Chicago Cubs owner and chairman Tom Ricketts made some mild waves this weekend at Cubs Convention for a handful of financial comments that, although not out of the ordinary, weren’t entirely well received.
Speaking on 670 The Score, here are the comments that seemed to bother a number of folks:
“Obviously, the Dodgers have a lot more resources, naturally, from smart business moves they made years ago,” Ricketts said. “I don’t begrudge them any of that. Some teams just have outside resources that are funding their player moves and acquisitions, and that’s really hard to compete with. I understand when fans say, ‘How come you don’t spend like that?’ Because they think somehow we have all these dollars that the Dodgers have or the Mets have or the Yankees have and we just keep it. Which isn’t true at all. What happens is we try to break even every year, and that’s about it.
“There’s a competitive balance issue that gets created. But the other problem is, I don’t think fans should spend all their time thinking about which teams have more money or how much they’re spending. We should talk about the players and who we draft and who we’re developing ….
“The other part of this, and a little bit frustrating at times, is that we’ve invested more in the team and the ballpark and the neighborhood than any other owner out of their pocket in baseball. We came out privately financing all the renovations at Wrigley, and everything we do around Wrigley Field, roughly a billion dollars, and no one has that kind of financial commitment to their team. So when I have a fan come up and say, ‘Hey, you’re cheap’ or ‘Open your wallet’ or something like that, I just think they’re just misinformed. I think it’s the wrong way to look at our ownership.”
For my part, I did not think these were atypical comments, nor did I think they were necessarily revelatory of new insights into how Cubs ownership operates. That said, a handful of quick things did jump out at me on those comments, and I offer them as a preface to the responses from other corners of the media world:
1.) I actually think it’s fair to say that the Cubs probably cannot spend at the same level as the Dodgers (a truly unique and extreme TV contract), the Yankees (a singular entity in baseball with revenue that blows most away), or the Mets (ultra-wealthy owner beyond any other).
2.) Expecting the Cubs’ spending to more consistently be near the top of the next tier of MLB teams, however? And wanting to discuss these things because they absolutely do impact an organization’s ability to compete? Also fair.
3.) The extent to which fans are “misinformed” about team finances seems to be a product not of fan ignorance, but instead of MLB teams keeping their financial picture a closely-guarded secret.
4.) I like the work that was done at Wrigley Field and in the surrounding area. It is genuinely appreciated by this fan.
5.) That work, however, was not charity work; it was an investment in businesses that are designed to make money. I’m not sure how much “credit” an owner should get from fans for constructing, for example, a for-profit hotel next to the ballpark.
All that said, none of this stuff was really all that new. Ricketts has said most of it before, and we’ve discussed most of it before. I generally think the two extreme poles – the Ricketts are spending absolutely everything they can VS. the Ricketts are totally cheap and never spend at all – are both getting this thing wrong, and I have mostly resigned myself to just pushing for the Cubs to spend commensurate with clubs like the Phillies or Red Sox or Blue Jays, and at least periodically exceed the luxury tax.
However, because Ricketts’ comments come against a backdrop that has seen the Cubs’ spending stagnate over the last five years, relatively speaking, and at a time when the financial divisions in MLB are all the more pronounced, they got a lot more attention this time around. And not just with fans. The comments seem to have caught fire in several corners, and I thought at least a couple were worth sharing and discussing.
For example, in his column about the Dodgers’ voracious appetite for player acquisition and aggressive spending, Ken Rosenthal took aim at a number of other organizations, and the Cubs got outsized attention:
“The Chicago Cubs possess the resources to bully the division, but their current estimated payroll is $48 million below where it was last season. Owner Tom Ricketts, speaking to 670 The Score at the Cubs Convention, sounded almost offended by the mere discussion of payrolls.
‘I don’t think fans should spend all their time thinking about which team has more money or how much they’re spending. It just becomes a big narrative that’s a distraction,’ Ricketts said. ‘I think our fans somehow think we have all these dollars that the Dodgers have or the Mets have or the Yankees have, and we just keep it. It’s not true. We just try to break even every year.’
