WGN

Pleased to rid themselves of financial albatross Chicago Cubs at the end of this year, WGN-AM is poised to replace team broadcasts with even more boring programming after the station was outbid last week by CBS-owned WBBM for Cubs broadcast rights.

The Cubs announced Tuesday that they'd be leaving their long-time radio home 720 WGN-AM for a competitor, CBS-owned 780 WBBM-AM. Naturally, many fans of the team were outraged at a change they see as a break in tradition and major inconvenience.

The Cubs' long-standing association with WGN TV will most likely end after the 2014 season when the team's telecasts move to Fox Sports 1 for 1 very good reason: So no one will watch them lose their inevitable 98 games.

“Do you, um … like hockey?” one reporter asked a confused Patrick Kane. Several minutes of awkward silence followed, until somebody finally asked Kane if he remembered the streak.

“Unfortunately WGN no longer is a superstation and can’t pay us top dollar to broadcast Cubs games,” said Cubs President of Baseball Operations Crane Kenney. “So we’re going to look into partnering with a bunch of stations scattered all over the TV dial, or maybe we’ll create the Cubs Cable Network, make it available in only a few hundred thousand homes and bury it in between Animal Planet 2 and C-SPAN Romania.”

“We tried doing things the ‘right way’ for a while when Bob was here,” said Cubs owner Tom Ricketts. “But that era is over, and it didn’t win us much. So we’re going back to the old school: booze, pills and spitballs.”

In the wake of Monday’s events – during which Ryan Dempster himself cut down wild trade speculation shortly before the Cubs played in Pittsburgh – the Cubs’ front office has deemed it necessary for players to have their cell phones on them at all times. If only to prove where they are.