Marquee is pretty well screwed now

Last week included the surprise arrival of Sammy Sosa visiting spring training instructor. It amazes me how bad The Garbage Family That Owns The Cubs™ are at all of this. Their biggest fear, clearly, in embracing Sammy when they first bought the team was having him around a lot. And then they shun him for 15 years, hold all the cards, can dictate how much he gets to interact with fans and players and just let him in to do everything everybody else does.

I think the surprise they got was when Sammy came to the Convention just how revered he is by their current players. In their minds, Sammy's the selfish cheater who besmirched the proud brand of mediocrity the Cubs have stood for mostly every season since the 1940s. But to their players he's the homer socking superstar that they either watched when they grew up or for the younger ones, he's who they watched YouTube highlights of smashing 500 foot dingers.

Sammy got to spend a week imparting his wisdom on players, which includes keeping your weight back and letting the ball travel so you can smoke the shit out of it ("I like to say I used to choke up, but you can't hit the TV hut in center field with your hands up the bat"), always ignoring the cutoff man ("they're just there to help you line up your throws, buddy"), finding the cameras after you homer ("the red light doesn't come on for guys who hit grounders to the right side with a man on second") and "spring training starts when I say it does."

Anyway, he's here now, and they're getting the Full Sammy. I'm enjoying it because I still like the guy and I know how much it pains the Garbage Family to have to do it.

But they have real problems to worry about. According to Jeff Agrest, Comcast has told the Cubs that their middling TV network is going to be moved from the basic programming tier to the Sports and Entertainment Tier. For the cable company it's a no-brainer. Regional Sports Networks are not what they used to be as far as the interest they draw from subscribers. You can't just foist them on every subscriber whether they ever want to watch it or not. So instead, you move it to a package that dopes like me pay extra for.

What's the harm to the Cubs? Marquee will still be on Comcast, which is the dominant provider in the Chicago metro area. Well, it's significant.

Under their current agreement the Cubs get a set fee (likely around $4) every month from everybody who has a Comcast subscription plan that they are on. Right now, that's every Comcast subscriber. When they move to the sports tier they will still get a monthly fee (which might actually be more than $4) from every Comcast subscriber who has a subscription plan that they are on, but that will be far fewer subscribers. According to Tom Loxas on our podcast last Thursday, our good friend Dave Kaplan and human hemorrhoid Gordon Wittenmyer on their podcast (don't you love me sourcing something from a podcast that mentioned something from another podcast?) said that will likely mean the Cubs TV revenue will drop by 40%.

OK, well just jack the price of beer bats up by another $5 and you'll be fine.

The Cubs really had no leverage. If they refused to agree to the tier change, Comcast would have just dropped them altogether. As much as Crane and his stooges think they can sell monthly streaming packages to Marquee on their own for $20, they clearly were not that confident that they could sell enough to impacted Comcast customers to risk it. The More Sports and Entertainment Package costs $9.95 a month on Comcast and in addition to Marquee you get NFL Network, NFL Red Zone, CBS Sports Network, Big Ten Network and for some reason Turner Classic Movies and the Military History Channel (those are the "entertainment" part of the package, I guess.) Buying a streaming package directly from Marquee costs twice as much every month. And there's still nothing other than the actual game broadcasts worth wasting your time with on Marquee.

This move might be good news for the other RSN in town, CHSN, which is still not on Comcast at all. I'm sure they didn't want to be on the sports tier while Marquee was on the basic tier, but now they won't look like schmucks if they agree to go there. Rights fees will still be a big issue, because even with three teams (White Sox, Blackhawks, Bulls), CHSN is unlikely to be able to get as much per month as Marquee.

And I can tell you, as someone who went to the trouble of re-hooking up my freakin' antenna so I could get CHSN, I rarely ever bother to watch it. It is literally just two extra remote control button pushes to get to, but it might as well be 1,000. I just don't bother.

I guess the fact that all three teams suck ass has something to do with that.

