Major cuts at Marquee raise serious questions about the Cubs moving forward

I remember, quite clearly, standing in the ballroom at the Sheraton Grand Chicago nearly five years ago when Cubs owner Tom Ricketts was showered with boos from the fans at the Cubs Convention opening ceremonies when he mentioned the introduction of Marquee Sports Network.

In a response that's only aged more poorly with each passing year, Ricketts answered the boos by saying, "What do you have against the Marquee Network? Believe me, you won't be booing about that in a year. You guys won't be booing about the Marquee Network next year."

Well, here we are five years later and, yep, there's still a lot of fans booing about it.

Pitched to the fanbase as a massive new revenue stream that would allow the Cubs to pursue top free agents and field payrolls commensurate with the team's large-market stature, Marquee has, instead, been a constant headache - plagued by various carriage issues and disputes and, now, major layoffs and restructuring are sounding alarm bells.

Diane Penny, Marquee's GM since April 2024, is out - as are content director Tony Andracki and reporter Andy Martinez, among others, on the digital content team. Rather than operate as a pseudo-independent regional sports network, the layoffs and restructuring sound more and more like Marquee will be largely a Cubs-run entity moving forward.

The full Sun-Times report is worth reading and offers a ton of insights into the moves, but what I want to focus on is what this may mean for the organization as a whole moving forward. I don't think these changes came out of nowhere and believe the budget Ricketts gave Jed Hoyer heading into the offseason took these now-public changes into account. So, in theory, it's not changing the equation for the baseball operations team this winter.

The future of the Cubs, Marquee, RSNs & the upcoming CBA discussions

The long-term picture, however, is where things feel very uncertain. Broadcast rights are one of the major issues that will be hashed out in next year's CBA talks because the revenue-sharing aspect is a huge topic of debate between large and small market owners. MLB is chomping at the bit to centralize as many of the team's broadcast rights as possible, and we'd always thought the Cubs would be one of the teams that pushed back on the idea as owners of their own RSN.

Maybe that won't be the case now? If they get market value in such a deal, perhaps Ricketts is amiable to such a proposal. Of course, the team has a long-term deal in place with Sinclair, which the Sun-Times calls out as a potential issue in such discussions, but we don't have answers there yet.

With RSNs dropping left and right in recent years, it's hard not to wax nostalgic about the days of WGN when you knew exactly where and when to find Cubs games. Those days, sadly, are gone - and just as the fanbase had somewhat come to accept Marquee, it feels the network is on shakier ground than ever before.