The Cubs keep giving us things we don't want
Some final thoughts on the convention and the inevitable shift in fandom


How much content can your wring out of a watered down fan convention celebrating the Cubs hopeful resurgence to mediocrity for 2023? I mean, this is already the fifth article on it, so…hopefully five?
The Cubs Business Operations panel featured Cubs President of Smarminess Crane Kenney, the guy who leaked his own tangential attachment to the Chicago Bears presidency Colin Faulkner, and some bald guy who I can only assume is the assistant to the traveling secretary.
Crane tried to act all folksy and problem solvery when at one point a fan who has season tickets in the upper deck complained that when they took down the crappy old TV monitors they never replaced them and Crane said, “Let’s take care of that now.” I assume he wanted the bald guy to head right over to Wrigley and start hanging some 19” Magnavox’s.
It was what you would expect from the Cubs business people. They bragged about how much revenue all of their brilliant ideas bring in for Jed to use to splurge on guys like Eric Hosmer. Crawly showed up again (he got more airtime on Marquee last weekend than Jim Deshaies) to ask why the Cubs don’t send season ticket holders all of the giveaways like the White Sox, Bulls and Bears do. Faulkner kidded him about wanting them to be more like the White Sox and said the reason they can do it is that they don’t have nearly as many season ticket holders as the Cubs—it was a solid burn. But the unspoken real reason is that they enjoy making Al Yellon squat in line for six hours before giveaway days, but then, Al will be there anyway.
One of the more ridiculous sequences was when Crane started bragging about about how much more content Marquee Sports Network lets them show than when they were part of Comcast/NBC Sports Chicago. He said under their old arrangement they could only have half hour pre and postgames whereas now they can do a full hour or more, under their old arrangement they could only show five or six spring training games where now they can show all of them, under their old arrangement they couldn’t break into programming for exciting news like Willson Contreras turning down the qualifying offer (or whatever example Crane actually used) where now they can, and how under the old arrangement they were limited to interviewing the parents of players for 90 seconds during games when now they can devote 90 minutes to that interesting stuff.
The reason that sequence was ridiculous is that Crane was the guy who negotiated the old deal. He’s great at taking credit for topping his old, super bad TV and radio deals. He has no problem talking about how they used to have the worst local TV and radio contracts in professional sports without pointing out that he was the one who negotiated the worst local TV and radio contracts in professional sports.