So you lost all your money investing in mortgage-backed securities when the mortgages turned out to be I.O.U.s written on bar napkins. A tough break, to be sure, but don’t lose hope. Baseball is there for you, if you can get in on the racket.

One of the game’s more astonishing stories this year has been the ongoing and interminably protracted sale of the Chicago Cubs. To oversimplify, real estate tycoon Sam Zell is close to buying the Tribune Company, which owns the Cubs, for very little money. He’ll be lending the company $225 million and shelling out another $90 million for an option to buy 40% of the company for $500 million at some point in the future; meanwhile, the company will be taking out $8 billion in loans to buy up its own stock, leaving it with a debt service about equal to its projected income. (If this deal makes sense to you, you’re probably rich.) The Tribune will be worth many billions less than it owes, so cash will be needed; hence the proposed sale of the Cubs.

Problematically for those who would like the Tribune Company’s reign of error to end, this deal may not go through. Money costs more right now than it did last winter when the deal was being negotiated, and the deal is predicated on Tribune stock, currently trading for $28 a share, being bought for $35 a share. No one is sure what would happen to the Cubs if Zell’s deal fell apart; probably they’d be sold anyway, but delays would be introduced and the protraction would become still more interminable.

Either way, thesamecastofcharacters would likely be involved in the sale. The machine candidate is John Canning, an upright Chicagoan who sits on the board of the Chicago Federal Reserve and Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and is a trustee of the Field Museum, Northwestern University, and the Museum of Science and Industry. A real city elder type leading a group of similarly situated plutocrats, Canning is the solid bet. You know the fix is in, because among his other holdings, he owns 11% of the Milwaukee Brewers, who were recently owned by baseball commissioner Bud Selig.

The reform candidate is Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and if I can ever do anything to help his cause, I’ll be glad to do it. He has more than a bit of Bill Veeck in him. Baseball has enough stolid city elder types; it could use a self-promoter and potential visionary like Cuban to demand accountability from his executives, reward performance from his players, and put winning and the fans ahead of the country club politics of sports ownership. Cuban, of course, has no chance.

My favored candidate, though, is you. A Chicagoan named Eric Majeski wants the Tribune to sell the Cubs to the people. (This will happen right after I strike out the side in the top of the ninth to preserve a Mets win in game seven of the World Series.) His scheme, outlined at www.4fanssake.com, is similar to the Green Bay Packers model. It involves dividing ownership of the Cubs into $100 shares and selling them to all comers, who would each be allowed to buy up to 1,000 shares. This makes good sense. The Cubs are a civic institution; why shouldn’t the people own them? Baseball is a democratic game, and a bit of democracy in its boardrooms would hurt no one.

The best part of this, though, and the reason that the likes of Canning and Ameritrade founder Joseph Ricketts want to buy the Cubs, is that baseball teams are about as good an investment as there is. Using Forbes magazine’s estimates of franchise values, which are one of the true jewels of baseball research, the current value of the 30 teams is $13 billion. The collective purchase price, in 2007 dollars, was $6.4 billion. That means that if you buy a stake in an average ball club and hold onto it for an average length of time, you’ll double your money.

If you have the good sense to buy cheap and hold on for a long time, as the Tribune did when they bought the Cubs in 1981 for $48 million in 2007 dollars, you can make out quite a lot better than that. (The value of the Cubs has gone up 1,233% under Tribune ownership.) Even if you buy high, you can’t lose money — among owners of any tenure, Cleveland Indians capo Larry Dolan has made out the worst, and his investment in the Tribe has netted him 7% since 2000.

The best deal, though, short of buying the Yankees for less than Carl Pavano’s annual salary, appears to be simply buying a big city team. In 2002, the Boston Red Sox sold for $444 million in 2007 dollars; today Forbes values them at $724 million. That same year, the Mets sold for $436 million in 2007 dollars, and today they’re worth $736 million. That’s a 66% return in five years, which isn’t bad at all. The Los Angeles Dodgers have shown a similar appreciation only three years after they were sold.

All of this is worth keeping in mind the next time you hear some owner crying relative poverty, and also worth keeping in mind the next time you’re trying to decide what to do with those spare tens of millions you have lying around. (Canning, for those interested, can be reached courtesy of Madison Dearborn Partners in Chicago.) What’s most worth keeping in mind, though, is that Majeski’s quixotic plan shouldn’t really be that quixotic. What’s built the value of the Cubs and Yankees? The love and devotion of the people, expressed not only in ardor but in tax breaks, infrastructure improvements, and special legislation. The ardor just costs time and heartbreak, but the rest costs money. Why not give the masses a chance to recoup some of that investment? Why not do it now?

tmarchman@nysun.com