As Cubs Slowly Rebuild, There’s Shouting From the Rooftops
By BARRY BEARAK
It is a typical Sunday at Wrigley Field, that old Eden of a ballpark, with the sun beaming bright, a breeze blowing in from the lake, a good crowd on hand and the last-place Chicago Cubs already losing, 7-0. As is his custom, Tom Ricketts strolls through the aisles of the upper deck, greeting the fans.
It is a typical Sunday at Wrigley Field, that old Eden of a ballpark, with the sun beaming bright, a breeze blowing in from the lake, a good crowd on hand and the last-place Chicago Cubs already losing, 7-0. As is his custom, Tom Ricketts strolls through the aisles of the upper deck, greeting the fans.
The owners of most ball clubs would not mingle like this, especially if their team was so ridiculously bad year after year. But there goes Ricketts, unescorted by security, a familiar figure now in a long-sleeve white shirt and khaki trousers. People rush over to shake his hand and pose for selfies.
Ricketts is blessed with a genial face that wards off hostility like a plate of armor. Not once does anyone tell him to get rid of those bums on the field and win some doggone games. To the contrary, a shirtless man, Andrew Kolb, scurries over to say, “Thanks for taking over the team, brother.”
Another fan is staring at Ricketts but cannot quite place him. Is he an actor? A politician? He asks a stranger, “Sorry for being so stupid, but who is this guy?”
When the Ricketts family bought the Cubs in October 2009, the four siblings — and that’d be Pete, Tom, Laura and Todd — introduced themselves at a packed news conference. They were personable and witty, nothing stuffed-shirt about them. They said they loved the Cubs. They said they loved Wrigley Field.
Cubs fans were used to a media corporation, Tribune Company, owning their team. By contrast, these Rickettses were refreshingly human. Holy cow! Bleacher Bums were now running the show.
“There is no curse,” Tom Ricketts scoffed about a popular myth, sounding like a businessman rather than an exorcist. “If anybody on our team thinks he’s cursed, we’ll move him to a less accursed team.”
He promised to win the World Series, a sunburst of optimism that seemed as improbable to some as a pledge to reverse the rotation of the earth. The Cubs had not won the National League pennant since 1945, at the dawn of the nuclear age; they had not won the World Series since Henry Ford produced the first Model T in 1908.
“I’ll be honest, I think we have a team that can do it next year,” he said earnestly.
Of course, that is not what happened, not the next year or the next after that or the next or the next or this dismal season about to mercifully end. Instead the Cubs have lost baseball games at a pace remarkable even for a team notorious for the longevity of its futility.
While nothing supernatural may afflict the Cubs, the Ricketts family has encountered all sorts of earthly bedevilments both on the field and off: aging, overpaid players; a 100-year-old ballpark with a beauty only skin deep; hardball Windy City politics; critics who say plans to install a mammoth outfield video board will change Wrigley Field forever, despoiling the understated charm of baseball’s loveliest oasis.
And then there are the neighbors across the street. They claim they are legally entitled to unobstructed views of the games from their rooftops and oppose revenue-generating signs the Cubs want to erect above the outfield walls. The Rickettses blame them for delaying a $575 million project, a top-to-bottom renovation of the ballpark and the construction of an adjacent commercial plaza and hotel.
Continue reading the main story
“I’ll grant you, it has been a learning curve,” Tom Ricketts said.
The Ricketts siblings grew up on Hickory Street in Omaha, and one by one they went off to college in Chicago, where they would come under the spell of the ballpark affectionately known as “the friendly confines” and its endearing, if woebegone, team, the Cubs.
This was not a casual embrace. The four of them bled Cubbie blue like the most devoted of die-hards, each year exchanging their optimism for fatalism, muttering with a shrug: Wait till next year.
After graduation, in the late 1980s and very early 1990s, they thought of the center-field bleachers as the hub of their summertime social life. They went to most every weekend game with a roundup of friends. Pete, the oldest, once camped out all night on a three-fold lawn chair to make sure they got tickets.
The bleachers — beyond the ivy-covered outfield walls — did not offer the best view of a game, and yet something exhilarating went on there. No matter the score, the crowd was boisterous and carefree, a community of revelers invigorated by hot dogs, peanuts and plenty of beer. They threw opponents’ home runs back onto the field. The bleachers were a mellow state of mind, an ointment for the soul.
Tom, the next oldest, particularly recalls one Sunday afternoon. He was conveniently seated so he could pass people’s money to the beer vendor below and haul up cup after cup like a bucket from a well. He bought 16 at one time, he said. He also met a medical student named Cecelia. And she became his wife.
Wrigley Field, built in 1914, is set in one of Chicago’s great old residential neighborhoods, with three-story apartment buildings immediately beyond the bleacher walls. For a while, Pete and Tom shared a flat above Sports Corner, a tavern just across the street from right field. The urgent hawking of scalpers and peanut vendors awakened them if they tried to sleep late.
Back then, in 1990, Tom was making a living as an options trader. He also oversaw two fantasy league baseball teams, a suitable hobby for a man who scrutinized all of the Bill James baseball abstracts.
Tom wanted to attend the University of Chicago business school at night. The seven-page essay accompanying his application confided, “I fantasize about owning a major league baseball team,” while at the same time admitting how unlikely that was. Where would he ever get the required boatload of cash? He was a son of the middle class. His family never owned a new car. They did not take vacations. As a teenager, to get spending money Tom worked at Burger King or bused tables at a country club.
But within a decade, life would bloom with extravagant possibilities. As Tom and his siblings were starting out as young adults in Chicago, their father, Joe Ricketts, was on his way to becoming phenomenally wealthy in Omaha, building the discount brokerage now known as TD Ameritrade. In 2009, at Tom’s instigation, the Rickettses purchased the Cubs for $845 million, using assets from a family education trust he offhandedly described as “money we weren’t paying much attention to.”
Since then, Chicagoans have grown familiar with the Ricketts siblings and their many enthusiasms. Tom, who turns 49 Sunday, is the baseball guy, the hands-on chairman of the Cubs. His brothers and sister — though not their parents — sit on the team’s five-person board. Pete, 50, a far-to-the-right political conservative, is the Republican nominee for governor of Nebraska. Laura, 47, a lesbian activist, is one of the Democratic Party’s top fund-raisers. Todd, 44, heads Ending Spending, which supports political candidates who promise to balance the federal budget by shrinking the size of government.
“No doubt, we have our differences but we are an incredibly close family,” said Tom, who calls himself a moderate Republican. “It’s not a rare thing for me to speak with each of my siblings every day.”
• • •
As Ricketts roams the grandstands, he is often approached by someone elderly who asks a question with genuine urgency: Will the Cubs win the World Series before I die?
He is so accustomed to this query he responds with a comic’s sense of timing: “Are you taking good care of yourself? Do you eat right? Are you getting your exercise?”
The house on Hickory Street in Omaha was big and white and had a leaky roof. Laura said her parents “worked all the time.” For a while, Joe did business out of the basement. Then he rented a small office, and his wife, Marlene, gave up her teaching career to join him as a stockbroker. The four children were expected to help on weekends. Tom recalled, “Sometimes my dad just sat us in a room and said, ‘If you’ll put all these things in envelopes, you can have all the sugar cubes you want from the coffee station.’ ”
Joe’s opportunity at stunning wealth came after the government deregulated commissions on stock trades, allowing brokerages to handle transactions at lower fees. Technology would be the handmaiden of his success. Most customers preferred to make trades without even talking to a broker. Joe provided that freedom, first with touch-tone phones and later with computer keystrokes. He was among the pioneers of these shortcuts and highly adept at advertising them. He became a dot.com billionaire.
Pete joined his father at Ameritrade, but Tom had a pioneering idea of his own. In 1999, he started Incapital, an investment banking firm that made it easier for small investors to buy fixed-income securities. “I was doing O.K.,” he said of those days, defining the term “O.K.” as personal earnings in the “millions but not tens of millions.” He was run-of-the-mill wealthy, not buy-a-baseball-team wealthy.
The Cubs were not for sale anyway, though by 2006 Tom anticipated they soon would be. Tribune Company, anchored in the newspaper business, was in financial trouble. Tom figured the corporation would want to divest itself of the Cubs. He intended to be ready when the team went on the market.
For that, he would need his father’s assistance, which was a problem. Joe had an abundance of interests, but did not share his children’s love for baseball. The family patriarch rarely gives interviews, but in a speech he recalled asking Tom: “Why would I want to buy a baseball team — or any sports team? I’m not a fan. I’m not a spectator. I’ve got A.D.D. I can’t watch a whole game of anything for very long.”
In Tom’s telling, his father only warmed to the notion when the family held a big party, renting some of the rooftop clubs that overlook Wrigley. The ballpark was jammed to capacity. “They sell out every game,” Tom recalled pointing out slyly. “And my father said: ‘I see what you mean now. This is a business.’ ”
Tom pitched the idea another way as well. By then, TD Ameritrade was big and corporate, no longer a family enterprise. The Cubs could become something purely Ricketts, a “super fun thing” handed down through the generations. Laura agreed: “Here was a chance to again have a family business.”
