The Cubs/goat origin

This use of such an image is so tacky, I might have to dump The Godfather from the list and come up with something else!

Insofar as the stadium renovation negotiations are concerned, I’ll be the first to admit I believe the Cubs often forget the degree to which Wrigley Field’s unique ambiance is tied into the character of the neighborhood.

DO SOMETHING THAT harms the feel of “Wrigleyville” (which I define rather strictly as the portion of Lake View within about two blocks of the ballpark, rather than the realtor definition that would use the label to describe the bulk of the North lakefront) and you’re doing something that will harm Wrigley Field.

Which, in the end, would hurt the Cubs – who certainly aren’t special for anything that happens on the playing field.

Heck, if the team is determined to push for so many changes in the essential character, then perhaps they should seriously consider the offers coming from suburban Rosemont.

Because there’s no way to build a stadium on the scale of what professional sports franchises play in anywhere in Chicago, unless you’re willing to accept a solely functional building like U.S. Cellular Field.

THIS IS ONE incident where I will be hoping that police can find someone who actually was involved with the goat head (which was delivered to the ballpark by an anonymous man who drove away in his truck before anyone tried checking the contents of the package).

The fact that the head had a tag on its ear from the Department of Agriculture may wind up giving some clue – particularly if it can help them figure out how the head was obtained to begin with.

Find a low-level accomplice, and it usually becomes possible for police to work their way up the chain to find the person who actually delivered the head – and the person who came up with the whole scheme.

Just in case it winds up involving more than one individual.

THE GREAT GOAT conspiracy! It could be a tale that Cubs fans tell for generations to come – just as they persist in replaying the tale about how “Billy Goat” Sianis got kicked out of Wrigley Field for the 1945 World Series because he tried to bring his goat into the ballpark to promote his Billy Goat Tavern.

When you lose that often, you have to find something amusing to talk about – even if it means pretending that the Cubs somehow did something wrong by not allowing livestock into the grandstand!

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Political people want to keep Cubs at the 'humble abode' of Elwood J. Blues

How much will structure change after renovation?

There’s one inherent fact to comprehend when it comes to the way Chicago political people interact with the professional athletic teams that represent this city.

They don’t want change!

THE WHITE SOX will always be at 35^th Street, while the Bulls and Blackhawks (who’d have ever envisioned so many wins in this strike-shortened season?) will play their games on Madison Street.

The Bears will be in Soldier Field. While the Cubs will forevermore be the team that plays at Clark and Addison streets.

Think about it. The White Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks moved to new stadiums in the 1990s that were located across the street from their old buildings – allowing for minimal change in the way we think of those teams.

The Bears play in that flying-saucer contraption located within the old Soldier Field, no matter how hideous it makes the overall structure look.

SO NOW THAT the Chicago Cubs are trying to engage in serious negotiations about a renovation of their stadium so that the 99-year-old building will survive a few more decades, the Cubs have the serious drawback in negotiations that they can’t seriously play a threat to move.

Even though I suspect some of their northwest suburban base of fans would probably prefer it if they no longer had to make the trek to the Lake View neighborhood and could instead go to a place like Arlington Heights or Schaumburg.

Of course, that would go contrary to the trend of modern-day stadium building – which comes up with structures that like to pretend they’re based on the classic ballparks of old but are usually built on the fringes of downtown.

TUNNEY: Talking tough, because he can!

But we’ve never had that attitude in Chicago. When the White Sox tried back in the 1980s to talk of building a new stadium in DuPage County, or when others tried to talk of a multi-purpose stadium for the White Sox and Bears in the South Loop – they were non-starters!

THE POLITICAL PEOPLE back then only wanted to talk about construction that would keep a sports team at 35^th Street near the Dan Ryan Expressway – as though it is written in stone that the ball club can go nowhere else.

Even though a modern facility probably would have fit in better at a different location than it does on the fringes of the old-school Bridgeport neighborhood.

The same attitude is going to prevail with the Cubs – which will limit the amount of change that will be permitted to the structure to make it competitive with the new stadiums that are overglorified shopping malls with sports themes, or perhaps baseball-themed amusement parks.

Where the game on the field is secondary to the whole spectacle of being present in the building.

THE RICKETTS FAMILY that now owns the Chicago Cubs wants to do a significant overhaul of the old building, but city officials are making it clear they’re not about to give in on much change.

Alderman Thomas Tunney of the 44^th Ward has said he wants assurances of more parking (which Wrigley Field now notoriously lacks), better police protection and guarantees that the renovated ballpark wouldn’t become an architectural albatross that overwhelms the neighborhood – such as what U.S. Cellular Field sometimes does to the Armour Square neighborhood.

And Mayor Rahm Emanuel seems determined to treat the Cubs as he might have once treated Republican politicos who were trying to undermine Barack Obama’s presidential authority.

What brought this thought into my mind was reading the assorted Internet comments being posted. There are those who think the Cubs ought to tell the city to “Shove it!” and move to a suburban location.

AS THOUGH LIFE were that simple.

Particularly since I suspect many suburban officials like the idea of having the amenities of life’s entertainment nearby without having them within their own boundaries. Because then, they’d be responsible for their maintenance.

It may well be only Chicago city officials who would want to take on a project such as a $300 million overhaul of Wrigley Field (with another alleged $200 million to upgrade the surrounding neighborhood).

Which may well mean that Chicago gets the upper hand in these negotiations.

WHILE I DON’T have a problem with professional sports teams playing in city- (or state-)owned stadiums, I only wish these governments could negotiate worthwhile deals that make it viable for them – as well as the teams!

Not selling out the house to benefit the Cubs could well be a major accomplishment for the Emanuel administration. Let’s only hope that city officials don’t forget that fact.

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