Ricketts bought the Cubs in 2009 for $845 million. Forbes now estimates the franchise is worth $4.225 billion. If Ricketts doesn’t want fans thinking about money, perhaps he should lower his ticket prices so they are not among the most expensive in baseball. And if he wants to support his claim that he is just trying to break even every year, he is more than welcome to open his books. Only two clubs provide such information, the Atlanta Braves and Toronto Blue Jays, and only because they are part of publicly traded companies.”
That isn’t the first time this offseason that Rosenthal has offered some unvarnished criticism of how the Cubs are operating financially these days.
Relatedly, Dan Bernstein went in on Ricketts for the spending comments, specifically as they relate to what he sees as counting for “Cubs” revenues and what doesn’t:
As @dan_bernstein notes, a large part of the disconnect between Tom Ricketts and fans regarding the Cubs’ spending is tied to Ricketts viewing his restaurants/real estate as investments for fans even though that profit doesn’t appear to be going back into player acquisition. pic.twitter.com/GjIv7YxVvL— 670 The Score (@670TheScore) January 20, 2025
On these matters, we have to do a whole lot of extrapolating and guesswork, because the books of the team – much less other private Ricketts entities – are never going to be open to us. That is to say, we may very well be “misinformed,” as Ricketts said, but some of that is probably by design.
As Bernstein discusses, we know that “The Chicago Cubs” are not the owner and operator of most of the adjacent businesses around Wrigley Field. We also know that non-team revenues are not subject to league revenue-sharing, so Cubs ownership is reticent to discuss those dollars as impacting the team budget (lest they be perceived as local team revenues, and thus subject to a huge chuck going out the door to other MLB teams).
Strictly speaking, the rooftops and the hotel and the restaurants and the concerts or whatever else may not generate revenues that the Cubs entity can treat as its own revenues for purposes of filling out the baseball operations budget, and Ricketts would still be telling the truth that every dollar that comes in the door (to the Cubs) is used on org expenses and baseball operations. Again, strictly speaking.
But it’s also true at a come-on-now level that those businesses operate under the auspices of whatever success or failure the Chicago Cubs entity bestows upon them. It’s the entire reason for MAKING those businesses in the first place! Seems like smart business to me, by the way, and a good reason to want to own the Chicago Cubs, specifically. (To say nothing of the assisted ability to continue paying down the debt of the organization, further increasing equity, and also benefitting from appreciation in these assets.)
So, while separating the Cubs/non-Cubs financials makes sense from a legal, accounting, and MLB-revenues perspective, you can’t ask fans to separate those dollars mentally or emotionally when it comes to how they feel about spending on the team. ESPECIALLY if you’re explicitly going to cite the build up around Wrigley as part of your spending on behalf of fans. Do whatever you want to do with your assets. Make as much money as you can. But you absolutely cannot thereafter cry foul when passionate fans want to talk about the money part of the game, and want to see more dollars – however they come, and into whatever door they come – being spent to make the team better.
I am not alleging that the Ricketts Family is just raking in mountains of non-revenue-sharable cash every year, and greedily keeping as much away from the Cubs entity as possible. We have no way of knowing any of that in any direction. Indeed, I think it’s probably been a relatively crummy four years financially for all of these businesses, between the pandemic and consumer spending and the crumbling TV landscape. Still a good set of businesses on the whole, though, I reckon ….
I am only saying that it’s more than reasonable for fans to want to discuss these things, for fans to want to deconstruct some of the arguments, and for all of us to have certain spending-related expectations for the Chicago Cubs.
The offseason isn’t over. The Cubs are going to add from here. And a multi-year trajectory of spending increases also remains theoretically possible. We’ll continue to track and discuss as much of it as we can, and I hope that the end result of this minor dust-up is that Ricketts and the Cubs bump up the transparency, rather than retrench into mostly silence on these matters. Because, hey, maybe we ARE misinformed about how this all works! Feel free to supplement at any time!