A typical organization would be:
Ownership
President
General Manager
Staff
Players
The Cubs have:
Ownership
President (Business) - - - - - - President (Baseball)
Marketing/Business Staff - - - - - - General Manager (Baseball)
Part of the newer structure is a result of the breaking apart of the components of the baseball business. The Cubs as a baseball franchise has been stripped down to its core assets: broadcast rights and player contracts. Wrigley Field and other facilities are owned by separate companies. The new real estate development block is owned by a different Ricketts LLC. The Cubs are mere tenants in Wrigley Field. And therefore, the division of revenue begins to get complex.
If you were just running a "baseball business," then the general manager would be in charge of both the team and the facilities management (including ticket sales and promotions) because all the revenue and expenses would flow through his desk. Minor league teams operate in this fashion.
If you begin to divide the duties amongst various camps, there can be some disconnect and uneven communications. For example, a baseball GM may want to use part of his revenue stream to sign another player. However, if he does not have full control over the budget, then he may not be able to so without approval of other managers. Likewise, part of the baseball operations are promotions, and depending on how the business side debits the accounts, those marketing activities could be taken out of the GM's baseball team account. In other words, there is possible friction when different people with different responsibilities want to handle the same fan dollar.
Now, some management officials would like the idea of splitting money from the baseball team as a means of checks and balances. The bean counters on the business side could hold down the expenses and player contracts on the baseball side. This may be bad for a general manager who is judged not by how profitable the team is but on yearly wins and losses. He may wish to spend money to make money (and victories).
There has been some disconnect in the marketing and promotions of the Cubs this year. As any fan knows, we get Cub spam on a weekly basis. However, most of it has to do with non-game activities around Wrigley Field (concerts, tours, family nights, etc.) The business side has made it a priority to get more people into Wrigley Field when the Cubs are not in town. It is a means of increasing the top line revenue number. But it does not necessarily equate in helping the Cubs field a better team.
We will see shortly the disconnection between the business and baseball side of the Cubs organization. If Ricketts moves forward with the Wrigleyville redevelopment projects, the baseball team payroll most likely will go down as those budgetary expenses will be moved to help defray construction costs. The Cubs payroll has been rapidly declining in recent years, from $140 million to $102 million to a projected $75 million in 2014.
Just as the Cubs two internal camps have had to co-exist, there are expanding two external camps amongst Cub fans. It centers on a simple word: patience. One camp, mostly long term season ticket holders and die hard fans, are getting impatient with the pace of improvement on the major league roster. A 100 loss season, a current roster filled with waiver claimants, and no sense of urgency to change has gotten these fans upset - - - it is no longer "wait to next year," but wait for the next decade. This group wants the Cubs to rebuild by using prospects and major league talent (via trades and free agency) to build a competitive team now.
This impatient group is growing and getting more vocal. Evidence of their unhappiness is found in the Cub announcement this week that the marketing department is adding more people to run through the team mailing lists in order to sell more season ticket packages. The announcement of this 18 month customer sales force means that ticket sales must be dropping at a rate that calls for the team to stem the tide by throwing more sales people to reclaim some of these ticket losses. The 18 month program is also curious, since this would take the sales hunt through to the beginning of 2015, the earliest turnaround date mentioned by Cub brass.
The other Cub fan camp are the patient folk. They understand the Epstein rebuilding blue print. They are fine that the Cubs major league team will stink for several years. They don't care. They believe that stocking the farm system with high priced prospects can yield a steady stream of homegrown talent in the years to come. They have focused their attention on following Cub minor league box scores from Boise, Daytona, and Tennessee rather than watching the current Cub team.
The patient Cub fan still has some hope. The impatient Cub fan does not believe in hope but only in results. So there is tension and friction brewing between these fan camps. A split between these two fandoms will hurt the business side of the Cub kingdom - - - no longer a loyal fan base that can be counted as tried and true fan support during the good and bad times.
Cubs ownership and management has to realize that this fault line could really hurt the bottom line. One could say a knee jerk reaction to these rumblings was the out-of-the-blue signing of Edwin Jackson to a $52 million contract last off season. It really did not make any sense to the patient fan base since the Cubs were not going to win this year. And there was some backlash from the impatient fan base, who thought the money was not well spent on a .500 journeyman pitcher. It also could have been one of those bureaucratic tendencies from the baseball side of the flow chart - - - the money was available to spend, so they had to spend it or lose it. So the GM signed Jackson.
Spending money just to spend a budget line item is not wise spending of resources. And spending money to appease the fans to signal you are trying is not going to hold as much water as it used to. There are going to be tugs of war both externally and internally in the Cubs world. There will be internal Cubs management friction for the next four years as the Rickettsville construction projects go forward while the team struggles on the field. There will be increasing fan friction over the direction of the team.