Sahadev had a (mostly) interesting feature over the weekend on Cubs' starting pitcher and Bat Boy lookalike Matthew Boyd (Bat Boyd). Boyd had zero arm problems through his first eight seasons in the big leagues. But after giving up an AL leading 39 homers (which is a fucking ton) in 2019 he went to Driveline where their dubious science was used to help him develop a changeup. It worked great, in 2020 he only gave up 15 homers. Which also led the American League...because it was only a 60 game season. And then, he blew out his elbow and has made just 23 total starts in his last three seasons.

Boyd has since scrapped the change and feels like he has his old fastball back. Which is great except for this.

Cool. And what do Nola, Shōta and Peralta have in common (other than being successful big league starters)? Last year they ranked first (Nola, 30), fifth (Shōta, 27) and sixth (Peralta, 26) in home runs allowed.

If you sit in the bleachers this summer, bring a glove. And a baloney sandwich wrapped in wax paper for Al.

I set up a mailbag for you, the home reader to send in your burning questions--but not questions about burning, because I am not legally allowed to write prescriptions for antibiotics. And a few have rolled in. Let's start with this one from Intrepid Reader Carlos R.

In a way, it's impressively depressing the variety of crimes these guys have piled up. And it spans two ownership groups and now four different front offices. And that's without including Dan Serafini allegedly killing his father-in-law and shooting his mother-in-law.

If you want to go way back, a guy who played for them in 1920, Ted Turner (not the one who owned the Barves and was married to Jane Fonda), enjoyed breaking into people's homes and breaking out of prison--his dad was called Turkey Bob Turner because his hobby was being arrested for stealing poultry. Fun family.

In more recent times, Cubs minor leaguers have been the ones facing indictment (and not just for not being able to hit a fastball). Josefrailin Alcantara was arrested for allegedly murdering a man in the Dominican Republic and Jesus Camargo-C0rrales got busted with 21 pounds of meth in his team-issued duffel bag. Twenty-one pounds?

And sometimes the Cubs were the victims of crimes. Roy Hobbs getting shot in The Natural was based on Billy Jurges getting shot by an ex-girlfriend in 1932, and then 15 years later an ex-Cub, Eddie Waitkus, got shot by an ex-lover (who he had begun dating when he was a Cub).

I think the four that really stand out in your list do so for two different reasons. While the worst of what Milton Bradley did came after he left the Cubs, he already had a very checkered history when they acquired him, and Aroldis Chapman had just been accused of domestic violence and shooting up his garage the winter before he joined the Cubs. Actually, it's the reason he was available. The Dodgers were on the verge of trading for him from the Reds when the accusations came to light and they backed out. So he was later traded to the Yankees. The Yankees fell out of the playoff race and figured (correctly) that they could trade him and re-sign him that offseason. I think Theo figured that the Yankees had already eaten all the shit for trading for Aroldis after the domestic incident so "how bad could it be?" And then he found out quickly it could still be bad. In both instances the Cubs acquired a known scumbag.

The other two would be Starlin and Russell who faced their accusations while they were already Cubs and the Cubs didn't do much about it. Starlin never faced any punishment from the team and the Cubs deferred to the league who eventually gave Addison a 40-game suspension while he was already injured. And in both cases the Cubs re-signed the players when they could have just let them go.

I don't know if it's better or worse that the Cubs do seem to take past behavior into account and then acquire the guys anyway? Like when they braced for the backlash and traded for Daniel Murphy, or when they traded for Aroldis. You basically are telling your fans, "We know this is a bad guy, but you'll be fine with it once you see him play!"

I don't think teams need to made up of choir boys, but there has to be a limit to the kind of shit you're willing to put up with. Like it's fine that Ian Happ's worst crimes are that he sells mediocre coffee, has a boring podcast and is an overrated fielder. It would not be fine if we found out he has those other two guys from his podcast chained to the furnace in his basement. Though, it would explain a lot.

In short (too late for that, I guess) I don't think the Cubs' standards for looking the other way are less than most other teams, but they certainly aren't better.

Hell, just look at their old Wrigley Field tenants. Sam Hurd can mock the value of the drugs Loaiza and Camargo-Corrales got charged with trafficking. And like Sergio Mitre, do not Google Barkevious Mingo's name.