Cubs Mascot

[Ark]

He looks worse in person. He almost looks like a squirrel.

He definitely doesn't look like a bear. The ears are too low. They should have just blatantly copied Minnesota's mascot but made it shorter and a lighter shade. Boom

The Twins don't have two identcal mascosts? wut

[CubsFanBudMan]

In reality, the Cubs are probably overdue on this. After all, it's just another thing the neighborhood did on its own while the team slept. But I really dislike what the Ricketts are doing. It's focused on everything but the winning. And despite wh at they claim, all the sideshow stuff doesn't add up to a winner.

They are taking a page right out of the book of John McDonough and what he did with the Blackhawks.(after he left the Cubs) Get the right fans on board, kids(and parent) and older people with money. Move more games to nighttime. Create interest with those buyers and slowly move away from the drunken, afternoon Bleacher crowd. Those people don't pay the bills.

Nah, it's more like Cubs-era McDonough. "Come see the ivy, Harry Caray, the Sosa homers ... and the losing."

Blackhawks-era McDonough put games on TV, mended fences with greats and made Blackhawks games the place to be ... over Wrigley ... and winning soon after didn't hurt.

[skier14]

Check out the flex on that bat. Is it made out of bamboo or something?

Bamboo wouldn't flex.

No?

Nice! Well that's also like 30 feet long. Not sure if you're being serious or funny, but there's plenty of bats made out of bamboo - or like mine, which has a bamboo handle (since the bamboo is harder to break) and maple barrel. Also, bamboo floors are pretty hard!

BBTV is correct that a bamboo bat would not flex like that. However, what makes bamboo a good material for a baseball bat is that it's modulus of elasticity is pretty high, so it can flex and return to it's original shape without being deformed. You need to remember that bamboo is actually a grass.

[Chicageaux]

Sports channel mistakenly airs X-rated version of Cubs mascot

[The_Admiral]

They are taking a page right out of the book of John McDonough and what he did with the Blackhawks.(after he left the Cubs) Get the right fans on board, kids(and parent) and older people with money. Move more games to nighttime. Create interest with those buyers and slowly move away from the drunken, afternoon Bleacher crowd. Those people don't pay the bills.

Oh my God this is one of the dumbest things I've ever read. If the Cubs were really taking pages out of John McDonough's book, they wouldn't be in this mess, because John McDonough was actually good at running the Cubs and was smart enough to know how to market the team in spite of the losing. Why would they get away from what works? The new Cubs marketing people are past tone-deaf and into straight-up Marlee Matlin deaf. Have you seen the commercials they run? Have you seen that they have to run commercials at all? The Chicago Cubs!

They're not as openly contemptuous of their customers as the White Sox are, but god damn are they ever trying.

[CubsFanBudMan]

That's a more accurate assessment. It's a bad imitation of the Cubs "everything but winning" strategies of the past. And in many ways -- "it's a way of life" and "committed" among them -- worse.

[The_Admiral]

The biggest difference is that when McDonough ran the Cubs, he successfully sold Wrigley Field as a summertime destination. That way, win or lose, going to a Cubs game was a fun thing to do. What the Baby Geniuses have done is bitch about the quality of Wrigley Field so that the government would give them free money, which it didn't because neither Chicago nor Illinois has that money to give, and then on the baseball side went away from "win or lose" and just confirmed "lose." So really, more than anything, they're telling you not to come to the games. And so now people don't. I gotta say, one way or the other, people do what the Cubs tell them to.

But don't worry! Theo Epstein is so smart! So is Jed Hoyer! And that one other guy! And also that black guy! Please give them taxpayer money.

[TheOldRoman]

Whether or not Epstein can win a championship (and I think we all know the answer to that), I think bringing him in was the right move. For an ownership group which knew nothing about running a baseball team, they made the right move by bringing in what was thought to be one of the top baseball minds by many. I was not among those many, but I digress. Sure, they are mortgaged to the hilt and have made every mistake imaginable in how they went about getting Wrigley renovations done. Thier PR has been nightmarish. Still, the Trib never really made that kind of committment to winning until they were looking to sell the team, and even then, the GM was noted buffoon Jim Hendry. At least Ricketts didn't pull a Jerry Jones. "Credit" doesn't count for much to pissed-off fans, but I think ownership deserves at least a hint of credit for brining in people who seemed to know what they were doing (if only they'd done that on the business side). However, Theo spending so much time telling Chicago how smart he is and selling people on the idea of him having a master plan was probably the first hint that he might not be cut out for such a task.

[The_Admiral]

Yeah, I think there's been some revisionist history at work w/r/t how the Tribune ran the team. It's gotten easy to forget the Andy MacPhail "competitive within the division" years, or the bad early '90s, because, well, that was a long time ago. But they had the Dallas Green years, too, and I think they were trying their best to win then. The Trib owned the team for almost 30 years. That's a long run for an ownership group. There was good and bad in that time.

