ESPN.com Hall of Fame writer Peter Gammons recently blogged about the impending sale of the Chicago Cubs to Tom Ricketts. The relevant portion for Brewer faithful:

Meanwhile, Cubs CEO Crane Kenney pushes ahead to try to bring the team into the 21st century. The Cubs have taken control of the rooftop viewers. They are opening their first restaurant, with plans for a hotel and other businesses in the Wrigley neighborhood. Their regional sports network soon will be up and running. The Cubs have been a $200 million business that should be closer to $300 million, especially considering the fact that they, the Yankees and the Red Sox are the sport's three national franchises; the eight largest crowds in the Cactus League this spring have been with the Cubs playing.

So when Ricketts takes over -- likely before Memorial Day -- it will be interesting to see whether the Cubs can take on a couple of contracts from one of the teams expected to be affected by the recession. There still seems to be a feeling they will be able to take on Jake Peavy's $63 million obligation if they can satisfy Padres GM Kevin Towers with a gaggle of prospects.

Bud Selig has often made sure that sales of teams are not approved coming into an off-season because he is worried about "new owner syndrome" where they feel the need to dump a bunch of cash to prove something to the fans. As Gammons mentions, though, there are likely to be teams looking to shed payroll this year and Ricketts may very well allow Hendry to go nuts and take on payroll. The short term implications for this season are fairly obvious. The Brewers are still probably going to have to be very budget conscious while making moves at the deadline, but the Cubs almost certainly will not and that probably gives them a leg up in the race before the season even starts. 

Long term, this could be, in many ways, a "game changer" in the NL central if the Cubs do in fact start producing revenue at this level. The Cubs are a team on the old side of the age curve. Their best players, with the notable exceptions of Carlos Marmol and Geovany Soto, are all in or past their primes right now. Derek Lee, Aramis Ramirez and Alfonso Soriano have all probably had their best years already and Carlos Zambrano, Ryan Dempster and Ted Lilly also aren't getting any younger. Those players all have sizable contracts that carry them through and past their respective primes.  The team will then have to decide what they want to do with the players as those contracts expire. Will they take the Yankees big budget approach and resign most of them knowing that they won't be able to fully live up to the money or will they be more cautious, Red Sox style and allow many to walk while only retaining a few key players?

Either way, the key is still going to be how the Cubs do developing players on their own heading forward. Currently, their farm system is not very highly rated. They are thin on top flight positional talent behind 3B Josh Vitters, and their pitching is young and interesting but lacking any advanced star potential. They would be well served to take a good chunk of money this summer (and the next few years) and plow it into the draft and the international market in the hope that they will have a new wave of prospects ready around the time that they have to decide on keeping the older players or letting them go. If they do commit themselves to becoming a "player development machine" using the same strategies that Boston and, to a lesser extent the Yankees, have used, they can probably become the kind of team that makes the buy-in for competing in the division they are in 90 wins.

If the Cubs do become an NL central version of the Yanks/Sox, the Brewers' task will become a more difficult one. Sneaking into the playoffs with 86 wins is probably off the table as a possibility, and there will be years where 92 or 93 wins won't be enough to snag the division or the wild card. If this does happen, Milwaukee management will probably want to refocus their overall strategy to put a bit more emphasis on the "big year" and accept more down "rebuilding" years as the price of doing business in a tougher division. This all hinges on the Cubs ability to parlay increased resources into a more productive farm system and a more stable major league future.