Laura was in her 30s and a practicing lawyer before she came out as lesbian. She told her family in stages, one or two at a time, first Pete’s wife, then Tom and Cecelia and finally her parents.
“Everyone was immediately supportive,” she said. “Dad actually encouraged me to help other people come out. He wanted me to be active in the lesbian community. My mom told me: ‘You’re the same person to me whether you are gay or straight. I love you either way.’ ”
It may have been harder for her to reveal herself as a Democrat. “I think all along my family suspected,” Laura said. “There was kind of like grumbling, people biting their lips and a little bit of teasing.”
Tom’s baseball fantasy was easy for his siblings to rally around, in part because the idea seemed so far-fetched. Go ahead, knock yourself out, it’ll never happen, they told him. At the time, Pete was busy running for the United States Senate, spending $12 million of his own money in a race he lost by 28 points.
Tom, as it turned out, was prescient about the Cubs being put up for sale. In 2007, Tribune Company was purchased by Sam Zell, a salty-mouth real estate magnate with no interest in hanging on to a baseball team. Tom had bankers and lawyers at the ready to analyze the Cubs’ value and put in a bid.
The deal required a tortuous two and a half years to complete. In that time, the stock market crashed and Tribune Company went bankrupt. Zell, who can squeeze a dollar like a wet sponge, imposed an intricate set of conditions on prospective buyers. To lessen the taxes he would owe on capital gains, he demanded to retain 5 percent of the team and required the deal be financed with a huge amount of debt.
“It was the most complicated transaction I’ve ever seen,” Joe Ricketts said.
But Tom doggedly pushed it along. And finally, he was able to walk across his own field of dreams. The ballpark itself was a national treasure, a place of elegant simplicity with an iconic, hand-operated scoreboard. The contour of the ivy-covered outfield walls, in the words of the Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, curved “gracefully like the undulating green hills of a Grant Wood painting.” The view beyond was an uninterrupted look into the brick-and-stone landscape of the city.
On the other hand, Wrigley Field also was pretty much a dump, an edifice with a crumbling concrete shell and grimy, narrow interior concourses. Players complained of the worst clubhouses in baseball. Fans often waited to get into a bathroom as if they were in the immigration line at a border crossing.
When Tom moved into his new office, an aide advised him how to strategically place the mousetraps.
• • •
Tom Ricketts’s clothes look remarkably well pressed among all the tank tops and cutoffs in the grandstands. He tells a fan from South Carolina, “Welcome to the greatest place on earth.”
Then he begins a short lecture on the high price of preserving greatness: “This upper deck was built in 1927 and it cost only $250,000. It’ll cost us more than $250 million just to fix this place up.”
Tribune Company’s corporate heart had too gone aflutter at the thought of a historic World Series. It pursued the quest by becoming one of baseball’s biggest spenders. The Cubs came five outs from the N.L. pennant in 2003, unforgettably unraveling after a loyal fan — Steve Bartman — reached out to catch a foul fly ball that might otherwise have been caught by a Cubs outfielder. The team’s fortunes then went up and down like the lines on an EKG. In one upswing the Cubs won their division in 2007 and 2008, the latter a season in which attendance rose to a record 3.3 million. Wrigley Field cannot get much more stuffed than that.
But Tom Ricketts was wrong to think he still had the core of a championship team. In 2010, his first season as owner, the Cubs did possess a star-packed roster that included Derrek Lee, Aramis Ramirez, Alfonso Soriano and Carlos Zambrano; eight players were earning more than $12 million apiece. But the team was largely notable for its lethargy, finishing third in major league payroll but only fifth in the N.L. Central. Its record was 75-87. The next year was more miserable yet. The Cubs ended up 71-91.
Ricketts would come to think of these initial seasons as “a lot like buying a house the day after there was a big party inside, walked in, food on the floor, beer cans all over the place, a guy that nobody knows sleeping on the couch.” He concluded: “We didn’t buy the party; we bought the hangover.”
The Cubs were a teardown, not a fixer-upper, he decided. In midseason 2011, he fired his inherited general manager, Jim Hendry, a respected baseball hand who had overseen the close-but-no-cigar years.
“We needed to take a real deep breath and start fresh,” Ricketts recalled.
He said he wanted to find a way to “climb out of the lobster pot” once and for all, to be a consistent playoff contender like the Boston Red Sox, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Tampa Bay Rays. He sought advice from about 20 baseball people he regarded highly: general managers, other owners, former players, agents. He wanted to win while at the same time excelling by the sensible businesslike metric “wins per dollars spent.”
His final question during these talks was always: Who should I hire to run the baseball side of things?
He remembered, “All but one said Theo Epstein, but you can’t get him.”
Epstein, once the boy genius of baseball, had become general manager of the Red Sox at age 28. Two years later, in 2004, the team won the World Seriesfor the first time in 86 years. This was both glorious and poignant. Epstein recalled, “Coming back from Logan Airport after we won, we passed cemeteries and saw gravestones with hats and pennants placed on them for those fans who hadn’t lived to see it.”
The Red Sox remained strong through the decade, and won another Series in 2007, but in 2011 they collapsed in epic fashion in the season’s final month. Epstein felt “near my expiration date in Boston.” He agreed to meet Ricketts in New York, and they spent the day talking about a challenge even more difficult than the one he had faced with the Red Sox. “The mission resonated with me,” Epstein said. “A Cubs world championship is a holy grail.” Ricketts would offer him the job as president of baseball operations.
Epstein’s father is the novelist Leslie Epstein, and his grandfather and great-uncle — Philip and Julius Epstein — wrote the screenplay for the film “Casablanca.” Theo himself has a way with words, though as he balances candor and discretion he hops on and off the record like a man stepping through hot coals.
From the start, he said, he and Ricketts agreed the Cubs required a gut rehab, with a reallocation of resources to scouting, the draft and the development of younger players. Older players would be dealt for high-upside prospects, sacrificing wins in the present for wins in the future. This was a strategy of delayed gratification, with the length of the delay vexingly uncertain.
Epstein said: “At our first meeting, I asked Tom in several ways, some indirect, about his stomach for living through the tough period ahead and whether he’d have the patience and the broad shoulders and thick skin necessary. My sense after intense probing is that this guy was extraordinarily patient.”
• • •
Ricketts finds one of his favorite fans, 12-year-old Natalie Adorno of suburban Bensenville, Ill. A Wrigley Field regular, she has skipped school so many times to attend games that some of her classmates have taken to calling her Ferris Bueller. “Were you out here early for batting practice?” Tom asks, and of course she was.
Politely, as if embarrassed, Natalie mentions, “We need a few runs.”
Against all discernible evidence, Ricketts replies, “Don’t worry, we’ll get them.”
The Chicago City Council designated Wrigley Field a landmark in 2004, a distinction that also meant any changes to the ballpark’s historic features now required approval by a politically appointed mayoral commission. The team’s management had preferred not to be hamstrung this way, but Richard M. Daley, a White Sox fan, was then the mayor and he liked neither Tribune Company nor the Cubs.
From the start, Tom Ricketts, Bleacher Bum, said reverential things about Wrigley Field, calling it a place with a unique vibe. “We can’t mess with that special feeling,” he said of the ballpark.
But Ricketts, the entrepreneur, also used phrases like “growing the business” and “monetizing the brand,” and he said to preserve the ballpark and develop a winning team every possible revenue opportunity had to be explored. This seemed reasonable enough, and yet some wondered what a more commercialized Wrigley Field would look like: Did he really say he was considering a Jumbotron?
Continue reading the main story
“Tom had sounded like such a down-to-earth guy, fulfilling his dream to own a baseball team,” said Jim Spencer, president of the East Lake View Neighbors Association and a man who lives a block from the ballpark. Like many in the community, he had begun to slowly sour on Ricketts. “I think his dream was actually to go into the advertising and real estate business.”
The Cubs’ finances were rather opaque. Forbes magazine usually ranked them among baseball’s most profitable franchises. But expensive long-term contracts with aging veterans were still on the books. The team was saddled with huge debt payments from the arduous terms of its acquisition. A likely bonanza in TV revenue lay ahead; other teams in major markets would soon be reaping billion-dollar deals. But the Cubs could not count on that yet. They were not fully free to negotiate a new TV deal until 2019.
“When you look at the Wrigley Field equation from a distance, we’ve got a pretty leaky bucket here,” said Crane Kenney, a top Cubs executive under Tribune Company. Ricketts had kept him on as his chief of business operations, and Kenney was superb at poor-mouthing, calling the franchise a victim of circumstance. He said, “No other major league team operates with the same restrictions we do.”
It may be nice to have Wrigley Field situated in a thriving neighborhood, within blocks of homes valued at $1 million and more. But city ordinances reflected the concerns of that residential community, Kenney said. The number of night games was limited. The same was true for concerts. Little space was available for the Cubs to operate lucrative parking lots. The team was constrained from selling the kind of brightly lit ad space that dominated the view above outfield walls in most other ballparks.
“I gave Tom a long list of things we ought to do, and my expectation was he’d say something like, O.K., do one, three, five, seven and eight but the rest either cost too much or will take too much time,” Kenney recalled. “He told me, O.K., go ahead. I asked, go ahead with which ones? He said, all, let’s do them all.”
