Cubs for Sale, but Who Cares?

by Jeff Siegel

As I write this, the Chicago Cubs have just started the 2007 baseball season, trying to hit a century without winning a World Series. But this is not the big news in Cubbie-dom.

The Cubs are going to get a new owner. The Tribune Co., which publishes newspapers, owns TV stations and has a really spiffy building on Michigan Avenue (and once numbered me among its employees), is going to sell the team as part of its effort to deliver more value to its shareholders. (Which is what business journalists write when a company has screwed up and the bosses are looking for a way to save their jobs.)

The Tribune Co. has been criticized for not spending enough money on the Cubs in the 26 years it has been in charge, but its stewardship has been so rotten it wouldn’t have made any difference. It has made dreadful baseball decisions that had nothing to do with money, whether hiring people like Jim Riggleman and Lee “The Other 15 percent” Elia to manage the team, or hiring people like Ed Lynch to be the general manager, or hiring as many of the players as it did. Derek Jeter has been a Hall of Fame shortstop for the New York Yankees for 12 seasons; in that time, the Cubs have had at least seven shortstops.

Still, it’s difficult to get too worked up at the Tribune Co.’s tenure, as pitiful as it was. It’s not like the Wrigley family did much better in its decades in charge. Like my bartender Louie says: “Life is mostly about losing. So why should we expect the Cubs to be any different?”

Which is also why I’m not going to worry too much about who the next owner will be, despite the volume of babble that will be heard trying to figure out who it should be, why some are better than others, and so forth. Bill Murray? Oprah Winfrey? Michael Jordan? Mark Cuban? I doubt any of them can play shortstop like Derek Jeter – or, sadly, will know how to hire someone to do it. That’s why, when they talk about the various curses plaguing the Cubs, there is only one curse that counts: incompetence.

For the record: The ringmaster here at iVoryTowerz asked me if I was going to do for baseball what he did during the football season, with his weekly updates and predictions. That is a bit more than my poor, ex-sportswriter’s brain can handle, but I will offer these predictions. The division winners in the American League: New York, Detroit, and Oakland. And in the National: New York, Milwaukee, and San Diego. With that and $600 million, you can probably buy the Cubs.

(Photo by CST of Normal, IL via Flickr, using a Creative Commons license.)

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