There's news out of Chicago on the potential sale of the sports world's most inept and disappointing professional franchise, the Cubs:

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban remains as interested as ever in buying the Chicago Cubs, dismissing a report that Major League Baseball might not want him as an owner.

According to a Chicago Sun-Times report that cited a baseball source, there was "zero chance" of Cuban taking over the Cubs.

The Sun-Times source said the Internet billionaire would meet with resistance in trying to get approval from Major League Baseball.

Things I know, or think I know, about Mark Cuban:  1) he went to IU; 2) he has made a gazillion dollars in the high tech world; 3) he now owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise; 4) he has spent a lot of money on amenities for the Dallas Mavericks players; 5) he has been somewhat controversial with his unusually intimate involvement in games, perceived bad calls, and interactions with fans both live and online; and 6) the Mavericks have not won an NBA title despite all the money Cuban has thrown at them.

Things I know about the Chicago Cubs:  1) they have not won a World Series Title in 100 years, and counting.

That said, do I want Mark Cuban to be the new Cubs owner?  I don’t know.  The MLB owners are private citizens, running privately held businesses, and apparently they can make whatever decision they want on whether to allow a person, group, entity, or combination thereof to take over an available MLB franchise.  I can’t begin to name the owners of all the MLB teams, but certain owners come to mind, like Steinbrenner, Selig (Yeah, I know, he’s technically the commissioner and his daughter owns the team.  Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not.  Who  knows, and who really cares?), Peter Angelos, maybe Ted Turner if he still owns the Braves (can’t remember - he may have sold the team but still hangs around).

Are the four guys I can name off the top of my head somehow in a different class than Mark Cuban?  I doubt it.  I can’t say I’d want to spend 5 minutes with any of them.  Well, maybe Steinbrenner just to be sniggering in my head thinking of Larry David’s Steinbrenner the entire time I’m listening to the real thing.

But the Cubs could do a lot worse than having an owner who’s freakishly wealthy, freakishly involved in the team's operation, and freakishly willing to try to throw money at the team to make it into a winner, and maybe even a place where winning players want to be.

I’m just saying, the past 100 seasons without a title don’t exactly recommend the approach the owners have been taking.  Of course, as I noted above, Cuban’s Mavericks haven’t managed to win a title either.  So it’s a crap shoot.  But I would love to know what the criteria are that the other MLB owners use to evaluate a potential new owner.  A really good investigative reporter would get that story for the public.  Cubs fans need to know.

Growing up as a fan of the Cubs and Bears in the 70s and 80s, I saw a lot of bad teams and awful players.  But I was fortunate enough to still be in high school and then college when da Bears put together a juggernaut team under Mike Ditka and won a Super Bowl.  An actual world championship for a Chicago team in my lifetime!  Amazing!

Of course, at the same time that Bears team was rising to prominence in the NFC, the Cubs exploded into a contender in 1984 with a team put together masterfully by Dallas Green.  Cubs fans well remember the meltdown that fall in San Diego, but it seemed going into the playoffs the Cubs had a legitimate shot to go to the World Series at last.  Sure, it would have been tough facing the Tigers that year, but anything can happen.  The sense was very real that the 1984 Cubs team was something special that might finally break through and win it all.

In 2003, the year of the Bartman incident, there seemed to be a similar vibe about the Cubs.  They looked like a team that was pretty well put together with pitching, defense and hitting.  They were a handful of outs from the World Series.  Still, it didn't happen.

Other Cubs playoff teams of the past 25 years seem, at least in retrospect, to be more like this year's model.  Good regular season clubs that fell apart in a hurry in the post-season.  They never managed to take the fans to the edge of getting to the World Series, and so the disappointment in their failing is somewhat muted.

Perhaps the 1989 squad's collapse against the Giants was a bit more painful than 1998 or the past 2 years, as the '89 team seemed to have some toughness, character and leadership that the later teams never did.  In '89 there was Sandberg, Dawson, Maddux, Sutcliffe, and a young Mark Grace playing their hardest for Don Zimmer.

The '98 team 'won' the wild card behind a steroid fueled Sammy Sosa and flamed out for Jim Riggleman.

I was actually excited when the Cubs hired Dusty Baker as manager.  While he never won a World Series, he seemed to get the most out of his teams in San Francisco, so I thought he might be the kind of guy who could somehow catch lightning in a bottle on the North Side, and he almost did in 2003.

Now having seen Lou Piniella preside over six consecutive post-season thumpings, and that the team exercised its option to pick up an additional year on Lou's contract just before the playoffs began, it's hard to see how Lou ever gets even as close to the World Series with the Cubs as Baker did.

Maybe I'll be surprised and the Cubs will find a way to again be competitive in the NL Central (ugh, how I hate all these new divisional groups), but given the way teams so often have difficulty in winning year after year, I think it's more realistic to think that injuries, disappointment, and the rise of other teams will combine to bring another season of misery to Chicago next summer.  It may even be so ugly that Piniella is no longer managing the team by the end of the year.