Within months of taking over, Ricketts asked the city’s permission to place a 360-square-foot illuminated display of the Toyota logo above the left-field bleachers, something that would net the team $2 million. The backlash was immediate, with some likening the sign to a zit on the nose of baseball’s prettiest face.
Ricketts was dismayed: Such a fuss over one sign! He wrote a letter to the public, arguing “the landmark designation was never intended to put Wrigley Field in a time capsule.” Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub himself, was enlisted to lobby the city landmarks commission, which in the end approved a less luminous version of the towering Toyota display. To win the support of Alderman Tom Tunney, whose ward includes Wrigley Field, the Cubs had to agree to a four-year moratorium on additional signs.
Ricketts was getting an introduction to local politics. Tunney, who can be abrasive, kept reminding him the friendly confines were exactly that: confined. “The Cubs campus is about three and a quarter acres, which is very small,” the alderman said. “It was built for a different time and era, really before cars were much of a mode of transportation. Most new stadiums are built around 30 acres of planned development.”
Tunney added, “No one begrudges a man trying to maximize his investment, but government has a role in protecting the residents who have concerns about what those investments will mean to them.”
In fact, the Ricketts family wanted to undertake an extensive renovation of Wrigley Field, a gargantuan project with plans that eventually came to include new concrete and steel throughout, a substantial expansion of concession areas, a new roof above the upper deck, the restoration of historic aspects of the building’s facade, new light standards for one of baseball’s most dimly lit outfields, a relocation of the bullpens to a space beneath the bleachers, new dugouts and clubhouses, an underground batting tunnel and even an auditorium. The cost would inflate to a whopping $375 million.
Other Chicago teams had received public money to build new stadiums, a common practice throughout the country, and the Rickettses believed they were similarly entitled. They wanted to substantially fund the makeover using a city amusement tax already tacked on to ticket prices. “This money was to come out of receipts generated right here at Wrigley Field,” Laura said. “It was a win-win for everybody.”
But this was the wrong time to wag a tin cup. Chicago faced a staggering debt in its pension system, and Rahm Emanuel, the city’s new mayor, never seriously considered the Cubs’ request for public funds.
The matter was once and for all put to rest in May 2012. The New York Times ran a front-page article that said the Ending Spending Action Fund, founded by Joe Ricketts, was contemplating a $10 million campaign to link President Obama with racially incendiary comments made by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. A copy of the proposal had been obtained by the newspaper from someone alarmed by its tone.
Joe Ricketts had stepped down from any role in TD Ameritrade, focusing instead on new business ventures, charitable causes and a personal crusade against government waste. After the article appeared, he said the provocative anti-Obama campaign was merely one of many proposals submitted to Ending Spending by various political consultants and nothing he would have seriously considered.
But the aftertaste lingered in Chicago. Emanuel had been Obama’s White House chief of staff. He called the proposal an insult to the president and the nation.
The Cubs were on an early-season 13-game losing streak, and this off-the-field rhubarb only added to the distress. Tom Ricketts issued a statement repudiating racially divisive politics, insisting his father felt the same way. Laura responded by generously praising both the president and her father.
Theo Epstein reacted in his own fashion. He agreed to headline an Obama fund-raiser, $1,000 a guest.
• • •
Tom has seen a line of frustrated fans waiting to get into an overcrowded Cubs gift shop. A line! A line thwarting the eager from parting with their money!
He says: “What kind of business model is that? What would any business school say?”
Twenty-four years ago, when Tom and Pete were living across the street from Wrigley Field, their landlord was George Loukas, the son of an immigrant steelworker. “I graduated from high school with a D-minus average,” he said, and that information is meant as a boast because he is clearly nobody’s fool.
Loukas, a substitute gym teacher, was careful with his money, and in 1974 he and his brother put down a $5,000 deposit on a 16-unit, $135,000 building at the corner of Waveland and Sheffield Avenues, just beyond the Wrigley Field scoreboard. The neighborhood was somewhat seedy back then. Heroin was for sale on many of the streets that led into the friendly confines. So were women of a certain sort.
Loukas painted his apartments and raised the rent to $75 a month. The roof of the building was made of tar, and every now and then he and a few friends slathered on suntan lotion and climbed up there to watch a game on garden chairs. One of those pals said he knew others who would pay $5 apiece to join them and speculated they would add a few bucks more to get a hamburger. Loukas brought up a Weber grill.
Much the same was happening up and down Waveland and Sheffield. Jim Lourgos, a young lawyer, was a partner in a rundown building. Someone offered $300 to rent the rooftop for an afternoon. He recalled, “We held their beers as they climbed the ladder and passed them along as they got to the top.”
In 1984, a Cubs team with Ryne Sandberg, that season’s N.L. most valuable player, and Rick Sutcliffe, who captured the Cy Young Award, nearly won the pennant, losing a best-of-five playoff series to San Diego after going up, two games to none. Tickets were hard to come by late that season and the rooftops were bursting with the overflow, people pushing right up to the edge.
TV cameras adored the image of these teeming rooftops, as did the Cubs announcer Harry Caray. Indeed, everyone seemed to love these informal appendages to the ballpark except the Cubs’ front office. In 2002, a windscreen was erected to block the view from Waveland Avenue.
Chicagoans immediately took sides. To some, the rooftop owners were plucky entrepreneurs who had merely answered when opportunity knocked. To others, they were leeches. Some of these entrepreneurs were not average Joes but real estate heavyweights who had thrived as the neighborhood gentrified. Loukas owned three apartment buildings and three taverns, including the hugely popular Cubby Bear lounge, which was cater-corner to Wrigley’s main entrance.
The Cubs eventually shifted tactics, removing the windscreen and instead going to court, suing the rooftop owners in 2003. A legal battle over intellectual property rights seemed in the offing until a federal magistrate strongly encouraged both sides to settle. A hastily written contract satisfied the aggrieved Cubs with 17 percent of each rooftop owner’s gross revenues for the next 20 years.
This would cost the rooftop owners a combined $3 million to $4 million annually, but for them it was a liberating expense. The way they understood the deal, they were now guaranteed a view into the ballpark through 2023. Some owners of the 15 rooftop businesses kept their operations modest, little more than gradually rising rows of metal bleachers. But most borrowed millions of dollars to upgrade their buildings into vessels of luxury, with elevators leading to different levels of air-conditioned indoor suites. Guests on the roof could linger at an outdoor bar or watch the game from cushioned seats.
Continue reading the main story
Lourgos, a lawyer, gutted his building of all but its facade. Then he borrowed nearly $5 million to construct a three-story club that attracted corporate clients, he said.
An excursion to a Wrigley rooftop was intended to replace a company’s golf outing or its cruise on the Chicago River. There was ample space for up to 200 guests to hobnob; they were served food and drinks at a price of up to $200 a head. That’s $40,000 a game.
For an avid Cubs fan, eyes riveted on the action, a rooftop was only a satisfactory observation post when compared with a knothole. Not only was the view distant, but large parts of the field were also impossible to see, especially the outfield’s deepest terrain. One of Loukas’s rooftops was situated so far into foul territory that the pitcher’s mound and the batter’s box were blocked by the overhang of Wrigley Field’s upper deck.
On the other hand, anyone turning his back to the game was rewarded with a panoramic view of the cityscape — glimpses of Lake Michigan and the Loop and the elevated trains snaking north and south.
Rooftop owners enjoyed profitable times. And when the Ricketts family bought the Cubs, Tom invited them and their families for a friendly breakfast at the ballpark. Loukas, now 65, remembered his former tenants Pete and Tom. “I told myself, hey, this is great,” he said. “These are nice people from Nebraska.
“Really, everything at this breakfast was kumbaya.”
• • •
Tom always carries a black sack with a dozen baseballs, each stamped with the day’s date. But by the time he reaches Section 530 these gifts are gone. Karen Patterson, a 25-year-old fan in a Cubs shirt, hurries down from Row 5 so she can meet him. “I’m so pleased you guys are fixing up Wrigley,” she says.
Tom nods appreciatively. He says, “Unfortunately, it has been a lot harder than it should have been.”
Theo Epstein’s plan for a gut rehab of the roster was going well, especially the gutting. The team lost 101 games in 2012, a sorry enough performance to “earn” the Cubs the second pick in the 2013 draft as a measure of solace. This became third baseman Kris Bryant, a presumed cornerstone of the rehab who was recently named minor league player of the year by Baseball America. With the Cubs performing so poorly, they were happy to redirect fans’ attention toward players apprenticing in their farm system in places like Des Moines; Kodak, Tenn.; Daytona Beach, Fla.; and Boise, Idaho.
The team’s major league payroll had dropped from an opening day total of $147 million to $88 million. But the team was spending more money on young international talent, a new baseball academy in the Dominican Republic and, with the help of public funds, new spring training facilities in Arizona.
“There is a plan in place and we are sticking to it,” said Ricketts, who sometimes talked of lost games as if they were actually wins prudently stashed in a savings account, like contributions to a 401(k) plan.
