If Cubs slide into bankruptcy, will fans ever be safe?

As a columnist for the largest non-bankrupt newspaper in Illinois, I have picked up a little financial acumen during the years. But Monday's report by Bloomberg News that my beloved Chicago Cubs may file for bankruptcy took me by surprise.

I thought the Cubs had been operating under bankruptcy rules for years.

In 1969, I invested my heart and soul in that franchise, and anticipated a decent return for my emotional investment. Getting home off the bus from school, I'd run into the den, turn on the black-and-white TV and shun episodes of the vampire drama "Dark Shadows" to snatch up shares of Glenn Beckert, Don Kessinger, Fergie Jenkins, Kenny Holtzman, Phil Regan, Billy Williams, Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, Randy Hundley, Jim Hickman and even Don Young and Adolfo Phillips.

What did I get for my investment? Pennies on the emotional dollar. A lousy second place, eight games behind a baseball team from New York that so scarred my young psyche, I still can't bring myself to say the name, referring to them only as "the M-words."

I spent most of my summer of 1984 at Wrigley Field, even saw "The Dave Owen Game" (the career .194 hitter drove in the winning run after Cubs' Hall of Famer Ryne Sandburg hit two homers off the Cardinals' Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter). But at the end of the year, I was financially poor and emotionally broke, left with nothing but a useless World Series ticket.

In 2003, my financial planning went so far as to spend the 7th inning of Game 6 of the National League championship series on the phone booking hotel rooms in both New York and Boston since it wasn't clear whether the Cubs would face the Yankees or the Red Sox in the World Series. Then the Florida Marlins scored eight runs in the eighth to bankrupt my postseason plans.

Last year, my Cubs portfolio was soaring with 97 regular season wins. But I didn't divest myself emotionally or financially from the team before another epic Cubs collapse.

The hearts of Cubs fans and all our "Cubbie Blue" blood have been in Chapter 11 for years. But are the Cubs really financially bankrupt?

They draw 3 million fans a year to Wrigley Field. They sell gobs of merchandise. The Tribune Co. bought the Chicago Cubs in 1981 for $20.5 million, and less than three decades later is trying to sell it for $900 million. I started at the Daily Herald in 1981, making $12,740 a year. During the next 28 years, I've won the same number of Pulitzer Prizes as the Cubs have won World Series. Had my value appreciated at the same rate as the Cubs, I'd be making $559,317 a year. Sadly, I am closer to bankruptcy than I am to making the Major League minimum salary.

The Cubs aren't the first Major League team to seek bankruptcy. The Seattle Pilots filed for bankruptcy in 1969 after a miserable first year in which they drew only 88,398 more fans than the Chicago White Sox. The Pilots responded by packing their bags, drowning their sorrows in Milwaukee and becoming the Brewers.

That option doesn't exist for the Cubs, who probably have to stay in Chicago. That doesn't mean the ownership-impaired Cubs have to sit pat.

White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf has offered money to buy another bankrupt sports franchise, hockey's Phoenix Coyotes. As the only living baseball owner to bring a championship to Chicago, maybe Reinsdorf should buy the Cubs and incorporate them into his current Sox, and from a reorganized hybrid team called the Subs.

But Cubs fans should be excited by the prospect of a Cubs bankruptcy. The NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins have filed for bankruptcy twice. Since that first declaration, the Penguins have won three Stanley Cups, and are the reigning champs, just a decade after their last bankruptcy.

So don't worry about a 2009 bankruptcy, Cubs fans. Just picture that World Series championship in 2019.