Amazin’! A Cubs fan will own the Cubs after 77 years

What better way to open my True/Slant tenure than to write about a Cubs fan finally owning the Cubs.

You find that odd? Aren’t most owners fans, because running a baseball team is not the most efficient way to make  money? Baseball’s lords of the game are in it for personal gratification, correct?

Not with the Cubs.  Tom Ricketts, certified Cubs fan, will be the first authentic rooter of the star-crossed franchise to run the team since the original Wrigley — William, Jr. — died early in 1932.

That stark fact, along with the lack of a quality baseball operation through most of that lifetime-plus, is the main reason the Cubs have not won a World Series in that period of time and not even have played in a Fall Classic since 1945.

A baseball team cannot be run without passion.  You cannot meddle, experiment or nickle-and-dime your way to on-the-field prosperity. The next investment after the $845 million Ricketts and his family paid Tribune Co. last week must be emotional. You have to want the Cubs to win down to your very soul.

Ricketts sat in the bleachers, supposedly meeting his wife in those cheap seats. I don’t think you would have found Tribune Co. bossmen Stanton Cook and John Madigan, formerly Cubs overseers, swilling beer and slathering on No. 30-strength sunscreen on the hard, wooden benches. They called themselves fans? Of the professional, businessman’s variety, maybe, but not a real, common-folk fan.

Gum magnate Phil Wrigley, who inherited the team from William Wrigley, Jr. and ran it for 45 years, simply was a rich man’s kid fulfilling his sense of family duty. He had little interest and understanding about baseball. Wrigley even said as much soon after he took over, but friendly newspapermen urged him to not repeat such opinions publicly. Wrigley merely maintained the Cubs and Wrigley Field as a family heirloom, in honor of his father. What do you with heirlooms? Not much, except to dust ‘em off and make sure they don’t break.

And anytime Wrigley proactively did anything with the Cubs, it was eccentric tycoon-type stuff, like the infamous College of Coaches of 1961-65. The scheme in which the team functioned without a manager while rotating coaches in and out of the head-man’s duty in the dugout caused great harm when folks weren’t busting a gut in laughter.  Wrigley would have been better off doing nothing.

Even worse than such crazy tinkering was Wrigley’s refusal to sell to many well-heeled fans who inquired about the Cubs over the decades. Chicagoan Ray Kroc, fresh from making his initial McDonald’s fortune in the 1960’s, was a maniacal Cubs fan. Wrigley turned him down and we’ll never know how McDonald’s-style management and marketing could have revived the Cubs. Papa Bear George Halas, who was a New York Yankees right fielder before he ever played pro football, also wanted the team and similarly was rejected.

Barnum Bill Veeck, who grew up with the Cubs when his father, Bill, Sr., was team president under William Wrigley, Jr., also desired to buy the Cubs in the 1960’s. Veeck, a fan first, would have attracted far more heavy investors as partners than when he regained White Sox ownership in 1975. Again, Wrigley said no — he would own the team ’till death did them part. And he kept his word.

Any of these fans and others would have left no stone unturned in pursuit of a winner.  That’s what passion does — it knocks down barriers, both real and self-imposed.

Andy MacPhail, Tribune Co.’s viceroy in charge of the Cubs from 1994 to 2006, might have been a fan of baseball. But he was personally arch-conservative and old-fashioned — one scout called him “The Antique” — and grew up in New York and Baltimore. He never knew the pain of watching the sure pennant just dribble away in September, 1969.  MacPhail did not have the emotional drive to spend all of the team’s fortune to build up the best baseball organization in the game. Tribune Co. overseers were surprised MacPhail handed in budgets lower than they expected and were put off by his stated “slow, steady, unspectacular” mantra.

Now we’ll be in unfamiliar territory, watching how all the heartbreak will push Ricketts and family forward once they officially take over later this year. I could give you a to-do list — gosh, everyone has, including yours truly in a newspaper — but there’s only two real objectives at work.

Hire the best and brightest, and make sure the people in charge have institutional memory.  Too many top Cubs figures have come in from elsewhere with no inclination to avoid repeating past mistakes or duplicate the uncommon times strategies and lineups seemed to work. Example:  the 1984 team led the NL in runs  scored with a fine blend of speed, power and on-base percentage.  I mentioned this fact to manager Lou Piniella — entrenched in New York in ‘84 — a couple of years back,  and he seemed to walk away muttering that was way too much information.

Nobody expects Tom Ricketts to reclaim his bleacher seat, although I suspect he’ll quietly circulate among the masses from time to time so he can keep in touch. Better he can win his fellow fans over years from now when all the pundits credit a Cubs World Series title to acquisitions and player development by the No. 1 baseball organization in the business.

Also, check out: Welcome to the Cubs, Tom Ricketts. Here’s what you need to do first… (via Bleed Cubbie Blue).