The Chicago Cubs and Sinclair Broadcast Group today announced a joint venture to own and run a Chicago-based regional sports network that will be the exclusive local TV home for the baseball team's live games beginning in 2020.

The team's Ricketts family owners have said for months that they were working on the new network, and earlier reports pointed to Hunt Valley, Md.-based Sinclair as its likely partner. The newly formed Marquee Sports Network will be based in Chicago, the companies said today in a statement.

In addition to being the network for all Cubs games, including spring training, the channel will have off-season feature content focused on the team and its players, the team told fans at its convention this year. Today it also said the network will have "other local sports programming" but didn't provide any details on what that might entail.

"Providing an enhanced experience for our fans is at the heart of everything we do. We are excited to better serve our fans with expanded and exclusive programming showcasing our remarkable players, beloved ballpark and storied past," Crane Kenney, the Cubs' president of business operations, said in a statement. "Our dedicated 'Cubs-centric' network will carry all available Cubs games and feature uncompromising, in-depth and behind-the-scenes coverage."

In forming the new channel, the Cubs are breaking up with their current Bulls, Blackhawks and White Sox partners in the NBC Sports Chicago regional sports channel, wagering the team will earn more ad and cable or satellite subscription money on its own, rather than splitting it with the three less popular Chicago teams.

The Cubs and Sinclair didn't announce any details of their financial arrangement today or disclose what access to the new channel's content might cost fans.

While some Cubs games have longed aired over local broadcast stations, most notably WGN-TV/Channel 9, it's not likely that will be the case anymore. Sinclair owns, operates or provides services for 191 TV stations in 89 markets, but not in the Chicago area, so the new Cubs network will still presumably have to negotiate agreements with cable and satellite stations, such as Comcast, to carry the team's programming. Such talks have sometimes turned testy for other teams that formed their own networks, leading to less availability of the games at times or outright outages in some regions.

Sinclair had been in discussions to acquire WGN owner Tribune Media, part of the storied Chicago media company that previously owned the Cubs, but that deal fell apart last year amid a Justice Department antitrust review. The merger plan had come under pressure from opponents who feared that Sinclair would have leeway to spread its conservative brand of broadcasting content to a much larger network of TV stations.

Recently, the Ricketts owners have been grappling with their own politically tinged publicity problems related to racist emails passed by their conservative family patriarch, Joe Ricketts. His son, Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts, called the emails "racially insensitive" and tried to distance the team from his father.

