Sosa’s stock has fallen

Sammy Sosa has one more big hit coming for the Chicago Cubs — a $13.5 million jolt to the bottom line of his former team’s corporate owners.

Tribune Co., the media conglomerate whose holdings include the Cubs, said in a regulatory filing that last month’s trade of Sosa to the Baltimore Orioles will cause it to take a $13.5 million pretax charge in the first quarter.

The costly transaction merited only a two-sentence mention in Tribune’s 114-page annual report, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, which typically mentions the baseball team only in passing in its filings and on conference calls with analysts, did not discuss the reason.

But Dennis FitzSimons, the Tribune’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, said at a recent media-industry investment conference that the timing of the trade caused Tribune to accelerate the payment of Sosa’s salary, reducing the company’s first-quarter net income by nearly 3 cents per share.

The public discussion of the Sosa trade’s financial effect caused a chuckle among the crowd of institutional investors, who normally focus on results from the company’s 14 daily newspapers and 26 television stations.

“I hear some laughter out there,” FitzSimons said at the conference, as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

Sosa was still owed $25 million on a $72 million multiyear contract when the Cubs dealt the slugger over the winter. Because controversy and declining production had diminished his trade value, the Cubs needed to send the Orioles $16.15 million in order to consummate the deal — causing the dip in first-quarter earnings.

Bad timing

Maurice Clarett reportedly ran unimpressive times of 4.72 and 4.82 seconds in the 40-yard dash at the recent NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis.

“In related news,” Randy Hill of Foxsports.com wrote, “the league decided that, based on his times, Clarett shouldn’t bother taking a drug test.”

Commented Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle: “It’s not so much that Clarett was slow. It’s just that it’s so rare in the 40 to see a guy get lapped.”

Word play

LSU professor Leigh Clemons, who had New England Patriots cornerback Randall Gay as a student, decided she’d like to have a personalized football jersey with the name Gay printed on the back.

But to her surprise, when she went to NFLshop.com and typed the word “Gay” in the box specifying personal lettering, she was informed: “This field should not contain a naughty word.”

“I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ ” Clemons told the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

Clemons had to go through three levels of bureaucracy to get the jersey. The word “gay” is now acceptable on the Web site.

The last word

Minnesota Vikings coach Mike Tice, quoted in an Associated Press report about lame-duck owner Red McCombs’ admitting he nearly fired Tice twice last season: “I gave serious thought to quitting. … So I guess we’re even.”