Tense time at Wrigley
SUNDAY STEW | Zell's prospective purchase of Tribune Co. and its properties should make Cubs management nervous
Until Sam Zell came along, exactly once since 1920.
1919 was the year William Wrigley Jr., already a part-owner, purchased Charlie Weeghman's shares of the
team to gain controlling interest.
It was also the year Ron Santo started yelling at Don Young.
Just kidding, Ol' Hairpiece.
In 1981, Tribune Co. snatched the Cubs from the Wrigleys, and that was it for 87 years.
Now this purchase of the whole Tribune smorgasbord by gazillionaire Zell, sweetened with goody-bag throw-ins such as the Los Angeles Times, WGN-TV and Cars.com, has rocked our little baseball world.
Because Zell already has a stake in the group that owns the White Sox, it seems possible he might invite the Cubs and Sox to play their crosstown series in his backyard.
Kidding again. Can't own two major-league teams, no matter how many buildings, river-barge companies or computer-cable businesses you control.
Zell must sell.
And the Cubs will be on the block as soon as this season ends.
Makes me think that new president John McDonough and new manager Lou Piniella, with the huge player payroll and their careers at stake, are in for the harriest, most desperate season of their lives.
If Tribune decides not to accept his bid -- and it still can do that -- he gets a ''breakup'' fee of $25 million.
That's Alfonso Soriano money without a single at-bat.
In the first inning.
Then A-Rod hit a two-run home run in the eighth, and the crowd cheered wildly and demanded a curtain call.
''It's like the stock market,'' A-Rod said of the ups and downs.
Or schizophrenia.
The White Sox and Cubs are in the top eight, but it's the have-nots -- or pay-nots -- that stand out.
The Florida Marlins, for instance, raised their payroll more than 100 percent since last season, from a stunning $14.9 million to a still-amazing $30.5 million.
And the Washington Nationals are not far away at $37.3 million, a drop of 41 percent from the $63.1 million they spent in 2006.
Major League Baseball had $5.2 billion in revenues in 2006 and has seen 11 percent annual growth since recovering from the strike back in 1994 and 1995.
Makes this scribe wonder why everybody thinks Yankees owner George Steinbrenner is such a genius and how a team like the pitiful Marlins could have won the World Series twice in the last dozen years and the Cubs haven't won -- aw, never mind.
I used to see him often at Bulls games. He slowly would lift his wrist as best he could from his wheelchair, and I would shake his braced and limp hand.
I enjoyed talking with the former Marshall High School and Purdue star, but I never could stop thinking this: Did Tatum, who billed himself as ''The Assassin,'' have to go for Stingley's head with such a viciously gratuitous blow in a preseason game?
Time hasn't been good to Tatum, either. He had a leg amputated in 2003 because of diabetes.
I played football at Northwestern at the same time Tatum played at Ohio State -- he was first-team All-Big Ten at cornerback; I was second-team behind him -- and read his book, They Call Me Assassin. I marveled that we were so unfathomably different, that he had what was needed to be a star in a brutal game, and I assuredly did not.
''I've used the word 'kill,' and when I'm hitting someone, I really am trying to kill, but not like forever,'' he wrote in his 1979 book. ''I mean, I'm trying to kill the play or the pass, but not the man.''
Alas, it seems he finally might have done what even he didn't want to do.
Kill.
I won't lay out a syllabus of my readings for you doubters, but take a look at The Great Lakes Water Wars by former Newsweek correspondent Peter Annin just for starters.
Then you can look up the recent U.S. Supreme Court declaration that tells all that global warming exists and that federal agencies have the right to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions because of it.
As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority in the first-ever high-court decision on the matter: ''The harms associated with climate change are serious and well-recognized.''
Or you can wait until pre-eminent scientists from around the world convene this year in Belgium to announce that in just a few decades, if conditions continue as they are, billions -- yes, billions -- of world citizens will become victims of flooding, freshwater shortages, droughts, dislocations and other hardships caused by global warming.
Or you can wear a donkey hat and chase your little rattails.