Tom Ricketts Might Want to Try Reading Room Before Speaking

The 2025 Cubs Convention wrapped up on Sunday and there are a few things to unpack. Other than Sammy Sosa’s return, Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts — who took the Sheraton Grand stage to boos — stole the spotlight with his comments about the current payroll situation. That didn’t come during the ownership panel that has been nixed for a while now, but in an interview on 670 The Score that quickly went viral on social media for all the wrong reasons.

“They think somehow we have all these dollars that the Dodgers have or the Mets have or the Yankees have and we just keep it, which isn’t true at all,” Ricketts said when asked what he would say to fans exhorting the team to spend more. “What happens is we try to break even every year, and that’s about it.”

We’ll never see the real numbers because it’s a privately held organization with accountants who can probably make those claims stand up on paper, but this is a bad look at best. Forbes estimated the Ricketts family as being worth $5.3 billion and gave the Cubs a valuation of $4.225 billion in March. That puts them as the fourth most valuable team in Major League Baseball, which is pretty good for what Ricketts described as basically a nonprofit.

The Cubs are really just a nonprofit charity when you think about it. https://t.co/hCr2y1ps8H

— Evan Altman (@DEvanAltman) January 18, 2025

While net worth and franchise valuation are not the same as profitability, Ricketts’ claims went over like a lead balloon in light of the team’s reduced payroll. FanGraphs has the Cubs as the 13th-highest projected payroll in for 2025, and even adding another free agent or two won’t put them near the biggest spenders. Ricketts and Jed Hoyer have argued that teams with lower payrolls can still be successful, which is true even if it’s also a cop-out. The Rays’ sustained success and the Diamondbacks making the World Series in 2023 may have given Cubs leadership too much confidence that extravagent spending is not needed.

Hoyer bears blame here too, but we can see from the comments above that he has to operate more frugally than some of his big-market peers. He does relatively well with the tight budget, as does Craig Counsell after his time with the Brewers. One worry Cubs fans had when Counsell was hired centered around whether it was a way to win at the margins while keeping the budget low.

But if the front office and manager can squeeze more wins out of less money, operating with a higher payroll should push the team to the next level. That’s exactly what they need to do, yet several free agents have been ruled out due to cost. That’s not just Juan Soto, it’s guys like Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates.

“Jed said they expect to spend [the Cody Bellinger surplus],” Sahadev Sharma tweeted Friday. “It’s less about gutting payroll and more about the lack of ability to raise it. Maybe they’ll never spend like Dodgers and Mets, but how about being in the top 5 again?”  

The odds that the Cubs will ever compete with the outliers at the top of the payroll rankings are slim, but there is no reason they can’t come close. They’ve done nothing big since acquiring Kyle Tucker, with the futile pursuit of Scott standing as the closest thing to a possible big expenditure. Fans are starting to get restless, wondering how Hoyer is planning to shore up the pitching staff before spring training.

When you have thousands of die-hards gathered in mid-January to show support for your team, the last thing you need to be telling them is that they shouldn’t expect you to spend big on a winner. Even if that’s what’s being discussed behind closed doors, saying the quiet part out load displayed a decided lack of self-awareness by ownership. Wait, how is that different from the recent past?