But among the bad was, at least I think, a general sense that they were half-trying and failing. They'd spend what they could until corporate told them not to spend anymore because they couldn't explain it to the shareholders. They never actively tanked the entire organization and talked about how good it was for business. I mean, remember that ultimately, the Cubs were under the programming division of the Tribune Company. They were quite literally a TV show. It would never be good business for that TV show to lose 100 games and publicly call their park a dump. I guess that's why the Cubs never lost 100 games in any season under Tribune ownership but have lost almost 400 games in four years of Ricketts ownership.

[The_Admiral]

Also, I generally think Will Leitch is a humblebragging doofus whose aw-shucks downstater-in-The-Big-City shtick just wears my ass right out, but he really, as I like to say around here, NAILED IT on this one:

http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/66607386

boldface supplied

I've met Billy Cub: I once gave him a drink of water during a particularly hot August day. (He high-fived me even though I was wearing a Rick Ankiel Cardinals jersey.) The fact he wasn't officially a member of the Cubs organization -- the fact he was just a fella in a suit -- was a large part of his charm.

This is always been a large part of Wrigley's charm. Wrigley Field is a baseball stadium that exists in a real, thriving neighborhood. It is not an antiseptic, Snyder-ized corporate zone in which you are charged $45 dollars to use a restroom with a picture of John Riggins on it. The Cubs have been a part of the community because they've been forced to be. They don't own everything in the area, so they've fit in. Some of the people across the street want to build rooftop seats to watch the games? The bars around the corner are sometimes a little rowdy? Some guy dresses up in an unauthorized bear costume and hugs people? This is what comes with being a part of a community. The Cubs are likable because they're relatable: They live there, too.

This is changing, which is what leads us to the man in the tie and in the khakis. For years, Billy Cub has been doing his thing, and other than an unfortunate incident with a substitute Billy Cub who became belligerent over not receiving a tip, it has worked out just fine. But last July, the Cubs -- specifically, the new ownership group led by the Ricketts family -- decided they could no longer abide Billy Cub. They sent a 100-page letter to Weier, demanding he cease and desist "engaging in unabated mascot activities." Weier ignored it. Then:

The next day, he said he was confronted by a Cubs executive.

"Someone came up to me, very angry, and said, 'did you not get our letter?'"

Problem was, Weier was in costume and in character at the time. And since Billy doesn't speak, he says he just stood there, gesturing and shrugging, as the executive in question got angrier.

Now that's an image: A middle-manager executive type red-faced and shaking in anger, screaming at a bear mascot who stares back at him, mute.

. . .

Now, obviously, this is a mascot for little kids and little kids only; the Cubs made a big show yesterday of making it clear Clark wouldn't be appearing on the field or on the dugout during games. (For now.) But this corporate perversity -- this boardroom representation of what mirth might look like -- is the logical extension of everything the Cubs have been doing in the Ricketts' era.

As Deadspin's Tim Marchman put it yesterday, in the Ricketts' era, the Cubs have spent most of their time "systematically eradicating everything that's even remotely attractive about them." I wrote in April about the massive changes coming to Wrigley Field, almost all of which were approved by the Chicago city council. There are massive scoreboards going up to block the views across the street. Much of the local housing is being transformed into a team-owned hotel that's connected to the park. As for that local community color? As a story about the changes put it, "[Ricketts would] like the city to crack down on street peddlers and performers, neighborhood billboards that conflict with the team's sponsors and rooftop attendance." The Cubs aren't trying to fit into the neighborhood anymore. They're trying to own it.

The Cubs will tell you they're doing all this because they need to compete, because Wrigley Field, as currently constructed, was a competitive disadvantage. This is even more disingenuous today -- when baseball teams are floating around in vats of television money -- than it was when they made it. As Jeff Passan pointed out, the Cubs have one of the five lowest payrolls in the game even though they're widely considered to be one of the most profitable franchises in the sport. And they're doing it by changing the only real reasons the Cubs have such goodwill in the first place.

If the Cubs win a World Series under the Ricketts' regime, none of this will matter. But I'm not sure that's the ultimate goal; it's just the public one. Don't worry, though: Here is Clark. His eyes may be lost, but he's right here for you, terrifying your children. All it took for him to get here was a man in a tie and khakis, screaming at another, different, less managerially acceptable bear. He is the new face of the Cubs, in pretty much every way.

Yeah, the Cubs have sold their soul and been generally disgusting to such an extent that there's almost little sense in rooting for them anymore. This isn't the Chicago Cubs team I fell in love with. This is just a sports team that sucks.

[TheOldRoman]

I am too young to speak of the Green years. The Cubs were decent in the last half of the '90s, but they didn't start really spending money until around 2007. Until maybe 2003-4, it seemed like the Cubs' MO was like that of the Sox at the time - be mediocre enough that things can come together for you to make the playoffs once every 8-10 years, and if 2-3 of our prospects happen to become superstars, we might have a chance to sustain winning or even win a championship.

With relation to recent losing, at least they committed to burning it to the ground, instead of just sticking with the Hendry patchwork. I mean, they've bungled the rebuilding so far, but at least they made an effort to break from the "hope you get lucky this year" pattern.

