Mark Cuban: From VAR To Chicago Cubs Owner?

Cuban, probably best-known now as the majority owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks basketball team, is now eyeing the storied Cubs MLB franchise, which is up for sale. He is said to be the top bidder with an offer of $1.3 billion.

He's been keeping pretty busy since his days as head of Dallas-based systems integrator MicroSolutions and the founding/sale of Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999, a $5.9 billion deal that made him a billionaire. He's had his fingers in plenty of pies: he bought the Mavericks in 2000, starred in reality TV program The Benefactor, competed in Dancing With the Stars and is listed as the executive producer of several films, including George Clooney's Good Night, And Good Luck.

Even if his offer is accepted by Tribune Co. -- the newspaper company that owns the team and also publishes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and others -- Cuban still might not end up in the owner's box. His bid to buy the Cubs would still have to be approved by three-fourths of the MLB's 30 owners.

Baseball fans are wondering if Cuban would be able to replicate the success he's had with the Mavericks if were to snatch up the Cubs, a team that hasn't won a World Series championship since 1908. In Dallas, he took a losing franchise and turned it into a championship contender (the team made it to the NBA Finals for the first time in 2006, though it went on to lose to the Miami Heat).