Holy Cow! The Chicago Cubs Finally Have a Winning Business Plan

When Jon Lester came to visit the Chicago Cubs the week before Thanksgiving, the team brought him to its brick offices a couple of blocks north of Wrigley Field. Lester, a 6-foot-4 left-handed pitcher with a devastating cut fastball, was one of the prize free agents on the market. Crane Kenney, the Cubs’ president for business operations, showed him a table-size scale model of Wrigley as it will be when the team finishes a $575 million renovation, with restored ironwork and terra cotta on the exterior, a jumbo video board above the left field bleachers, and a Cubs-branded hotel across the street. On a 108-inch touchscreen, Kenney brought up illustrations of the new clubhouse, which will have a 200-seat auditorium along with its dining, recreation, and weight rooms. “The Yankees will have a slightly larger clubhouse than ours,” Kenney says, reprising the same presentation four months later, “but at 30,000 square feet, we’ll be the second-largest.”

The bulk of the spiel came from Theo Epstein, the Cubs’ president for baseball operations and the guy responsible for putting together a winning roster. He made a virtue of the Cubs’ failure to win a World Series since 1908. Epstein says, “We told him how he could help deliver one of the most significant championships in the history of sports and how we felt like we weren’t too far away.”