I know that there are a great many Jon Lester-related things to discuss this evening, and I will get to them shortly. If you’ll forgive my absence, I was just at the Cubs’ first blogger forum, which afforded a group of alternative media folks like myself the opportunity to meet with Chicago Cubs President of Business Operations Crane Kenney for a while this afternoon. The Cubs are trying to facilitate a stronger communications relationship with the alt media community, and this was something of a “pilot project” step in that process.

For that reason, and because Kenney discussed some very salient things, I wanted to get this to you right away.

Our group met with Kenney at the Cubs’ offices, just north of Wrigley Field, in the conference room where they present the (impressive) Wrigley Field renovation/development model to prospective business partners. In case you missed some of the shots of that model:

Checking out the Wrigley renovation model. pic.twitter.com/aLV8NNMJFj — Brett Taylor (@BleacherNation) November 25, 2014

I’ll have quite a few more soon.

As we sat around that model – the thing takes up an entire conference table – Kenney, together with VP of Communications and Community Affairs Julian Green and Communications Manager Kevin Saghy, addressed us briefly about the blogger forum concept that they’re working on, and also on some obvious renovation/media rights topics. From there, it was a Q&A with Kenney, who was candid.

Among the things Kenney shared: