Will Zell Get Personal With the Seats of Cubs' Fans?

Sam Zell's back in the news, wowing journalists with "open collared shirts and jeans", telling them that he's no Nero, dumbly picking up a fiddle as a conflagration roars around him.

We know Sam's not dumb, and he's got a small fleet of MBAs dispatched to learn about the Tribune's various business units, "learning" as in deciding what to keep, what to toss, what to downsize, if and when the long-awaited sale goes through. Staff will know it's serious if the consultants carry tape measures or start counting ceiling tiles.

Of course, more doubt -- as if the deal needed more -- has been thrown on the deal by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's push to clear away the barriers to more media concentration and cross-media (TV, newspaper and more in the same market) ownership in the same market.

But in Chicago, those weighty matters are less fun than the parlor game of "What Will Sam Do?"

And given his background in real estate, the games goes to sellable assets.

Of course, we know of the talk of selling out the valuable ground beneath big-city newspaper buildings in Chicago and L.A. Selling the land and the buildings would of course fetch hundreds of millions.

But the game gets more interesting when we hear about Sam keeping the Tribune Tower, but tossing out some of the staff and replacing them....with condo owners. That's right, the new in-demand Chicago Trump Tower could get a neighbor. "Live with the Colonel (McCormick)" could read the (Tribune!) ads: "Once in a Lifetime Opportunity to Own a Piece of the Tower." Trump's places are going for about a mill apiece on average. Maybe Sam, citing historicity, could fetch the same. Replace cost centers (complaining reporters) with profit centers (happy homeowners).

But the game that's even more fun is doing the arithmetic on Wrigley Field. Sure, Sam's said he's going to sell the Cubs and Wrigley: "Maybe (the Cubs) is a business. But it's not a business I understand. So I think I'll pass it on to someone who understands it as a business or to someone who gets enough psychic income that they don't give a shit," he said this week.

Here's the Wrigley Math: Keep the Cubbies and Wrigley and sell personal seat licenses. There's precedent in Chicago where the new Soldier Field sold them for as much as $10,000 for the best seats and down to a thousand or so for cheap ones. Now, Wrigley's considered one of the two gems of baseball (with Boston's Fenway Park), and fans would have -- you guessed it -- a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy.

So, let's see. With a capacity of 41,118 and a $10,000 premium price, that could be a windfall of $411 million. Okay, so the game goes, $10,000 is way too high. Maybe an average of $5000, still netting $205 million + beer and peanuts and tickets (bought annually as before) forever.

Remember, it's just the parlor game going around Chicago. But also remember, Sam didn't get rich playing Candyland.

More Content Bridges post on Zell and Tribune, here