Owner setting high bar for Cubs
Tradition calls for Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts to welcome the team back every spring with a talk that establishes expectations for the upcoming season.
Ricketts made news Monday reasserting the Cubs’ plan to end their one-year championship drought, bold talk embraced by everyone from manager Joe Maddon to the last player in camp.
“I won’t say a season is a failure because you don’t win the World Series,” Ricketts said. “But it is our goal.”
It doesn’t seem long ago that the biggest goal Ricketts discussed on Day One of spring training revolved around Wrigley Field renovations or changes in the dugout. The annual big battle that loomed involved City Hall, not the Dodgers or Nationals. How times change. Now — beginning his ninth year at the helm of the Cubs — Ricketts sets a World Series-or-bust tone in his opening remarks.
Funny thing is, Ricketts didn’t have to say a word for everyone to already grasp that. His real statement about 2018 came earlier this month when the Cubs signed Japanese star Yu Darvish to a sixyear, $126 million contract. The entire baseball world heard it.
The Cubs announced their 2018 slogan as “Everybody In.” Ricketts proved how much ownership was by digging deep in the family’s pockets to lure the top freeagent pitcher to the North Side. The commitment to win starts at the top, where you will find a die-hard Cubs fan disguised as team chairman. Don’t let the sheepish, aw-shucks demeanor fool you: Ricketts is more competitive than he looks.
Sustaining success takes money. And Ricketts has evolved into a chairman willing to spend whatever it takes in the name of winning.
The addition of Darvish inflated the Cubs’ payroll to $172 million, the fifth-highest in baseball, according to spotrac.com. It also showed how much Ricketts trusts club president Theo Epstein with his money, even if it meant giving it to an outsider — Darvish — over a Cubs legend in Jake Arrieta.
After the Cubs’ season ended in October in the National League Championship Series loss to the Dodgers, a sense of inevitability surrounded Arrieta’s departure. But Maddon felt just as certain that, somehow, the combination of the Rickettses’ money and Epstein’s brain would find a way to make the Cubs legitimate World Series contenders again.
“I thought something would be done,” Maddon said. “I thought, ‘OK, Jake won’t be back, but we will replace Jake in a good way.’ I knew what our game plan was.”
In Chicago, oddly, the Cubs are the only professional sports team with a plan to win now. Optimism oozes at White Sox camp in Glendale, Ariz., because of all the terrific prospects, but they would be happy to win 75 games. The Bears hired a new, 39-year-old coach, allowing the franchise to hit reset yet again. The Bulls picked their lane in June by trading AllStar Jimmy Butler to begin a rebuild that appears promising — for 2020.
The Blackhawks can’t end their disappointing season soon enough so real changes can re-establish them as viable Stanley Cup contenders someday.
So when Ricketts speaks with urgency absent from Chicago’s other teams and backs it up with big investments, it resonates even more.