Tom Ricketts Family, Owners of the Chicago Cubs

Tom Ricketts Family

After a long and well publicized battle to become owners of the Chicago Cubs, Tom Ricketts and his family took over the ownership at the end of the 2009 season. As the new owners, they took over a team and a franchise stuck in neutral, and in the view of many, moving backwards. Just getting started in their tenure, it's impossible to see how it will turn out, but with their strong fandom for the Cubs and their passion for the team, it looks to be a good match in the making.

Tom Ricketts and his family, worth over $1 billion according to Forbes, took over ownership of the Cubs on October 27, 2009. Tom is the chairman of the organization, and as such, is in charge of all operations, although officially, his three siblings Peter, Laura and Todd, as well as his parents, are all in the ownership group. The Ricketts own 95% of the Chicago Cubs and of Wrigley Field, while the Tribune Company retained a 5% ownership stake. Additionally, the Rickets own 20% of Comcast SportsNet Chicago.

The bid to buy the Cubs from the Tribune Organization was worth a reported $900 million. The deal was approved unanimously by the other 29 teams in the league and by commissioner Bud Selig. According to Forbes, of the $900 million spent on the purchase, about $642 million represents the cost of the actual franchise itself, as opposed to other assets and features included. When Tom Ricketts and his family won, it ended a two year ordeal, in which many potential owners and suitors rose up, including a group led by Dallas Mavericks owner Marc Cuban.

J. Joseph Ricketts

The father of Tom Ricketts, J. Joseph Ricketts, is the founder of Ameritrade. That's of course the huge online broker now known as TD Ameritrade, one of the largest firms in the United States. Tom himself is now one of the directors of that organization. However, he is also the CEO of Incapital LLC, which is a Chicago investment bank that deals with corporate bonds for retail investors.

Clearly, the family brings a strong sense of investment and successful business navigation into their ownership of the Cubs, which is important as the franchise continues to seek new ways of creating revenue streams and putting a successful product onto the field. Ricketts has already vowed to keep the tradition of the Cubs intact, along with the restoration and maintenance of Wrigley Field, as opposed to making things too corporate centered, or changing things up to be overly modern and steered away from tradition.

Many owners in professional sports are not necessarily huge sports fans. Or, perhaps more accurately, they are not necessarily huge fans of the teams that they bought into. Instead ,they are a fan of the game and the sport, and seized an opportunity to own any potentially valuable franchise. It's simply not always possible that the franchise you grew up rooting for is available on the market, and that you'll be in a position to buy.

But that's not the case for the Chicago Cubs and new owner Tom Ricketts, and that's something that the fans, players and rest of the organization can really get behind. After all, everyone has seen the chaos with the Los Angeles Dodgers, as their ownership group feuded, destroyed some of the image of the brand and the team, and on down the line. It takes fans with deep ties to the team and the sport to really understand what an organization needs, the way they need to move forward and present themselves, and so forth.

Tom Ricketts

Tom Ricketts has said that he has been a fan of the Chicago Cubs at least since he was 18 years old. That's when he moved to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago, where he received first a bachelors degree, and then an MBA. Apparently he lived very close to Wrigley Field for a time with his brother Pete, and even more strikingly, he met his wife Cecilia in the bleachers of Wrigley during a game.

As mentioned, you never know how the marriage between an owner and a franchise and its fans is going to work out until years and years into the endeavor. So far, Tom Ricketts and his family have been off to a strong start. One can only hope that their deep loyalties and rooting interests with the Cubs will eventually lead to on the field success for a franchise long since starved of a championship.

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