As for the ballpark itself, in early 2013 he announced that the family itself would finance the expensive renovations. Additionally, the Rickettses planned to invest $200 million for a plaza with office and retail space adjacent to the ballpark as well as a nearby 175-room hotel. These projects would provide a $500 million to $600 million booster shot to Chicago’s economy, which was heartily welcomed by the mayor.
Continue reading the main story
From that point, the Cubs were no longer beggars but choosers. In lieu of public money, Ricketts asked for concessions from the city, including permission to hold more night games and concerts, something many people in the neighborhood opposed. The Cubs also wanted approval to erect numerous signs in and around the ballpark that would generate a continuing stream of advertising revenue. Additional signage had helped finance renovations at baseball’s other great heirloom, Fenway Park in Boston.
Ricketts got most of what he wanted. Alderman Tunney was again involved in the negotiations and he said the mayor’s office essentially decided that “one of the most generous sign packages ever” was a reasonable trade-off for the Rickettses’ willingness to spend their own money. He added ruefully: “There will be advertisements coming out of everywhere. We will have our own little Times Square right here at the corner of Clark and Addison.”
Plans called for most of the ads to glow within the open-air plaza, which would also include a farmers’ market and ice rink. But the city landmarks commission also approved two signs deemed essential to what Ricketts called “the battle to control our own outfield.” One would rise above the right-field wall, covering 650 square feet. The other was a 5,700-square-foot video board, one of the biggest in baseball, dominating the area above the left-field wall with a brightly lit rectangle three times the size of the familiar center-field scoreboard.
The prospect of this video board delighted those who thought it would bring the ballpark into the 21st century with a continuing flow of visual entertainment. Others were appalled. Cheryl Kent, an architecture writer and critic, called it “an animated monster” that would ruin “the essential intimacy” of Wrigley Field.
By then, Ricketts was reminding people the ballpark was “not a museum.” Besides, he said, surveys showed the Cubs faithful wanted a video board: “When you ask fans, would you like to see signs in the outfield, they say no, not really. But when you tell them those signs will help the team win, they say yes, of course.”
This was the new hard sell: Anything impeding revenue was postponing the Cubs’ resurrection. The Oakland Athletics may have played great baseball in a dilapidated ballpark; the Rays may have fielded a winner despite low attendance. But to escape the quicksand of failure, the Cubs, Ricketts said, required additional revenue from a renovated ballpark and huge outfield signs. The video board alone would earn the team $5 million to $7 million a year, he said.
The rooftop owners, of course, had objections beyond aesthetics. Views from some of their buildings would be obstructed by the two signs, and they believed they had a contract prohibiting that.
Ricketts said his lawyers had concluded otherwise, and yet he still feared what the rooftop owners might do to gum up the works. What if they won an injunction to stop construction after it began, he asked. Ricketts said no renovations would start unless the rooftop owners promised not to sue.
This was an unusual ultimatum, a demand for adversaries to renounce their legal rights. The mayor asked Alderman Patrick O’Connor, a veteran pol, to mediate negotiations between the Cubs and the rooftops’ owners. No deal was reached, and the alderman found the talks frustrating. The 15 rooftops were hardly united as one voice. “The right-field guys don’t necessarily agree with the left-field guys,” O’Connor said. Some of the businesses were owned by consortiums.
But the Cubs were also attempting a real estate squeeze play; by interfering with the view into the ballpark the signs were likely to drive down the value of the rooftop businesses. Kenney, the head of the Cubs’ business operations, said the team made firm offers to buy each of the buildings, which some owners deny. Other rooftop owners said the Cubs were lowballing them, pricing the properties as if they still housed apartments rather than luxury spaces for corporate parties.
“They can have my buildings, but I need to get fair value,” said Loukas, who sarcastically suggested if the Cubs truly wanted to increase profitability, they ought to field a better team.
Indeed, while the Cubs were known as lovable losers, the absence of winning had not made the heart grow fonder. Paid attendance has fallen by about 100,000 a year since the Ricketts family took over, and while the Cubs still outdraw two of every three major league clubs, lower gate receipts now annually reduce revenue by about $30 million a year, Ricketts admitted. Other estimates go higher.
Business on the rooftops has similarly declined as corporate outings to a Cubs game have lost cachet. Small groups and even individuals can now buy rooftop tickets on the Internet. Admission is sometimes sold as a Groupon deal, making the rooftops direct rivals with the Cubs for ordinary fans.
In January, at the annual Cubs convention, both Ricketts and Kenney once again singled out the rooftop problem as the final obstacle before any renovations could begin. Ricketts poked fun at the owners of the buildings, likening them not only to neighbors who peek through your window to watch Showtime on your TV but also to profiteers who charge others to do the same.
Beth Murphy, 59, owns a small rooftop business beside her tavern, Murphy’s Bleachers. She said she found it dumbfounding to be portrayed as a villain. Murphy has been a Bleacher Bum since she was a teenager; she used to have a schoolgirl crush on third baseman Ron Santo.
She said, “I never thought I’d be considered the reason the Cubs can’t win the World Series.”
• • •
Tom has signed about an hour’s worth of hats, shirts and scorecards, and his hands are flecked with black ink from his Sharpie. He is heading down a ramp from the upper deck when he sees another of those things that drive him nuts. There’s an ugly wall of decaying wood behind rusty iron mesh.
“How do you let a jewel like Wrigley Field deteriorate so much?” he says, shaking his head.
On May 21, with the current baseball season seven weeks old, Tom Ricketts issued a video message to the fans that made the Cubs seem even more pitiable than their record at the time, which was 16-28. He stood in the team’s clubhouse, demonstrating how batters were forced to warm up by hitting a ball off a tee like the tiniest of Little Leaguers. Baseball’s other 29 teams had the benefit of indoor batting cages, he said, adding, “It’s time to invest in Wrigley Field and to do the things our competitors do.”
Continue reading the main story
He then started in again on his archnemeses. “Unfortunately, it seems like my family’s plans for Wrigley Field have gotten lost in a dispute with the rooftops,” he said, this time adding a twist: The Cubs were going ahead with the ballpark renovations even if that meant they’d be sued. “We cannot delay any longer,” Ricketts said with a touch of melodrama. “The time to build a winner is now.”
Negotiations with the rooftops may have been fruitless, but the year delay in breaking ground now allowed the Cubs to go back to the city landmarks commission with an expanded wish list for the renovations: extended bleacher seating, a new patio atop the right-field wall, more luxury suites. Instead of two signs above the outfield, the team now wanted seven.
“The Rickettses are very smart,” said Lourgos, one of the rooftop owners. He thought the Cubs had played their hand masterfully. “They kept their money in their pockets until they got what they wanted. Their asks keep changing; they always want more.”
The commission’s staff slightly moderated the Cubs’ plan for the seven signs. The advertisements would have to be a minimum of 20 feet apart — and a minimum of 65 feet on either side of the center-field scoreboard. The video board was reduced to 3,990 square feet.
In July, the commission unanimously approved the expanded renovation plans, which finally set off a lawsuit by some of the rooftop owners. They sued the commission rather than the team, saying the landmarks ordinance for Wrigley Field had been improperly interpreted.
Ricketts said the renovations would begin anyway. Outfield signs will be erected before next season, he said, and the renovations should be completed before opening day in 2018. He said the video board — eye-catching as an enormous TV set — will make the ballpark a better place. “Wrigley will still be Wrigley,” he promised. “It will still be beautiful and it will be a lot more functional.”
Whatever happens, the Cubs have not entirely eschewed public money. The bleacher expansion requires an extension of Wrigley Field’s exterior walls, and the city is giving the Cubs the necessary sidewalk space and a parking lane. The ballpark is likely to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places, making the team eligible for federal tax credits that may amount to $50 million or more.
The landmarks commission’s action occurred exactly a week after the Cubs traded Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel, two pitchers who were having excellent seasons. The key player received in return from the Oakland Athletics was Addison Russell, 20, playing in the minor leagues at the Class AA level.
It was the third year in a row the Cubs had essentially pulled the plug on the baseball season in July by trading two of their best pitchers for younger talent. But Epstein and Ricketts could now boast the team had three of the top 10 players in Baseball America’s list of leading prospects: infielders Bryant, Russell and Javier Baez. It was as if the two men had begun to hear the bugle call, the cavalry soon coming to the rescue over yonder hills. Baez joined the Cubs in August (and is hitting below .180).
Epstein said he foresaw the Cubs becoming a contender in the next year or two, with the team’s best young players blossoming just as increased ballpark revenue provides him a fattened budget to add free agents. “The two great currencies in baseball these days are money and impactful young players,” he said. “We have a chance to have as much of these currencies as anybody.
“That’s like going to Vegas with a sound mind and thick wallet. There are no guarantees. I can’t tell you that we’ll win a championship in 2017, just like I can’t tell you we’ll hit blackjack. But we are positioned to make a nice long run if we continue on this path.”
He again emphasized there were no guarantees; young players can fizzle or get hurt. But then he grew excited, going off the record to name the Cubs’ starting lineup of the future, speculating who will someday get M.V.P. votes and who will merely be All-Stars. He named some of the free agents he thought he would be able to sign, a 70 percent chance on this player, a 40 percent chance on another.
