With its newspaper operations in distress and its corporate image in tatters, the company is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to shore up its baseball team, the Chicago Cubs.

Tribune owns the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, two venerable newspapers that are in disarray because the parent company can't seem to generate big enough profits to satisfy its investors on Wall Street. Life at the L.A. Times is so chaotic that the paper's editor and publisher both quit recently, rather than submit to Tribune Co.'s seemingly endless cost-cutting.

Then we have the woeful Cubbies. In parallel with the newspaper franchises, the Cubs also recently replaced their leader, Manager Dusty Baker. The team limped to a 66-96 record this year, finishing last in the National League.

Your newspaper operations are a mess and your baseball team is a disaster. So, what do you do? Why, invest heavily in the baseball team, of course.

On Monday, Tribune confirmed that it would pay free-agent slugger Alfonso Soriano $136 million over eight years. It's spending more than $200 million total on many players this off-season, as well as hiring a new manager, veteran Lou Piniella.

Holy cow!

As the late, great Cubs announcer Harry Caray might shout in disbelief: Holy cow!

As ESPN.com has pointed out, Soriano would get the fifth-largest pay package ever given to a major league player.

And is Soriano even worth Tribune's big bucks? Plenty of experts have their doubts. Maybe it doesn't matter that the Cubs would become Soriano's fourth team since the 2003 season, or that he has been dogged by talk that he occasionally sulks, plays questionable defense and doesn't shine in post-season play.

I feel a little guilty about raining on the Cub fans' parade. Even on the business channel CNBC, Cub fever was on display this week. On Monday morning, Rick Santelli, who ably covers the Chicago financial markets for the cable network, gushed that it was "great" to see the Cubs beefing up their roster — "especially at a time when there are so many questions about the Tribune Company."

Look, I hope Soriano helps lead the Cubs to a National League pennant, I hope the Tribune and the L.A. Times cover the hell out of the story, too. Maybe the parent company would even give World Series tickets to the employees!

Priorities

It's clearly a matter of establishing priorities.

I understand that the entertainment business is all about spending money on talented performers. The players and their agents exhibit virtually no loyalty and the highest bidder usually comes out on top.

Still, it smells bad when Tribune claims it has to lay off journalists while it can lavish millions on baseball players.