$900M Sale of the Chicago Cubs Completed....Kinda, Almost.

The Game Room
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According to the Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times and ESPN the sale of the Chicago Cubs by the Tribune Company to a group headed up by the Ricketts family, founders of Ameritrade, is almost complete.

The deal, over 2 years in the making, is not officially completed yet. MLB still has to approve the deal and some of the finer details regarding the ownership percentages of WGN need to be hammered out. Also, with the Tribune Company in Chapter 11 a judge need to approve the deal.

The deal includes Wrigley Field.

Supposedly the Ricketts are lifelong Cubs fans and will be running the team that way. I’m skeptical of this, especially with a family founded on investment banking, and they are a disappointing alternative to once interested Mark Cuban. The Ricketts had to shake the cup for investors (including Hollywood celebrities with Chicago roots) in order to scrounge up some of the capital needed which scares the crap out of me. I don’t want the Cubs to end up operating on a tight budget.

Getting the Cubs out of the hands of the Tribune Company seems like a good thing. For years and years they were content to pocket millions while the faithful (and drunk) turned out to every game at Wrigley Field to watch a losing and often boring team. That said, in the last decade or so this criticism seems silly. They’ve fielded very competitive and very well paid teams. Their management has generally been very good and they’ve always been players when big name free agents are on the market. In the recent years when the eventual sale was announced and the company in Chapter 11 they still made big deals to acquire Soriano, Harden, Fukudome, Lilly, Bradley and several other lesser moves to bring in veteran role players like DeRosa, Johnson, Simon, Heilman, Marquis and Edmonds. They all weren’t successful, but it’s tough to accuse the Tribune company of being cheap or lazy.

Anyways, the story been around for a long time but if it’s close to official I figure it’s worth discussing.

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And now Sam Zell decided to dick around some more to milk a couple extra bucks out of the buyer.

If he just wanted a bidding war he should have done that from the outset. I’m sure Cuban would have been thrilled with the proposition.

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The Tribune and the LA Times may be doing so badly that Zell may have decided to turn it into a bidding war, who knows?

The Rickett’s may have chosen “to pass the cup” rather than have been forced to, I might add. Mark Attanasio did the same thing when he bought the Milwaukee Brewers a couple of years ago. He has the large majority of stock, and so all the power, but found there were a few deep-pocket folks who liked the idea of being minority owners in the club, which made the whole deal a little easier for him. In that case, why not?

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Anyone think there will be naming rights sold at Wrigley Field?

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We’ll probably never know how much “have to” there was but through everything I’ve read about the selling process and the bid process, the Ricketts were always painted as a longshot because of their comparatively limited financial resources. Needless to say, the deal looks to be a stretch for them, if that’s false it might not matter since appearances matter so much in sports media.