[CubsFanBudMan]

This isn't the Chicago Cubs team I fell in love with. This is just a sports team that sucks.

So true. None of this even addresses the STHs that got blasted by Crane Kenney. Don't like that the seats you paid $10 for in 2001 are now $31 for the marquee games? (1 of 5 price levels.) Well, "you can just scalp the best games to pay for your season tickets." Never mind that some games were selling for 19 cents. We're all just scalpers.

Don't forget they also tried to force a floor on StubHub after that fiasco because their unsold tickets at face value couldn't compete. And their six-figure STH waiting list is exhausted. I had no choice but to bail after how the new regime treated their most valuable customers.

Tone deaf. And then some.

[Anubis2051]

This isn't the Chicago Cubs team I fell in love with. This is just a sports team that sucks.

So true. None of this even addresses the STHs that got blasted by Crane Kenney. Don't like that the seats you paid $10 for in 2001 are now $31 for the marquee games? (1 of 5 price levels.) Well, "you can just scalp the best games to pay for your season tickets." Never mind that some games were selling for 19 cents. We're all just scalpers.

Don't forget they also tried to force a floor on StubHub after that fiasco because their unsold tickets at face value couldn't compete. And their six-figure STH waiting list is exhausted. I had no choice but to bail after how the new regime treated their most valuable customers.

Tone deaf. And then some.

Yankees bailed on stubhub over the floor issue

[CS85]

This isn't the Chicago Cubs team I fell in love with. This is just a sports team that sucks.

I couldn't agree more. I supported the team giving the organization an enema after the Hendry era, but something about this stupid mascot serves as the exclamation point. Is it the totally unnecessary nature of it's existence? Is it the fact that more time was probably spent on "Clark" than actively attempting to improve the 2014 roster?

The Cubs used to be able to compensate for their losing ways with some shred of charm and community. Now there's nothing but this empty husk bleaching any flavor out of the city to paint the colors a little brighter and build the Wrigley walls a little higher; anything to convince the paying customers to ignore the horrifying product on the field with a future as bleak as the look in this lifeless mascot's eyes.

[The_Admiral]

If they spent 10 minutes on Clark, they spent more time on Clark, because they have no intention to improve the roster. They have to keep being bad as part of The Plan. This will be a fifth straight year of flat-out sucking. The Plan can blow me. Looking up their season-by-season records, I don't think they've even had a stretch of baseball as awful as 2010-pres. Even in the midst of their worst stretches, they'd still derp their way into winning like 83 games one year out of four or five. Like I said, most of those were just teams that happened to be bad. These teams are bad by design, and that's pathetic.

I was watching the local news today and they were talking about Clark, and how this addresses a need for "family-friendly entertainment" at Cubs games. You know what's fun for the whole family? WATCHING THE F-CKING BASEBALL GAME YOU JUST BOUGHT TICKETS TO, YOU STUPID HOLES OF ASS.

[CS85]

Denethor = Cubs organization

Faramir = Cubs fans

Gandalf = Hope

Pippin = Kerry Wood

[CubsFanBudMan]

It feels good to let it out. Glad to see it's not just me. I've stayed through many rough years, but I'm just not in the same place anymore. Even if The Plan works as so many somehow thought was destined the moment Thesus walked on water on the cover of the Sun-Times, I'm not sure I'm in.

It's not hyperbole... something is missing. It almost feels as if I'd be jumping on a bandwagon that I never knowingly jumped off of. And I'd been on since 1983.

I never understood how an owner could affect fandom... until now. Guess I was a Tribune guy, despite the faults admiral outlined above.

[Buster]

The backwards cap is so Chicago.

This is bad. He'd work well for a Little League team, but not professional. Then again, it's the Cubs.

He has the Spongebob grin going on, eyes and all.

[Buster]

And there's this.

http://deadspin.com/contest-do-something-horrible-to-the-cubs-new-perver-1500558877

(was on original link in post #1)

[MadmanLA]

It feels good to let it out. Glad to see it's not just me. I've stayed through many rough years, but I'm just not in the same place anymore. Even if The Plan works as so many somehow thought was destined the moment Thesus walked on water on the cover of the Sun-Times, I'm not sure I'm in.

It's not hyperbole... something is missing. It almost feels as if I'd be jumping on a bandwagon that I never knowingly jumped off of. And I'd been on since 1983.

I never understood how an owner could affect fandom... until now. Guess I was a Tribune guy, despite the faults admiral outlined above.

Add to the fact that this is possibly the last year of the Cubs on WGN (TV and perhaps radio too). The Rickettses are seeing what the Angels, Rangers, Mariners, Dodgers, and most recently the Philies are getting in new local TV rights deals (plus those aforementioned also got an ownership stake in the networks that carry their games), and want their own network. Problem is, the Cubbies have five more years left in their Comcast SportsNet deal (plus 20 percent ownership), so in the interim, the over-the-air games that have been on WGN-TV for generations may move to Fox's two Chicago stations (and perhaps could lead to Fox Sports Net coming back to Chicago, as the Cubs' primary TV home).