NEWSLETTER
Chicago Cubs Chairman and Owner Tom Ricketts has been making a round of media stops this morning, as you’d expect for the home opener. As you’d also expect, a heavy focus of the interviews has been the status of discussions with the City/Neighborhood/rooftops on a funding deal to get the revovation, itself, underway.
As expected, based on Dave Kaplan’s conversation with Ricketts this morning, there isn’t much to update. By way of example, here are the notes I jotted down while listening to Ricketts’ interview on the Score this morning (“I’s” and “We’s” are Ricketts speaking, paraphrasing where appropriate):
The conclusion? Well, this is a whole lot of nothing, which suggests things really are looking good, even if there’s nothing official to announce just yet. To my ear, Ricketts never even planted a single, subtle seed of doubt about eventually getting the deal done. I wonder if he’s been cautioned not to say anything about anything, and if that penultimate bullet there is the key one. Maybe things are essentially agreed upon (subject to some additional wrangling with the rooftops), but because of the formal process required – community approvals, City Council vote, etc. – Ricketts isn’t permitted to say much of anything.
Thus, we get a lot of fluff. Given that Ricketts knew he was going to be blasted by renovation questions today, and that he clearly had prepared answers that had no real substance to them, I suspect things really are still moving in a positive direction. There were no threats, no discussion of a deadline, and nothing but positivity. That doesn’t mean there aren’t still issues to deal with, but it didn’t have even the whiff of “things might fall apart and we might not get to renovate Wrigley the way we want.” Hopefully that means there are mere i’s to dot and t’s to cross.
I suspect we’ll hear plenty more about this as the week goes on … like it or lump it.
