Cubs exec Crane Kenney shares MLB business insights with Joliet Chamber

Chicago Cubs President of Business Operations Crane Kenney on Tuesday gave a Joliet audience a look at what it’s like in top management at a Major League Baseball team.

Kenney was the featured speaker at a Joliet Region Chamber of Commerce luncheon celebrating the organization’s 110th Anniversary.

Interviewed by Chicago sports journalist David Kaplan in a casual give-and-take format in front of a chamber audience that filled the banquet room at the Renaissance Center in downtown Joliet, Kenney provided insight into:

• Why “playoff baseball is no fun” for top team management in the executive suite at the games

• How the Cubs came close to playing their 2016 World Series season somewhere other than Wrigley Field

• The pains the Cubs took when updating Wrigley Field to avoid a “New Coke” disaster

Kenney, an executive with the Cubs since 1993, began his remarks noting that the baseball team and the chamber have something in common this year as the Cubs celebrate the 110th anniversary of Wrigley Field.

“It doesn’t happen without a lot of people putting a lot of effort behind it,” he said.

Kenney later talked about the challenge the Cubs faced in modernizing Wrigley Field after concrete began to fall in 2004 and the ballpark appeared to be “past its useful life.”

He said he was mindful of Coca-Cola’s disastrous effort to introduce “New Coke” in the 1980s, which the company quickly abandoned because of a customer backlash, as he looked into changes for Wrigley Field.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to go to every iconic venue that’s still operating,’” Kenney said. “‘I’m going to find out what works and what doesn’t work.’”

He and others in the Cubs organization went to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, Augusta National Golf Course in Geogia, Fenway Park in Boston and other classic sports arenas to learn what they did when modernizing venues that were attractions in large part because of their historic appeal.

Once the Cubs had a plan, the team still faced the challenge of how to make major renovations at a baseball stadium that was in use for most of the construction season.

“We looked at playing outside of Wrigley Field for one season,” Kenney said.

The Cubs marked 2016 as the year the team would play somewhere other than Wrigley Field for the first time in more than 100 years.

“At the last moment I lost my nerve,” Kenney said, adding that he worried that moving the team to another stadium for even one year would take too much of a toll on fan loyalty. Of course, as he said, “2016 turned out to be major.”

The Cubs in 2016 won the World Series, the first time for the team since 1908 and an achievement that in itself was iconic in baseball history.

Winning the World Series was the greatest experience of his life, Kenney said.

But he provided some insight into what it’s like in the executive suite where top management and team owners often sit when watching playoff and World Series games.

“There’s nothing fun about playoff baseball – nothing at all,” he said.

He described how his wife joined him in the suite for one playoff game and left. When he later asked why, Kenney said, he heard from her.

“‘Oh my god, everyone was having a stroke,’” Kenney said, paraphrasing his wife. “‘It was the most horrible experience I ever had.’”

Kenney described how his entire family, including his children, were reluctant to join him in the executive suite for the game in Cleveland in which the Cubs won the World Series because of the tension among the executive staff.

But they did, he said.

And the chamber audience broke into applause after Kenney said, “They stayed to see it.”

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