Ricketts is equally optimistic. Five years of terrible baseball, like compost, is nourishing the future. “The brand lovable losers is dead to us,” he said. “We’ll soon be lovable winners.”
He paused, adding, “I really mean it.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/sports/baseball/as-cubs-slowly-rebuild-theres-shouting-from-the-rooftops.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&abt=0002&abg=0
The owners of most ball clubs would not mingle like this, especially if their team was so ridiculously bad year after year. But there goes Ricketts, unescorted by security, a familiar figure now in a long-sleeve white shirt and khaki trousers. People rush over to shake his hand and pose for selfies.
Ricketts is blessed with a genial face that wards off hostility like a plate of armor. Not once does anyone tell him to get rid of those bums on the field and win some doggone games. To the contrary, a shirtless man, Andrew Kolb, scurries over to say, “Thanks for taking over the team, brother.”
Another fan is staring at Ricketts but cannot quite place him. Is he an actor? A politician? He asks a stranger, “Sorry for being so stupid, but who is this guy?”
When the Ricketts family bought the Cubs in October 2009, the four siblings — and that’d be Pete, Tom, Laura and Todd — introduced themselves at a packed news conference. They were personable and witty, nothing stuffed-shirt about them. They said they loved the Cubs. They said they loved Wrigley Field.
Cubs fans were used to a media corporation, Tribune Company, owning their team. By contrast, these Rickettses were refreshingly human. Holy cow! Bleacher Bums were now running the show.
“There is no curse,” Tom Ricketts scoffed about a popular myth, sounding like a businessman rather than an exorcist. “If anybody on our team thinks he’s cursed, we’ll move him to a less accursed team.”
He promised to win the World Series, a sunburst of optimism that seemed as improbable to some as a pledge to reverse the rotation of the earth. The Cubs had not won the National League pennant since 1945, at the dawn of the nuclear age; they had not won the World Series since Henry Ford produced the first Model T in 1908.
“I’ll be honest, I think we have a team that can do it next year,” he said earnestly.
Of course, that is not what happened, not the next year or the next after that or the next or the next or this dismal season about to mercifully end. Instead the Cubs have lost baseball games at a pace remarkable even for a team notorious for the longevity of its futility.
While nothing supernatural may afflict the Cubs, the Ricketts family has encountered all sorts of earthly bedevilments both on the field and off: aging, overpaid players; a 100-year-old ballpark with a beauty only skin deep; hardball Windy City politics; critics who say plans to install a mammoth outfield video board will change Wrigley Field forever, despoiling the understated charm of baseball’s loveliest oasis.
And then there are the neighbors across the street. They claim they are legally entitled to unobstructed views of the games from their rooftops and oppose revenue-generating signs the Cubs want to erect above the outfield walls. The Rickettses blame them for delaying a $575 million project, a top-to-bottom renovation of the ballpark and the construction of an adjacent commercial plaza and hotel.
Continue reading the main story
“I’ll grant you, it has been a learning curve,” Tom Ricketts said.
The Ricketts siblings grew up on Hickory Street in Omaha, and one by one they went off to college in Chicago, where they would come under the spell of the ballpark affectionately known as “the friendly confines” and its endearing, if woebegone, team, the Cubs.
This was not a casual embrace. The four of them bled Cubbie blue like the most devoted of die-hards, each year exchanging their optimism for fatalism, muttering with a shrug: Wait till next year.
After graduation, in the late 1980s and very early 1990s, they thought of the center-field bleachers as the hub of their summertime social life. They went to most every weekend game with a roundup of friends. Pete, the oldest, once camped out all night on a three-fold lawn chair to make sure they got tickets.
The bleachers — beyond the ivy-covered outfield walls — did not offer the best view of a game, and yet something exhilarating went on there. No matter the score, the crowd was boisterous and carefree, a community of revelers invigorated by hot dogs, peanuts and plenty of beer. They threw opponents’ home runs back onto the field. The bleachers were a mellow state of mind, an ointment for the soul.
Tom, the next oldest, particularly recalls one Sunday afternoon. He was conveniently seated so he could pass people’s money to the beer vendor below and haul up cup after cup like a bucket from a well. He bought 16 at one time, he said. He also met a medical student named Cecelia. And she became his wife.
Wrigley Field, built in 1914, is set in one of Chicago’s great old residential neighborhoods, with three-story apartment buildings immediately beyond the bleacher walls. For a while, Pete and Tom shared a flat above Sports Corner, a tavern just across the street from right field. The urgent hawking of scalpers and peanut vendors awakened them if they tried to sleep late.
Back then, in 1990, Tom was making a living as an options trader. He also oversaw two fantasy league baseball teams, a suitable hobby for a man who scrutinized all of the Bill James baseball abstracts.
Tom wanted to attend the University of Chicago business school at night. The seven-page essay accompanying his application confided, “I fantasize about owning a major league baseball team,” while at the same time admitting how unlikely that was. Where would he ever get the required boatload of cash? He was a son of the middle class. His family never owned a new car. They did not take vacations. As a teenager, to get spending money Tom worked at Burger King or bused tables at a country club.
But within a decade, life would bloom with extravagant possibilities. As Tom and his siblings were starting out as young adults in Chicago, their father, Joe Ricketts, was on his way to becoming phenomenally wealthy in Omaha, building the discount brokerage now known as TD Ameritrade. In 2009, at Tom’s instigation, the Rickettses purchased the Cubs for $845 million, using assets from a family education trust he offhandedly described as “money we weren’t paying much attention to.”
Since then, Chicagoans have grown familiar with the Ricketts siblings and their many enthusiasms. Tom, who turns 49 Sunday, is the baseball guy, the hands-on chairman of the Cubs. His brothers and sister — though not their parents — sit on the team’s five-person board. Pete, 50, a far-to-the-right political conservative, is the Republican nominee for governor of Nebraska. Laura, 47, a lesbian activist, is one of the Democratic Party’s top fund-raisers. Todd, 44, heads Ending Spending, which supports political candidates who promise to balance the federal budget by shrinking the size of government.
“No doubt, we have our differences but we are an incredibly close family,” said Tom, who calls himself a moderate Republican. “It’s not a rare thing for me to speak with each of my siblings every day.”
• • •
As Ricketts roams the grandstands, he is often approached by someone elderly who asks a question with genuine urgency: Will the Cubs win the World Series before I die?
He is so accustomed to this query he responds with a comic’s sense of timing: “Are you taking good care of yourself? Do you eat right? Are you getting your exercise?”
The house on Hickory Street in Omaha was big and white and had a leaky roof. Laura said her parents “worked all the time.” For a while, Joe did business out of the basement. Then he rented a small office, and his wife, Marlene, gave up her teaching career to join him as a stockbroker. The four children were expected to help on weekends. Tom recalled, “Sometimes my dad just sat us in a room and said, ‘If you’ll put all these things in envelopes, you can have all the sugar cubes you want from the coffee station.’ ”
Joe’s opportunity at stunning wealth came after the government deregulated commissions on stock trades, allowing brokerages to handle transactions at lower fees. Technology would be the handmaiden of his success. Most customers preferred to make trades without even talking to a broker. Joe provided that freedom, first with touch-tone phones and later with computer keystrokes. He was among the pioneers of these shortcuts and highly adept at advertising them. He became a dot.com billionaire.
Pete joined his father at Ameritrade, but Tom had a pioneering idea of his own. In 1999, he started Incapital, an investment banking firm that made it easier for small investors to buy fixed-income securities. “I was doing O.K.,” he said of those days, defining the term “O.K.” as personal earnings in the “millions but not tens of millions.” He was run-of-the-mill wealthy, not buy-a-baseball-team wealthy.
The Cubs were not for sale anyway, though by 2006 Tom anticipated they soon would be. Tribune Company, anchored in the newspaper business, was in financial trouble. Tom figured the corporation would want to divest itself of the Cubs. He intended to be ready when the team went on the market.
For that, he would need his father’s assistance, which was a problem. Joe had an abundance of interests, but did not share his children’s love for baseball. The family patriarch rarely gives interviews, but in a speech he recalled asking Tom: “Why would I want to buy a baseball team — or any sports team? I’m not a fan. I’m not a spectator. I’ve got A.D.D. I can’t watch a whole game of anything for very long.”
In Tom’s telling, his father only warmed to the notion when the family held a big party, renting some of the rooftop clubs that overlook Wrigley. The ballpark was jammed to capacity. “They sell out every game,” Tom recalled pointing out slyly. “And my father said: ‘I see what you mean now. This is a business.’ ”
Tom pitched the idea another way as well. By then, TD Ameritrade was big and corporate, no longer a family enterprise. The Cubs could become something purely Ricketts, a “super fun thing” handed down through the generations. Laura agreed: “Here was a chance to again have a family business.”
Laura was in her 30s and a practicing lawyer before she came out as lesbian. She told her family in stages, one or two at a time, first Pete’s wife, then Tom and Cecelia and finally her parents.
