During his session today at 2020 Cubs Convention, club President of Business Operations Crane Kenney said he feared no boos; not for Marquee Network, nor anything else. Kenney told the assembled crowd he’s been booed before, for several things, including the jumbotron and the team mascot Clark.

The latter reference is poignant as the pants-less but friendly and inviting cartoonish bear was pretty much the headline story of Cubs Convention 2014. Why? Because he was a new addition to the club in a winter when the team made no real new additions to the player roster. The team was coming off a bad season (66-96) and moving towards the next one in which they were projected to be bad (they were, 73-89) again.

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Chicago Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts, along with his sister Laura, were the first guests to come on stage for Ryan Dempster’s session at the 35th annual Cubs Convention Friday night, an endeavor that appears in the form of a late night talk show.

Ricketts’ intro and exit music was, wait for it, “Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People.” You know this classic 1970s soul tune by its very familiar refrain: “Iiiiiiiiiiiiii am every-day people!” Yes, billionaires! So like us! We can relate to having a family business……..which Charles Schwab buys for $26 billion!

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The ticket sales agents of the Chicago Cubs seem to be more aggressive than usual this offseason. It could be that the franchise is just going more full on Glengarry Glen Ross in their sales tactics for 2020, or it could be that they’re not hitting their quotas and thus have to be overly aggressive.

It’s probably the latter, given the off-the-record conversations we’ve had with numerous Chicago Cubs season ticket holders and perennial purchasers of game tickets. Commons sense tells you that if salesmen and saleswomen are calling you more often than they usually do, well, they’re obviously trying to keep busy because they are NOT occupied by taking and processing orders.

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As Nathaniel Hawthorne famously said: “time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” It was just three years ago that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series and in doing so provided one of the most iconic moments in sports history.

Now their championship window is in danger of closing shut, and that closure could be here before you know it, unless they have a a lot of major victories this offseason. The Cubs are coming off a year in which they didn’t even make the postseason, and that’s on the heels of a season in which they couldn’t do any better than the one-off Wild Card play-in.

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