Tribune Co. will continue to make money off Cubs — as always

The company run from Tribune Tower will continue to benefit from the Cubs well into a seventh decade (Image via Wikipedia).

When Tribune Co. finally signs off as controlling Cubs owner in the next few weeks, handing the keys to Wrigley Field to the Ricketts family, you cannot accurately tell them “good riddance.”

The former colossus on Michigan Avenue ain’t goin’ away — just like they’ve hung around dipping their hands in the Cubs’ pockets for much longer than you realize, more than three decades longer than their formal ownership began in the late summer of 1981.

Beyond the 5 percent ownership stake Tribune Co. will maintain for tax purposes, the company will still glean profits off the Cubs with long-term broadcast deals for WGN-TV and radio. The parent company had the foresight to lock in for many years to come.  Any Ricketts-conceived Cubs Network, in the style of team-run broadcast operations of the Yankees and Red Sox, will have to wait further into the 21st Century to come to fruition as a result.

The WGN connection is what hooked Tribune Co. into its 28-year ownership in the first place — and made them a de facto co-owner or partner of the Wrigley family for 33 years prior to 1981.

A lot of fans and more than a few sports-media types (including at least one Chicago baseball beat writer) seem to abhor baseball history, so tune out right now if you can’t stomach it here. To understand how the Cubs came to be in their present situation of c0ntinually reaching for the Holy Grail of a World Series, the Tribune-WGN-Cubs relationship has to be put in the forefront.

Col. Robert R. McCormick, the far-right wing impresario of the Chicago Tribune, always was fascinated by new technology. So he purchased a fledging radio station in 1924 and renamed it WGN (after the Trib’s motto of “World’s Greatest Newspaper”). Very soon WGN joined in a multi-station arrangement of airing Cubs games.

That was interrupted in the 1940’s, when WGN, as a flagship station of the Mutual Broadcasting System, had network commitments to air children’s programs in the late afternoon when Cubs home games were played. So the broadcasts shifted over to WIND-Radio. But in 1948, McCormick began Chicago’s second TV station, also named WGN. Good old Channel 9 was on the air only a few days when it assumed a full 77-game schedule of Cubs home games (baseball played 154 games at the time).  Here’s where the too-close relationship with the Wrigleys began.

Then-Cubs owner Phil Wrigley, who didn’t know a thing about baseball as a game, was a marketing innovator with his gum company. He believed in aggressive, creative advertising. Wrigley extended that philosophy to baseball. Unlike many other owners, he felt frequent and free exposure would sell the product. In 1948, Wrigley allowed the two TV stations on the air in Chicago to televise all his games with their own separate announcers and equipment. In 1949, WENR, the new ABC-owned station, also began televising all Cubs home games with, of all people, the irascible Rogers Hornsby as announcer. Wrigley basically gave away his TV rights — they were public domain.

By 1952, the two competitors had dropped off due to cost and other programming commitments. WGN-TV became the exclusive outlet for the Cubs, along with White Sox home day games. But Wrigley continued to give away his product. His rights fees were way under market value, ensuring WGN of an automatic profit. In 1962, the total Cubs broadcast rights, both radio and TV, were just $600,000. Meanwhile, the White Sox garnered about $1 million for radio-TV. Interestingly, the late longtime Cubs announcer Vince Lloyd once recalled his surprise looking at the TV ratings of the two teams sharing the same station in the early 1960’s. Even though the Cubs were a 103-loss, College of Coaches embarrassment to Wrigley, the city of Chicago and baseball, they outdrew the Sox on WGN-TV. And yet the Sox paid more for the privilege of lower viewing numbers.

In 1958, WGN and Tribune Co. cemented their monopoly on Cubs broadcasts. At the behest of broadcaster Jack Brickhouse, WGN-Radio snared the rights back from WIND. Brickhouse told WGN bossman Ward Quaal he’d lose money the first year, then make profits “forevermore.”

The Cubs had staked the high ground in exposure in Chicago via WGN. Even though Wrigley Field attendance was abysmal in the 1950s  and through the first six years of the 1960s, the fans were no further away than their TV and radio sets. In spite of the continual losing seasons, a network of downstate Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin TV stations lobbied WGN for a schedule of Cubs telecasts to show to the greater Midwest. They did not want Sox games.  That request was granted in 1967. The next year, after the Sox had fled to what is now Fox-32 and inferior exposure on the UHF spectrum, Wrigley allowed WGN to put on about 60 road games. The Cubs’ popularity mushroomed. And a decade later, WGN became a satellite-borne superstation, making the Cubs a truly national team.

All the while, Phil and Bill Wrigley presided over the most incompetent baseball operations department in the game. But they weren’t going to be criticized by the Tribune-WGN axis, which included the afternoon Chicago’s American/Chicago Today daily paper until it folded in 1974. No way would the powerful media conglomerate call for the Wrigleys to sell the Cubs to a baseball-savvy owner in spite of a long line of potential buyers stretching. That would kill the golden goose of cheap rights fees and the resulting automatic black ink from beer and gasoline sponsors. Besides, the arch-conservative Tribune believed in trickle-down business and politics long before Ronald Reagan popularized the concept. The corporate boss was always right and if the little guy somewhat benefited, that was fine, too.

The cozy Tribune Co.-Cubs relationship enveloped the Chicago Bears, too. Papa Bear George Halas rented Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970.  Until recently, more NFL games had been played at Clark and Addison than any other stadium. WGN-Radio was the exclusive broadcast carrier of Bears games starting in 1953, when a total TV blackout of both Bears home and road contests was in effect due to the presence of the Cardinals at old Comiskey Park. When the Cards played at home, the Bears could not televise their road games to protect the former team’s gate. That’s why Halas in effect chased the Cards out of town by 1960 to activate the TV market, while WGN continued to be the only broadcast conduit while home games were still banned from video.

Halas also was friendly with Tribune editor Don Maxwell and  Chicago’s American editor Luke Carroll, who often picked him up at the airport coming home from road games. When Chicago’s American Bears beat writer Ed Stone, a crack football reporter, criticized Halas’ handling of  his quarterbacks in 1963, an angry Halas complained to Carroll. Within days, Stone was taken off the Bears beat, replaced by a young writer named Brent Musburger. Stone did not get back on the Bears beat until 1967, when the broadcast-b0und Musburger became a columnist.

The final, formal Tribune Co.-Bears financial relationship ended when the radio rights shifted to CBS-owned WBBM in 1977. But the Tribune and the football team still remained cozy.

With all these long-standing interlocking relationships, Bill Wrigley would not go outside to find a buyer for the Cubs when he was hammered with $40 million in inheritance taxes in 1981. He merely turned to his partner across Michigan Avenue in an old-boys network, closed-circuit deal. At the same time, a bevy of Cubs fans offered to buy the troubled team, stripped down to expansion-talent levels by the strapped Wrigley.  They were told it was not for sale and then were surprised when Tribune Co. announced it had bought the team.

Mind you, Tribune Co. has not been all bad for the Cubs. Initially viewed as a deep-pocketed savior who would change the stodgy, thrifty ways of the Wrigleys before public disappointment set in by the late 1980s, Tribune Co. did build up the franchise financially and improved Wrigley Field as best as possible given the limited property on which it rested.  Of course, the decades-long broadcast exposure was the crucial part of the team’s popularity. But Tribune Co. execs meddled too much in baseball matters while mimicking the Wrigleys in not hiring the best and brightest to run the franchise.

In the end, the bottom line is just that for Tribune Co.  Tom Ricketts may run the team, but that Tower of Power will still have a vested, and profitable, interest in the Cubs’ fortunes, well into a seventh decade.