Ricketts’ youngest brother, Todd, was featured on the CBS program “Undercover Boss.”

I hope they made him clean a piss trough.

And I hope it featured a heart-breaking story about Jim Hendry's lifelong dream to be a rodeo clown and so the Cubs are going to pay for him to live his dream for the next several years.

I'll never understand how the Braves parlayed their national cable TV reach into continual success during the 90's while the Cubs, with similar potential, pissed it away in a series of fourth place finishes. I feel sorry for fans of this team.

I'll never understand how the Braves parlayed their national cable TV reach into continual success during the 90's

The Braves had the same national cable TV reach in the 80s, and it didn't help them then.

The Braves had the same national cable TV reach in the 80s, and it didn't help them then.

So did the Cubs! And they still sucked! I'm not bashing any fans of the team, but man, it sure looks to me like Cubs management blew some huge advantages. Hell, here's a great parallel: the Braves in 1993 sign Greg Maddux, formerly of the Cubs, who replace him with...Jose Guzman. Greg Maddux wins the next three Cy Young awards, and goes on to be a pretty good pitcher. Jose Guzman...doesn't.

Basically what happened was the Braves got KC's Schuerholz while the Cubs got the Twins' MacPhail.

Well, that and Turner supported Bobby Cox when he was a GM while the Cubs dumped Dallas Green.

Dallas was putting the Cubs on the right path but unfortunately between collusion and the Cubs's brass wishing to fit in and not spend money all of the hard work Dallas put into the Cubs in the early 80's was thrown away by the end of the 80's and into the 90's.

The Cubs could have been a pretty darn good team in the 90's.

God only knows why (or if) it was true but back when MLB was first looking at making teams like the Cubs and Braves share their "national" revenues, the Cubs said they shouldn't have to because they were only getting paid for a regional broadcast and WGN was charging only regional ad rates. Given the ads you saw on WGN, the latter (except maybe for Bud and a couple of others) might have been true.

It was certainly true (and was up to at least a few years ago) that the Cubs-WGN contract was seriously underpriced. Which is to say, they wanted as much of the revenue as possible on the WGN side which kept it away from MLB and helped fuel the Trib's plans for global domination.

I don't know if it's still true but a few years ago, WGN was still paying more for 40 Sox games than they were for 80 Cubs games (or whatever the relevant numbers were).

Given the ads you saw on WGN, the latter (except maybe for Bud and a couple of others) might have been true.

Yeah, I grew up in Florida and I remember all the Sport Mart and Unocal 76 ads, places we didn't have there. Later there were a lot of Culvers ads - I wondered what the hell a "frozen custard butterburger" was. I had images of a scoop of custard on the burger and thought that just sounded disgusting.