“Everyone was immediately supportive,” she said. “Dad actually encouraged me to help other people come out. He wanted me to be active in the lesbian community. My mom told me: ‘You’re the same person to me whether you are gay or straight. I love you either way.’ ”
It may have been harder for her to reveal herself as a Democrat. “I think all along my family suspected,” Laura said. “There was kind of like grumbling, people biting their lips and a little bit of teasing.”
Tom’s baseball fantasy was easy for his siblings to rally around, in part because the idea seemed so far-fetched. Go ahead, knock yourself out, it’ll never happen, they told him. At the time, Pete was busy running for the United States Senate, spending $12 million of his own money in a race he lost by 28 points.
Tom, as it turned out, was prescient about the Cubs being put up for sale. In 2007, Tribune Company was purchased by Sam Zell, a salty-mouth real estate magnate with no interest in hanging on to a baseball team. Tom had bankers and lawyers at the ready to analyze the Cubs’ value and put in a bid.
The deal required a tortuous two and a half years to complete. In that time, the stock market crashed and Tribune Company went bankrupt. Zell, who can squeeze a dollar like a wet sponge, imposed an intricate set of conditions on prospective buyers. To lessen the taxes he would owe on capital gains, he demanded to retain 5 percent of the team and required the deal be financed with a huge amount of debt.
“It was the most complicated transaction I’ve ever seen,” Joe Ricketts said.
But Tom doggedly pushed it along. And finally, he was able to walk across his own field of dreams. The ballpark itself was a national treasure, a place of elegant simplicity with an iconic, hand-operated scoreboard. The contour of the ivy-covered outfield walls, in the words of the Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, curved “gracefully like the undulating green hills of a Grant Wood painting.” The view beyond was an uninterrupted look into the brick-and-stone landscape of the city.
On the other hand, Wrigley Field also was pretty much a dump, an edifice with a crumbling concrete shell and grimy, narrow interior concourses. Players complained of the worst clubhouses in baseball. Fans often waited to get into a bathroom as if they were in the immigration line at a border crossing.
When Tom moved into his new office, an aide advised him how to strategically place the mousetraps.
• • •
Tom Ricketts’s clothes look remarkably well pressed among all the tank tops and cutoffs in the grandstands. He tells a fan from South Carolina, “Welcome to the greatest place on earth.”
Then he begins a short lecture on the high price of preserving greatness: “This upper deck was built in 1927 and it cost only $250,000. It’ll cost us more than $250 million just to fix this place up.”
Tribune Company’s corporate heart had too gone aflutter at the thought of a historic World Series. It pursued the quest by becoming one of baseball’s biggest spenders. The Cubs came five outs from the N.L. pennant in 2003, unforgettably unraveling after a loyal fan — Steve Bartman — reached out to catch a foul fly ball that might otherwise have been caught by a Cubs outfielder. The team’s fortunes then went up and down like the lines on an EKG. In one upswing the Cubs won their division in 2007 and 2008, the latter a season in which attendance rose to a record 3.3 million. Wrigley Field cannot get much more stuffed than that.
But Tom Ricketts was wrong to think he still had the core of a championship team. In 2010, his first season as owner, the Cubs did possess a star-packed roster that included Derrek Lee, Aramis Ramirez, Alfonso Soriano and Carlos Zambrano; eight players were earning more than $12 million apiece. But the team was largely notable for its lethargy, finishing third in major league payroll but only fifth in the N.L. Central. Its record was 75-87. The next year was more miserable yet. The Cubs ended up 71-91.
Ricketts would come to think of these initial seasons as “a lot like buying a house the day after there was a big party inside, walked in, food on the floor, beer cans all over the place, a guy that nobody knows sleeping on the couch.” He concluded: “We didn’t buy the party; we bought the hangover.”
The Cubs were a teardown, not a fixer-upper, he decided. In midseason 2011, he fired his inherited general manager, Jim Hendry, a respected baseball hand who had overseen the close-but-no-cigar years.
“We needed to take a real deep breath and start fresh,” Ricketts recalled.
He said he wanted to find a way to “climb out of the lobster pot” once and for all, to be a consistent playoff contender like the Boston Red Sox, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Tampa Bay Rays. He sought advice from about 20 baseball people he regarded highly: general managers, other owners, former players, agents. He wanted to win while at the same time excelling by the sensible businesslike metric “wins per dollars spent.”
His final question during these talks was always: Who should I hire to run the baseball side of things?
He remembered, “All but one said Theo Epstein, but you can’t get him.”
Epstein, once the boy genius of baseball, had become general manager of the Red Sox at age 28. Two years later, in 2004, the team won the World Seriesfor the first time in 86 years. This was both glorious and poignant. Epstein recalled, “Coming back from Logan Airport after we won, we passed cemeteries and saw gravestones with hats and pennants placed on them for those fans who hadn’t lived to see it.”
The Red Sox remained strong through the decade, and won another Series in 2007, but in 2011 they collapsed in epic fashion in the season’s final month. Epstein felt “near my expiration date in Boston.” He agreed to meet Ricketts in New York, and they spent the day talking about a challenge even more difficult than the one he had faced with the Red Sox. “The mission resonated with me,” Epstein said. “A Cubs world championship is a holy grail.” Ricketts would offer him the job as president of baseball operations.
Epstein’s father is the novelist Leslie Epstein, and his grandfather and great-uncle — Philip and Julius Epstein — wrote the screenplay for the film “Casablanca.” Theo himself has a way with words, though as he balances candor and discretion he hops on and off the record like a man stepping through hot coals.
From the start, he said, he and Ricketts agreed the Cubs required a gut rehab, with a reallocation of resources to scouting, the draft and the development of younger players. Older players would be dealt for high-upside prospects, sacrificing wins in the present for wins in the future. This was a strategy of delayed gratification, with the length of the delay vexingly uncertain.
Epstein said: “At our first meeting, I asked Tom in several ways, some indirect, about his stomach for living through the tough period ahead and whether he’d have the patience and the broad shoulders and thick skin necessary. My sense after intense probing is that this guy was extraordinarily patient.”
• • •
Ricketts finds one of his favorite fans, 12-year-old Natalie Adorno of suburban Bensenville, Ill. A Wrigley Field regular, she has skipped school so many times to attend games that some of her classmates have taken to calling her Ferris Bueller. “Were you out here early for batting practice?” Tom asks, and of course she was.
Politely, as if embarrassed, Natalie mentions, “We need a few runs.”
Against all discernible evidence, Ricketts replies, “Don’t worry, we’ll get them.”
The Chicago City Council designated Wrigley Field a landmark in 2004, a distinction that also meant any changes to the ballpark’s historic features now required approval by a politically appointed mayoral commission. The team’s management had preferred not to be hamstrung this way, but Richard M. Daley, a White Sox fan, was then the mayor and he liked neither Tribune Company nor the Cubs.
From the start, Tom Ricketts, Bleacher Bum, said reverential things about Wrigley Field, calling it a place with a unique vibe. “We can’t mess with that special feeling,” he said of the ballpark.
But Ricketts, the entrepreneur, also used phrases like “growing the business” and “monetizing the brand,” and he said to preserve the ballpark and develop a winning team every possible revenue opportunity had to be explored. This seemed reasonable enough, and yet some wondered what a more commercialized Wrigley Field would look like: Did he really say he was considering a Jumbotron?
Continue reading the main story
“Tom had sounded like such a down-to-earth guy, fulfilling his dream to own a baseball team,” said Jim Spencer, president of the East Lake View Neighbors Association and a man who lives a block from the ballpark. Like many in the community, he had begun to slowly sour on Ricketts. “I think his dream was actually to go into the advertising and real estate business.”
The Cubs’ finances were rather opaque. Forbes magazine usually ranked them among baseball’s most profitable franchises. But expensive long-term contracts with aging veterans were still on the books. The team was saddled with huge debt payments from the arduous terms of its acquisition. A likely bonanza in TV revenue lay ahead; other teams in major markets would soon be reaping billion-dollar deals. But the Cubs could not count on that yet. They were not fully free to negotiate a new TV deal until 2019.
“When you look at the Wrigley Field equation from a distance, we’ve got a pretty leaky bucket here,” said Crane Kenney, a top Cubs executive under Tribune Company. Ricketts had kept him on as his chief of business operations, and Kenney was superb at poor-mouthing, calling the franchise a victim of circumstance. He said, “No other major league team operates with the same restrictions we do.”
It may be nice to have Wrigley Field situated in a thriving neighborhood, within blocks of homes valued at $1 million and more. But city ordinances reflected the concerns of that residential community, Kenney said. The number of night games was limited. The same was true for concerts. Little space was available for the Cubs to operate lucrative parking lots. The team was constrained from selling the kind of brightly lit ad space that dominated the view above outfield walls in most other ballparks.
“I gave Tom a long list of things we ought to do, and my expectation was he’d say something like, O.K., do one, three, five, seven and eight but the rest either cost too much or will take too much time,” Kenney recalled. “He told me, O.K., go ahead. I asked, go ahead with which ones? He said, all, let’s do them all.”
Within months of taking over, Ricketts asked the city’s permission to place a 360-square-foot illuminated display of the Toyota logo above the left-field bleachers, something that would net the team $2 million. The backlash was immediate, with some likening the sign to a zit on the nose of baseball’s prettiest face.
