CHICAGO — Opening Day didn’t go well for Chicago Cubs ace Carlos Zambrano. The big right-hander walked the first Cincinnati Red he faced, gave up a home run to the second, and through the first four innings was working with a fastball that didn’t break 90. In the fifth he walked two, hit a man, gave up a single and a sacrifice fly, was charged with a wild pitch, and was saved from being charged with several more only by the exertions of his catcher. Halfway through the inning — far too late — he started throwing 96-mph fastballs.

What made it a typical day of Cubs baseball, though, was what happened in the next half inning. The Chicago hitters, facing in enemy pitcher Aaron Harang a hurler who had just been lounging in the dugout for nearly half an hour, took all of six pitches to make their three outs.

An ace who strikes out one and walks five, and a lineup incapable of showing the barest form of plate discipline — the Cubs may have spent $300 million this winter, and they may have brought in a new manager, but they’re just a new punchline to baseball’s longest-running joke.

For Cubs fans, the big news of the day was that there may actually be hope. The Cubs’ parent company, Tribune Co., was sold to investor Sam Zell for $8.2 billion. As a consequence of the deal, the Cubs, along with Wrigley Field and the Tribune Co.’s stake in a regional sports channel, will be sold at the end of this year, likely for something between $600 million and $700 million.

There probably isn’t one Cubs fan in the entire world who’s sad to see the Tribune Co. selling their team. Since the faceless, monolithic entity bought the club for $25.5 million in 1981, the team has had its mild successes and catastrophic failures, but during all that time it has been plagued by inept management regimes that never seemed to understand how a baseball team differs from other types of subsidiary holding. This is, at least, the common complaint, and there may be some truth to it.

To give an example, say the Mets brass budgets $130 million for payroll next year, but GM Omar Minaya determines there aren’t any players worth the extra cash. He can make a proposal to roll the unused money over into the next year’s budget (or into bonuses for amateur players or scouting), and if he makes a convincing case, the proposal will be taken up. Similarly, if he’s exceeded his budget but needs a bit more cash for the July trading deadline, he can make a case for why he should be given more money.

While the Cubs’ finances have always been exceptionally murky, one theory as to why they’re always awful is that their GMs haven’t had this kind of flexibility. Some Tribune Co. accountant sets a budget for the Cubs, and that’s it. The notoriously stodgy corporate culture of Tribune Co., if you buy into this line of reasoning, is to blame for the team’s failures over the last quarter-century; they haven’t cared about winning, but just about extracting money from the ATM that is Wrigley Field. Everything is their fault.

The problem with this reasoning is that it foolishly takes things for granted. Wrigley Field may be baseball’s crown jewel, for example, but it doesn’t attract fans simply by existing. In the first two seasons after Tribune Co. took over, the Cubs ranked next to last and third to last in the league in attendance. It’s various Tribune Co. innovations, like remodeling the park, scalping their own tickets, and so on, have supported the exorbitant payrolls the team’s inept GMs have squandered. Also, many teams have done just fine under corporate management. The Braves won their 94 straight division titles while functioning as a line item in the budgets of the Turner and Time Warner empires.

Cubs fans might expect that all that stands between their rich team and an end to the shame of 99 years without a World Series victory is a dashing, heroic individualist in the George Steinbrenner line — perhaps Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who’s been linked to efforts to buy the team. They may even be right. Baseball is a business, though, and Tribune Co. bought the Cubs for around $68 million in 2007 dollars and will sell them for around 10 times that much. Not all of that ridiculous appreciation in franchise value can be attributed to what Tribune did, but a lot of it is, and probably the only heroic individualist alive who’d rather fly a flag than enjoy those kinds of returns owns a team in the Bronx. The Cubs will be sold, but you can expect the laughs to keep on coming.

tmarchman@nysun.com