Tom Ricketts may not have come right out and shared the Cubs’ payroll target when he made the media rounds Wednesday, but he left little doubt about the greater strategy for 2020 and beyond. Behind the delicious irony of the chairman saying “you can’t really buy teams” just days after meeting with the IRS to answer questions about his family’s purchase of the Cubs from the Tribune company was a dose of reality about how he wants to operate moving forward.
The Cubs had one of the highest payrolls in baseball this past season, an estimated $240 million expenditure that was greater than any postseason participants.