3 people Chicago Cubs fans love to hate – and 1 they’ll always adore

3 people Chicago Cubs fans sure love to hate: #1 – Tom Ricketts

If you told me in the wake of the Cubs’ 2016 World Series championship that within five years, Tom Ricketts would be among the most despised with fans, I’d have thought you’d lost your mind.

I mean, how do you burn that much political capital with a fanbase that waited for 108 years for a ring that quickly? Well, I guess we should just ask Ricketts, who has done just that. Refusing to spend near the end of the team’s competitive window, slashing and burning when it came to payroll and a complete failure of a launch of Marquee Network – the losses keep piling up for Ricketts.

“You won’t be booing next year,” he told us. Yet the Cubs’ television network remains as hard to watch as ever, with no signs of that changing anytime soon. Despite a lackluster on-field product, ticket prices at Wrigley are higher than anywhere else in the league – and all we’ve heard from ownership is talk of ‘biblical’ losses since the pandemic hit in 2020.

Let’s call it what it is. For the Ricketts family, ownership of the Cubs (and an ever-growing portion of Wrigleyville) is an investment. It’s about the bottom line, period. At one point, maybe we thought otherwise – but the evidence speaks for itself. Even if this ownership group delivers another championship, I don’t know if Ricketts will ever be loved again at Wrigley.