With the Bears season conveniently out of the way, the only Cubs column you’ll ever need is back to its normal slot on Mondays.
Thanks to Marquee televising a stupefying amount of the Cubs Convention we were able to consume it at our leisure, and I watched too damned much of it. Here are a few (many) observations.
Saturday morning - Ricketts Family Panel
Cole Wright moderated, and only Laura and Tom Ricketts were there to represent the family. Cole lost his voice bleating repeatedly during the previous night’s opening ceremonies, but that didn’t stop him from power through a scratchy throat to serve up softballs to his bosses’ bosses.
Laura talked for quite a while about Cubs Charities. Look, I know they do a lot of good work, but nobody in that room came to hear that stuff. Even Tom couldn’t pretend to be interested. Though, at one point he woke up and said he’s proud of how the charity has grown since his dad bought the team for the kids to play with. He said Cubs Charities was a modest effort when Tribune Company owned the team, and when they took over he asked an owner of another team what their charity raised and knew they needed to step it up. “Because we have to be number one at everything.” Yeah, sure, buddy. Though I can see how being number one at having people give you money would be on your list.
Tom said he never expected that they’d have to do another rebuild, “But a lot of things happened. We couldn’t get extensions done with our players, some trades to add talent while we were ‘going for it’ traded talent away from the minors.” Yeah, like Eloy and Gleyber and then…who? Nobody, that’s who.
Tom worked in his new favorite talking point about how the last 15 World Series winners had a top 10 farm system before they won. That’s just an ambiguous statement to mean nothing and everything all at once.
Tom said he’s excited about how the guys “gelled” last year. Did you know that the last 15 World Series winners all turned to gelatin at some point before they won? They’ve already taken a crucial first step.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Pointless Exercise to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.