I can't imagine who the Cubs ownership, whoever it may be by then, would try to bring in to right the ship if that's the case.  Conventional wisdom is that baseball teams alternate between tough guys who ride their teams hard and are hated by the players and "players' managers" who make almost everyone on the roster happy and are beloved by the team.

I've lost track of where the Cubs are on this supposed cycle.  Regardless whether it's Lou or someone else who next manages to take the Cubs to the post-season, I'll be curious to see how the team is put together.  On paper, this year's squad seemed like it should have captured my heart and had me believing that, yes, after 100 years everything had finally come full circle and we were on the verge of a World Series title.

But I never believed in this team.  More to the point, I never loved this team.  There was never anyone on the team that made me think they would do anything to win a title.  The '84 squad had those kinds of players, and I loved them for it.

It's probably more my perception than anything, but with the possible exception of Mark DeRosa, I don't see any "gamers" on the current Cubs roster.  They have plenty of solid players on paper.  But none that seem to exude leadership or appear to be great teammates that you would love to have in your locker room to make a pennant run.

So we end another baseball season with that familiar, optimistic cheer:  "Go Bears!"

If the name Steve Bartman sounds only vaguely familiar to, you must not be a Cubs fan.  Let's go back to the fall of 2003, Game 6 of the NLCS, when the Cubs were a mere five outs from a trip to the World Series.  Mark Prior, at the time one of the Cubs' great young starters, was on the mound and his club had staked him to a 3-0 lead.

Then, as with all things Cubs, it all went downhill.  The most famous and memorable incident of the meltdown was the foul ball down the left field line that landed just in the seats.  Moises Alou, the Cubs left fielder, was in position to try to make a play on the ball, leaping up over the wall to reach into the first row to try to make the catch.  But instead of coming away with the ball, Alou collided with Steve Bartman, an unfortunate Cubs fan who made a terrible mistake in trying to catch the ball himself rather than get out of Alou's way.

So the Cubs didn't get an out on that play, and of course they wound up losing that game, and then the NL Championship Series in Game 7.  And Steve Bartman's life would never be the same.

To his credit.  Bartman has not changed his name to try to get away from this unfortunate incident.  He did not move away from the Chicago area to try to start over.  And now, he has turned down an offer of $25,000 to sign a photograph of the infamous Alou play from Game 6.

It's rare in today's world that someone doesn't try to cash in on whatever type of fame they may have.  Bartman could have probably done local ads that played off the incident.  He probably could write a book about his experience after Game 6.  And it's hardly surprising that some sports memorabilia dealer would try to get him to sign a photo of the play to make a few bucks.

But Bartman has refused to profit from his trip to the spotlight.  Good for him for continuing to be a regular human being and die-hard Cubs fan.  Should the unthinkable happen in my lifetime, I hope Bartman is also around to appreciate it.

The Yankees and Red Sox are the teams you usually hear about when it comes to trying to just buy a pennant or World Series.  Their payrolls are staggering, but there are certainly other teams that have the resources available to compete if that's the approach they want to take.  The Mets spend a lot of money, and I seem to recall the current Angels owner as being reputedly willing to spend big to try to win.

One team that manages to usually spend a fair amount of money but still not make its way to a World Series title is of course the Cubs.

So the latest news that the Cubs have been fined half a million dollars tells us what?  Here's the quick and dirty:

The Cubs' fine for violations related to the June draft of first-year players was a whopping $500,000, SI.com has learned.

Major League Baseball ruled that the Cubs violated a couple of baseball rules, including failing to report a signing to MLB's New York offices and putting the player on the field before receiving approval for the signing from MLB offices.

The Cubs were said by people familiar with the case to have exacerbated the situation by how they responded to MLB's concerns. MLB higherups apparently didn't believe Cubs people were completely forthcoming regarding their actions in the case when questioned about them.

I would certainly like to think that the Cubs front office is made up of sharp-eyed baseball minds who somehow made brilliant acquisitions that will help turn the team into a juggernaut over the course of the next decade.

A century of futility and a little bit of common sense makes me think it's far more likely that the front office is badly run and that if this year's team manages to win a title the most appropriate analogy for the role of the front office in all this would be to think of them as the thousand monkeys that finally produced a Shakespearean play.

 

Wise words in that title from ESPN radio host and football analyst Mike Golic in response to George Will's latest column in Newsweek on the new book Your Brain on Cubs:

Yes, rooting for the Cubs is a minority taste because it is an interminable tutorial in delayed gratification, but "there is some evidence that being in the majority (everyone loves a winner) reduces reflective thinking."

"The scientific literature," Grafman says, "suggests that fans of losing teams turn out to be better decision-makers and deal better with divergent thought, as opposed to the unreflective fans of winning teams."

