For Cubs, it's officially 'time to compete'
Cubs presidents took center stage Friday.
In fact, they took the only stage during a long presentation to season-ticketholders downtown at the Oriental Theatre.
The gist from baseball president Theo Epstein and business president Crane Kenney: The future's so bright you have to wear shades.
Each Cubs honcho delivered lengthy monologues to ticketholders, with video presentations mixed in to break up the monotones. Epstein repeated what he told us media members at the end of the season.
"It's time to compete," he told the crowd. "We're ready to compete. We were the youngest team in the league. We battled all season long … From July 28 on, we were 31-28. We finished strong, the last couple months over .500.
"I'm the first to admit we haven't done anything yet. We haven't proven anything yet.
"I believe what we've established is that we have enough talent now in this organization to compete. When you're ready to compete, you can set your sights high."
Epstein added the Cubs have "tremendous flexibility" when it comes to dollars for player payroll. Behind the scenes - literally as he said backstage when he met with reporters after the fan session - Epstein repeated that the Cubs may not land the pitching targets they need this winter and that the process is a long-term one even as he acknowledged the need to add "impact" pitching.
"We haven't reached that next level yet, where the payroll is going to significantly increase," he said. "The TV deal is really the magic bullet there, the paradigm shifter that's going to put us on a whole new level.
"The improvements to Wrigley over time will certainly move the needle. For right now, we have all the payroll flexibility we need at this moment for 2015.
"We didn't spent all of our 2014 dollars. We can apply some of that to 2015 … The payroll flexibility really isn't an issue for us in 2015."
The Cubs' cable-TV deal with Comcast runs through 2019, and Kenney said they're in "extra innings" with negotiating a shorter-term deal for over-the-air rights, which WGN has held since the late 1940s. The Cubs may re-up with WGN, or they may go with another outlet. But they figure the big payday is coming by 2020.
"We're free agents for our 70 games that aired on WGN and WCIU this year," Kenney said. "We have a wonderful long-term relationship with WGN television. The sports media marketplace is extremely robust.
"We're fortunate that a number of potential partners have emerged. All are interested in long-term relationships spanning 15 to 30 years. Some of those long-term discussions would also include our games next year even before our Comcast agreement ends in 2019.
"All I can say is that we know what's at stake here, and we're not going to short-arm the negotiations. We're very confident we're going to have a very good outcome on the television deal."
Back on the field, Epstein talked glowingly of new hitting coach John Mallee, hired this week to replace Bill Mueller, who resigned.
"We actually hired him a couple years ago to be our minor-league hitting coordinator," Epstein said of Mallee. "We were disappointed four days later; he joined Bo Porter's staff to be major-league hitting coach for the Astros.
"John's got a great reputation. He's done this job and done it well. He's worked with a lot of young hitters and gotten results. He's a knowledgeable, energetic, passionate true worker and will fit in with the rest of our staff and hopefully create some stability with our hitting-coach position."
bmiles@dailyherald.com