Ricketts was dismayed: Such a fuss over one sign! He wrote a letter to the public, arguing “the landmark designation was never intended to put Wrigley Field in a time capsule.” Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub himself, was enlisted to lobby the city landmarks commission, which in the end approved a less luminous version of the towering Toyota display. To win the support of Alderman Tom Tunney, whose ward includes Wrigley Field, the Cubs had to agree to a four-year moratorium on additional signs.
Ricketts was getting an introduction to local politics. Tunney, who can be abrasive, kept reminding him the friendly confines were exactly that: confined. “The Cubs campus is about three and a quarter acres, which is very small,” the alderman said. “It was built for a different time and era, really before cars were much of a mode of transportation. Most new stadiums are built around 30 acres of planned development.”
Tunney added, “No one begrudges a man trying to maximize his investment, but government has a role in protecting the residents who have concerns about what those investments will mean to them.”
In fact, the Ricketts family wanted to undertake an extensive renovation of Wrigley Field, a gargantuan project with plans that eventually came to include new concrete and steel throughout, a substantial expansion of concession areas, a new roof above the upper deck, the restoration of historic aspects of the building’s facade, new light standards for one of baseball’s most dimly lit outfields, a relocation of the bullpens to a space beneath the bleachers, new dugouts and clubhouses, an underground batting tunnel and even an auditorium. The cost would inflate to a whopping $375 million.
Other Chicago teams had received public money to build new stadiums, a common practice throughout the country, and the Rickettses believed they were similarly entitled. They wanted to substantially fund the makeover using a city amusement tax already tacked on to ticket prices. “This money was to come out of receipts generated right here at Wrigley Field,” Laura said. “It was a win-win for everybody.”
But this was the wrong time to wag a tin cup. Chicago faced a staggering debt in its pension system, and Rahm Emanuel, the city’s new mayor, never seriously considered the Cubs’ request for public funds.
The matter was once and for all put to rest in May 2012. The New York Times ran a front-page article that said the Ending Spending Action Fund, founded by Joe Ricketts, was contemplating a $10 million campaign to link President Obama with racially incendiary comments made by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. A copy of the proposal had been obtained by the newspaper from someone alarmed by its tone.
Joe Ricketts had stepped down from any role in TD Ameritrade, focusing instead on new business ventures, charitable causes and a personal crusade against government waste. After the article appeared, he said the provocative anti-Obama campaign was merely one of many proposals submitted to Ending Spending by various political consultants and nothing he would have seriously considered.
But the aftertaste lingered in Chicago. Emanuel had been Obama’s White House chief of staff. He called the proposal an insult to the president and the nation.
The Cubs were on an early-season 13-game losing streak, and this off-the-field rhubarb only added to the distress. Tom Ricketts issued a statement repudiating racially divisive politics, insisting his father felt the same way. Laura responded by generously praising both the president and her father.
Theo Epstein reacted in his own fashion. He agreed to headline an Obama fund-raiser, $1,000 a guest.
• • •
Tom has seen a line of frustrated fans waiting to get into an overcrowded Cubs gift shop. A line! A line thwarting the eager from parting with their money!
He says: “What kind of business model is that? What would any business school say?”
Twenty-four years ago, when Tom and Pete were living across the street from Wrigley Field, their landlord was George Loukas, the son of an immigrant steelworker. “I graduated from high school with a D-minus average,” he said, and that information is meant as a boast because he is clearly nobody’s fool.
Loukas, a substitute gym teacher, was careful with his money, and in 1974 he and his brother put down a $5,000 deposit on a 16-unit, $135,000 building at the corner of Waveland and Sheffield Avenues, just beyond the Wrigley Field scoreboard. The neighborhood was somewhat seedy back then. Heroin was for sale on many of the streets that led into the friendly confines. So were women of a certain sort.
Loukas painted his apartments and raised the rent to $75 a month. The roof of the building was made of tar, and every now and then he and a few friends slathered on suntan lotion and climbed up there to watch a game on garden chairs. One of those pals said he knew others who would pay $5 apiece to join them and speculated they would add a few bucks more to get a hamburger. Loukas brought up a Weber grill.
Much the same was happening up and down Waveland and Sheffield. Jim Lourgos, a young lawyer, was a partner in a rundown building. Someone offered $300 to rent the rooftop for an afternoon. He recalled, “We held their beers as they climbed the ladder and passed them along as they got to the top.”
In 1984, a Cubs team with Ryne Sandberg, that season’s N.L. most valuable player, and Rick Sutcliffe, who captured the Cy Young Award, nearly won the pennant, losing a best-of-five playoff series to San Diego after going up, two games to none. Tickets were hard to come by late that season and the rooftops were bursting with the overflow, people pushing right up to the edge.
TV cameras adored the image of these teeming rooftops, as did the Cubs announcer Harry Caray. Indeed, everyone seemed to love these informal appendages to the ballpark except the Cubs’ front office. In 2002, a windscreen was erected to block the view from Waveland Avenue.
Chicagoans immediately took sides. To some, the rooftop owners were plucky entrepreneurs who had merely answered when opportunity knocked. To others, they were leeches. Some of these entrepreneurs were not average Joes but real estate heavyweights who had thrived as the neighborhood gentrified. Loukas owned three apartment buildings and three taverns, including the hugely popular Cubby Bear lounge, which was cater-corner to Wrigley’s main entrance.
The Cubs eventually shifted tactics, removing the windscreen and instead going to court, suing the rooftop owners in 2003. A legal battle over intellectual property rights seemed in the offing until a federal magistrate strongly encouraged both sides to settle. A hastily written contract satisfied the aggrieved Cubs with 17 percent of each rooftop owner’s gross revenues for the next 20 years.
This would cost the rooftop owners a combined $3 million to $4 million annually, but for them it was a liberating expense. The way they understood the deal, they were now guaranteed a view into the ballpark through 2023. Some owners of the 15 rooftop businesses kept their operations modest, little more than gradually rising rows of metal bleachers. But most borrowed millions of dollars to upgrade their buildings into vessels of luxury, with elevators leading to different levels of air-conditioned indoor suites. Guests on the roof could linger at an outdoor bar or watch the game from cushioned seats.
Continue reading the main story
Lourgos, a lawyer, gutted his building of all but its facade. Then he borrowed nearly $5 million to construct a three-story club that attracted corporate clients, he said.
An excursion to a Wrigley rooftop was intended to replace a company’s golf outing or its cruise on the Chicago River. There was ample space for up to 200 guests to hobnob; they were served food and drinks at a price of up to $200 a head. That’s $40,000 a game.
For an avid Cubs fan, eyes riveted on the action, a rooftop was only a satisfactory observation post when compared with a knothole. Not only was the view distant, but large parts of the field were also impossible to see, especially the outfield’s deepest terrain. One of Loukas’s rooftops was situated so far into foul territory that the pitcher’s mound and the batter’s box were blocked by the overhang of Wrigley Field’s upper deck.
On the other hand, anyone turning his back to the game was rewarded with a panoramic view of the cityscape — glimpses of Lake Michigan and the Loop and the elevated trains snaking north and south.
Rooftop owners enjoyed profitable times. And when the Ricketts family bought the Cubs, Tom invited them and their families for a friendly breakfast at the ballpark. Loukas, now 65, remembered his former tenants Pete and Tom. “I told myself, hey, this is great,” he said. “These are nice people from Nebraska.
“Really, everything at this breakfast was kumbaya.”
• • •
Tom always carries a black sack with a dozen baseballs, each stamped with the day’s date. But by the time he reaches Section 530 these gifts are gone. Karen Patterson, a 25-year-old fan in a Cubs shirt, hurries down from Row 5 so she can meet him. “I’m so pleased you guys are fixing up Wrigley,” she says.
Tom nods appreciatively. He says, “Unfortunately, it has been a lot harder than it should have been.”
Theo Epstein’s plan for a gut rehab of the roster was going well, especially the gutting. The team lost 101 games in 2012, a sorry enough performance to “earn” the Cubs the second pick in the 2013 draft as a measure of solace. This became third baseman Kris Bryant, a presumed cornerstone of the rehab who was recently named minor league player of the year by Baseball America. With the Cubs performing so poorly, they were happy to redirect fans’ attention toward players apprenticing in their farm system in places like Des Moines; Kodak, Tenn.; Daytona Beach, Fla.; and Boise, Idaho.
The team’s major league payroll had dropped from an opening day total of $147 million to $88 million. But the team was spending more money on young international talent, a new baseball academy in the Dominican Republic and, with the help of public funds, new spring training facilities in Arizona.
“There is a plan in place and we are sticking to it,” said Ricketts, who sometimes talked of lost games as if they were actually wins prudently stashed in a savings account, like contributions to a 401(k) plan.
As for the ballpark itself, in early 2013 he announced that the family itself would finance the expensive renovations. Additionally, the Rickettses planned to invest $200 million for a plaza with office and retail space adjacent to the ballpark as well as a nearby 175-room hotel. These projects would provide a $500 million to $600 million booster shot to Chicago’s economy, which was heartily welcomed by the mayor.