I guess the opening of the baseball season is not interesting on its own, so we have to somehow dredge up the Cubs 2003 NLCS Game 6 collapse:

Should Steve Bartman be off the hook with Cubs fans? According to Moises Alou, he should be.

Alou, now with the Mets, said he wouldn't have caught the now-infamous pop foul in the 2003 National League Championship Series that hit the heel of Bartman's hand in the eighth inning of Game 6, prolonging an inning in which the Marlins later rallied for the lead. Florida went on to win the series.

Ooooohhhhhkay.  My own memory is a little different on Moises' chances, as the story notes further on:

That stands in stark contrast to Alou's reaction at the time. After the play, he jumped up and down with his arms outstretched.

After the game, he said: "I timed it perfectly, I jumped perfectly. I'm almost 100 percent that I had a clean shot to catch the ball. All of a sudden, there's a hand on my glove."

Who are you gonna believe, Moises or ..... Moises?!

As we Cubs fans begin our second century of failure and misery, we can at least chortle a little bit at the poor rubes in San Diego.  From Thursday's USA Today:

...the Padres do have a former ace up their sleeve in Mark Prior.

The ex-Chicago Cub, recovering from shoulder surgery last April, signed a one-year, $1 million deal with his hometown Padres. He missed most of the last two years and hasn't pitched a full season since 2003, when he won 18 games and led the Cubs to the playoffs. He will probably pitch in minor league rehab assignments in April and plans to be ready to pitch in the majors by late May or early June.

"He's on track with baseball activities and medically. He's making his bullpen sessions without any setbacks," manager Bud Black said.

Meanwhile, he's focused on drills, throwing off the mound and feeling confident as he increases the stress placed on his shoulder with each bullpen session. The fifth starter's job is in his sights.

If only I had a nickel for every story that projected Mark Prior's return to form and gave a timeframe for when he might be back in the pitching rotation.  Enjoy the waiting, San Diego.  I'm sure it will be any week now when Mark Prior graces the diamond with his return to pitching.

Of course, given that Prior is now a former Cub, the most likely scenario will be a mid-season return for him in San Diego, where he will have a Sutcliffean run to take the Padres to the World Series, where he and Maddux will each win a game.

I think I'm going to be sick.

Following up on yesterday's news on the potential sale of Wrigley Field so that it would be owned by a separate entity than the team ownership, we get this AP story on ESPN's web site.  Looks like my fears about the end of Wrigley were well founded:

CHICAGO -- The chief executive officer of the Tribune Company said Wednesday he won't hesitate to sell the naming rights to Wrigley Field -- even if baseball purists don't like the idea.

During an interview on CNBC, Sam Zell said despite Wrigley Field being known worldwide, he didn't get a discount because he wasn't going to use the naming rights that the field represents.

Zell said he plans to sell the Cubs and Wrigley separately and in his own time frame. He also disclosed that Major League Baseball has approved "four or six" potential ownership groups and that any one of them would be fine.

The sale of the team has been delayed by Zell's plan to sell the team and the stadium separately, and to have a state agency acquire and renovate Wrigley.

 

I hated it when they put in lights.  I hated it when the team started putting the players names on their home jerseys (and I'd still take them off the road unis).  I hated it when they put on-field advertising on the bricks behind the batters.  And I hate the prospect of renaming Wrigley Field or coming up with some bastardized name as was done with Soldier Field (and which I obviously still have never bothered, and never will bother, to learn).  With a century's worth of futility now in the books, it seems like a bad time to give the fans something else not to like about their baseball team.

From Bloomberg News:

Sam Zell, chairman of Equity Group Investments LLC, told CNBC he plans to sell the Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball team on his ``time frame.''

The real estate billionaire told the financial news network he's worked on a structure in which Wrigley Field stadium would be separated from the team.

``We think that's best for us, we think that's best for any owner, and most important of all, we think it's best for the city of Chicago,'' Zell said.

 

First, a very minor nit, I don't think I've ever seen reference to "Wrigley Field stadium," but I could be wrong.  My understanding is that it's "Wrigley Field" period, full stop.  Or, in the parlance of the faithful, just "Wrigley."

More substantively, I think what this will mean is that at some point in my lifetime the Cubs will either leave Wrigley, tear it down to make a new facility, or perform some hideous "renovation" as was done to Soldier Field.

Once you have the ownership of the baseball team itself separated from the ownership of Wrigley, the tensions between their competing interests will see to it that disaster will result in the worst possible outcome for Cub fans.

Granted, the Tribune Company already took a huge step in ruining the place when they put in permanent lights, giving us another Day that Lives in Infamy, 8/8/88, so combined ownership interests are not a guarantee that problems won't arise.  Look at New York and the upheaval of tearing down the renovated Yankee Stadium to build a new park across the street.

But a complete separation of team and stadium ownership will only lead to battles over leases, amenities, rights, etc. that will eventually end up ruining everything.  I better make plans to get my kids there this summer so they'll be able to say they saw it when...