Now that the Ricketts family has signed on as the next owner of the Cubs, the players and manager Lou Piniella are eager to meet Tom Ricketts, who spearheaded the purchase.
“Yeah, I’d like to meet my owner, my boss,” said Alfonso Soriano, who is signed through 2014. “Three years with no boss? Now we know what we can do. With a new owner, if he shows he wants to win, we can have a better team and we can play together more and have more shots [at winning].”
Tribune Co. put the Cubs up for sale on the day Piniella managed his first game in a Cubs uniform, Opening Day in 2007. Perhaps more than anyone in the organization, Piniella was outspoken about his belief that the Cubs were at a disadvantage without an owner who could focus solely on the team.
“It hasn’t helped,” he said. “This thing has been in a bit of a flux in the three years I’ve been here. And now that things are heading in the right direction, it’s very positive and encouraging for this organization.”
But the Cubs won back-to-back division titles since the team was put up for sale, and their $135 million payroll this year is the third-highest in baseball. Aramis Ramirez insisted the long time frame between the announcement of the sale and Friday’s news hasn’t been a negative.
“For some reason, [general manager] Jim Hendry has been able to make moves, even though we didn’t have a new owner,” he said. “We’ve been able to get what we need. They needed an outfielder with pop, and we added Milton Bradley. And they added Aaron Miles. He kept adding the pieces he thinks we need.”
Hendry has met Ricketts but didn’t deal with him on team matters during the sale process, leaving that to Cubs Chairman Crane Kenney. He knew of the Ricketts family from his days coaching at Creighton University in Omaha, the family’s home base.
“They had an impeccable reputation, and Tom seems like a guy who cares about not only the Cubs, but also the people of Chicago,” Hendry said. “He wants to do the right thing for the franchise, and it’s a huge investment by him and his family.”
While Hendry didn’t say it, the Cubs were not able to take on any major contract during the ’09 season because the budget was basically frozen. He was able to bring in John Grabow and Tom Gorzelanny but could not pursue left-handed starter Cliff Lee, who wound up with Philadelphia.
“I never use that as an excuse,” Hendry said. “We’ve had a high payroll the last few years. The way we went about our business after ’06, we spent a lot of money and signed a lot of good players in high-end deals. Unless you’re going to be the Yankees, you just can’t do that every year. We thought we had to mix and match a little more this last off-season. We thought we did things that would make us just as productive, or more so, than last year. That hasn’t been the case.
“That’s not an excuse for me., No one is going to sit in the chair I sit in and complain about the payroll we’ve been able to have the last three years.”
———
psullivan@tribune.com
Up next
Saturday at Dodgers,
3:10 p.m., WFLD-Ch. 32
Big number
.253
Cubs’ average against right-handers, third worst among NL teams. They ranked second (.274) in 2008.