Continue reading the main story
From that point, the Cubs were no longer beggars but choosers. In lieu of public money, Ricketts asked for concessions from the city, including permission to hold more night games and concerts, something many people in the neighborhood opposed. The Cubs also wanted approval to erect numerous signs in and around the ballpark that would generate a continuing stream of advertising revenue. Additional signage had helped finance renovations at baseball’s other great heirloom, Fenway Park in Boston.
Ricketts got most of what he wanted. Alderman Tunney was again involved in the negotiations and he said the mayor’s office essentially decided that “one of the most generous sign packages ever” was a reasonable trade-off for the Rickettses’ willingness to spend their own money. He added ruefully: “There will be advertisements coming out of everywhere. We will have our own little Times Square right here at the corner of Clark and Addison.”
Plans called for most of the ads to glow within the open-air plaza, which would also include a farmers’ market and ice rink. But the city landmarks commission also approved two signs deemed essential to what Ricketts called “the battle to control our own outfield.” One would rise above the right-field wall, covering 650 square feet. The other was a 5,700-square-foot video board, one of the biggest in baseball, dominating the area above the left-field wall with a brightly lit rectangle three times the size of the familiar center-field scoreboard.
The prospect of this video board delighted those who thought it would bring the ballpark into the 21st century with a continuing flow of visual entertainment. Others were appalled. Cheryl Kent, an architecture writer and critic, called it “an animated monster” that would ruin “the essential intimacy” of Wrigley Field.
By then, Ricketts was reminding people the ballpark was “not a museum.” Besides, he said, surveys showed the Cubs faithful wanted a video board: “When you ask fans, would you like to see signs in the outfield, they say no, not really. But when you tell them those signs will help the team win, they say yes, of course.”
This was the new hard sell: Anything impeding revenue was postponing the Cubs’ resurrection. The Oakland Athletics may have played great baseball in a dilapidated ballpark; the Rays may have fielded a winner despite low attendance. But to escape the quicksand of failure, the Cubs, Ricketts said, required additional revenue from a renovated ballpark and huge outfield signs. The video board alone would earn the team $5 million to $7 million a year, he said.
The rooftop owners, of course, had objections beyond aesthetics. Views from some of their buildings would be obstructed by the two signs, and they believed they had a contract prohibiting that.
Ricketts said his lawyers had concluded otherwise, and yet he still feared what the rooftop owners might do to gum up the works. What if they won an injunction to stop construction after it began, he asked. Ricketts said no renovations would start unless the rooftop owners promised not to sue.
This was an unusual ultimatum, a demand for adversaries to renounce their legal rights. The mayor asked Alderman Patrick O’Connor, a veteran pol, to mediate negotiations between the Cubs and the rooftops’ owners. No deal was reached, and the alderman found the talks frustrating. The 15 rooftops were hardly united as one voice. “The right-field guys don’t necessarily agree with the left-field guys,” O’Connor said. Some of the businesses were owned by consortiums.
But the Cubs were also attempting a real estate squeeze play; by interfering with the view into the ballpark the signs were likely to drive down the value of the rooftop businesses. Kenney, the head of the Cubs’ business operations, said the team made firm offers to buy each of the buildings, which some owners deny. Other rooftop owners said the Cubs were lowballing them, pricing the properties as if they still housed apartments rather than luxury spaces for corporate parties.
“They can have my buildings, but I need to get fair value,” said Loukas, who sarcastically suggested if the Cubs truly wanted to increase profitability, they ought to field a better team.
Indeed, while the Cubs were known as lovable losers, the absence of winning had not made the heart grow fonder. Paid attendance has fallen by about 100,000 a year since the Ricketts family took over, and while the Cubs still outdraw two of every three major league clubs, lower gate receipts now annually reduce revenue by about $30 million a year, Ricketts admitted. Other estimates go higher.
Business on the rooftops has similarly declined as corporate outings to a Cubs game have lost cachet. Small groups and even individuals can now buy rooftop tickets on the Internet. Admission is sometimes sold as a Groupon deal, making the rooftops direct rivals with the Cubs for ordinary fans.
In January, at the annual Cubs convention, both Ricketts and Kenney once again singled out the rooftop problem as the final obstacle before any renovations could begin. Ricketts poked fun at the owners of the buildings, likening them not only to neighbors who peek through your window to watch Showtime on your TV but also to profiteers who charge others to do the same.
Beth Murphy, 59, owns a small rooftop business beside her tavern, Murphy’s Bleachers. She said she found it dumbfounding to be portrayed as a villain. Murphy has been a Bleacher Bum since she was a teenager; she used to have a schoolgirl crush on third baseman Ron Santo.
She said, “I never thought I’d be considered the reason the Cubs can’t win the World Series.”
• • •
Tom has signed about an hour’s worth of hats, shirts and scorecards, and his hands are flecked with black ink from his Sharpie. He is heading down a ramp from the upper deck when he sees another of those things that drive him nuts. There’s an ugly wall of decaying wood behind rusty iron mesh.
“How do you let a jewel like Wrigley Field deteriorate so much?” he says, shaking his head.
On May 21, with the current baseball season seven weeks old, Tom Ricketts issued a video message to the fans that made the Cubs seem even more pitiable than their record at the time, which was 16-28. He stood in the team’s clubhouse, demonstrating how batters were forced to warm up by hitting a ball off a tee like the tiniest of Little Leaguers. Baseball’s other 29 teams had the benefit of indoor batting cages, he said, adding, “It’s time to invest in Wrigley Field and to do the things our competitors do.”
Continue reading the main story
He then started in again on his archnemeses. “Unfortunately, it seems like my family’s plans for Wrigley Field have gotten lost in a dispute with the rooftops,” he said, this time adding a twist: The Cubs were going ahead with the ballpark renovations even if that meant they’d be sued. “We cannot delay any longer,” Ricketts said with a touch of melodrama. “The time to build a winner is now.”
Negotiations with the rooftops may have been fruitless, but the year delay in breaking ground now allowed the Cubs to go back to the city landmarks commission with an expanded wish list for the renovations: extended bleacher seating, a new patio atop the right-field wall, more luxury suites. Instead of two signs above the outfield, the team now wanted seven.
“The Rickettses are very smart,” said Lourgos, one of the rooftop owners. He thought the Cubs had played their hand masterfully. “They kept their money in their pockets until they got what they wanted. Their asks keep changing; they always want more.”
The commission’s staff slightly moderated the Cubs’ plan for the seven signs. The advertisements would have to be a minimum of 20 feet apart — and a minimum of 65 feet on either side of the center-field scoreboard. The video board was reduced to 3,990 square feet.
In July, the commission unanimously approved the expanded renovation plans, which finally set off a lawsuit by some of the rooftop owners. They sued the commission rather than the team, saying the landmarks ordinance for Wrigley Field had been improperly interpreted.
Ricketts said the renovations would begin anyway. Outfield signs will be erected before next season, he said, and the renovations should be completed before opening day in 2018. He said the video board — eye-catching as an enormous TV set — will make the ballpark a better place. “Wrigley will still be Wrigley,” he promised. “It will still be beautiful and it will be a lot more functional.”
Whatever happens, the Cubs have not entirely eschewed public money. The bleacher expansion requires an extension of Wrigley Field’s exterior walls, and the city is giving the Cubs the necessary sidewalk space and a parking lane. The ballpark is likely to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places, making the team eligible for federal tax credits that may amount to $50 million or more.
The landmarks commission’s action occurred exactly a week after the Cubs traded Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel, two pitchers who were having excellent seasons. The key player received in return from the Oakland Athletics was Addison Russell, 20, playing in the minor leagues at the Class AA level.
It was the third year in a row the Cubs had essentially pulled the plug on the baseball season in July by trading two of their best pitchers for younger talent. But Epstein and Ricketts could now boast the team had three of the top 10 players in Baseball America’s list of leading prospects: infielders Bryant, Russell and Javier Baez. It was as if the two men had begun to hear the bugle call, the cavalry soon coming to the rescue over yonder hills. Baez joined the Cubs in August (and is hitting below .180).
Epstein said he foresaw the Cubs becoming a contender in the next year or two, with the team’s best young players blossoming just as increased ballpark revenue provides him a fattened budget to add free agents. “The two great currencies in baseball these days are money and impactful young players,” he said. “We have a chance to have as much of these currencies as anybody.
“That’s like going to Vegas with a sound mind and thick wallet. There are no guarantees. I can’t tell you that we’ll win a championship in 2017, just like I can’t tell you we’ll hit blackjack. But we are positioned to make a nice long run if we continue on this path.”
He again emphasized there were no guarantees; young players can fizzle or get hurt. But then he grew excited, going off the record to name the Cubs’ starting lineup of the future, speculating who will someday get M.V.P. votes and who will merely be All-Stars. He named some of the free agents he thought he would be able to sign, a 70 percent chance on this player, a 40 percent chance on another.
Ricketts is equally optimistic. Five years of terrible baseball, like compost, is nourishing the future. “The brand lovable losers is dead to us,” he said. “We’ll soon be lovable winners.”
He paused, adding, “I really mean it.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/sports/baseball/as-cubs-slowly-rebuild-theres-shouting-from-the-rooftops.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&abt=0002&abg=0