The Chicago Cubs are professional major league baseball team. They play on Chicago's North Side. They are in the National League's central division. The Chicago Cubs are owned by the Tribune Company and managed by Lou Piniella. John McDonough and Jim Hendry are the team's president and general manager, respectively.



There are actually two major league teams in Chicago, Illinois. In addition to the Chicago Cubs, there is also the Chicago White Sox, who play in the American League. Both the Cubs and the White Sox are charter members of their leagues. They have also both won championships for their leagues, with the Cubs scoring theirs in 1876, to be followed a quarter of the century later by the White Sox. They were each referred to as the ?White Stockings? when winning their first championships.

The Cubs were once owned by the Wrigley family, famous for manufacturing chewing gum. One eccentric deed reputedly orchestrated by P.K. Wrigley, who owned the team during the Great Depression, was the hiring of a man to put an ?evil eye? hex on opposing players for an entire season. The procedure allegedly failed, although the man was paid several thousand dollars.

Another unusual maneuver by Wrigley, this one orchestrated many years later, was the institutionalization of a coach rotation system among the team and its minor leagues and farm system. This was tried out during the 1961 and 1962 seasons, but failed to have any noticeable effect on the team's performance, as the Cubs lost more games than they won during that period.

Al Goldis, the team's player development chief, once instituted a strange program of his own, requiring the players to practice their stance, coordination, and swing on top of a twenty-five rubber tires and a stack of two by fours.

Tragedy struck the team in 1932. Violet Valli, a femme fatale, was known to be suicidal and psychotic. She walked in to the apartment of Billy Jurges, who was the Cubs? shortstop, and shot him in the course of a confrontation. This even inspired Bernard Malamud to write the novel The Natural.