Paramount Interested in Buying Yankees : Baseball: The media company owns the cable network that broadcasts the club’s games.

Paramount Communications, already a sports dynamo in New York, has had preliminary discussions about buying the New York Yankees, perhaps the best-known and most valuable franchise in professional sports.

Although Paramount said it has “not received any concrete proposals, nor have we made any,” the company confirmed its interest in the ballclub, as disclosed in Thursday’s New York Daily News.

Yankee principal owner George M. Steinbrenner said in a statement Thursday that he had met with Paramount “purely at their request,” and that theirs was “just one of many expressions of interest in the Yankees that I have received.”

Paramount, a $3.9-billion conglomerate, owns Hollywood’s Paramount Pictures, the Simon & Schuster publishing house, plus New York’s basketball Knicks and hockey Rangers and their home arena, Madison Square Garden.

More significant, Paramount owns MSG Network, one of the nation’s largest regional cable-TV sports networks, which is paying the Yankees $42 million a year to show their games. The $500-million, 12-year deal is pro sports’ richest local TV contract.

Buying the Yankees--even at the $250 million or more that some experts say the team might fetch--would protect Paramount’s interest in that TV contract, which runs through the year 2000. It might also provide programming for Paramount’s ventures in pay-per-view and home-satellite TV.

Paramount has the money on hand--a $1.5-billion cash hoard that analysts have been expecting it to use for acquisitions. In fact, the company was criticized just this week for timidity in pursuing new properties. And if sentiment plays any part, Paramount chairman Martin S. Davis grew up in the Bronx, the Yankees’ home turf.

Michael Megna, a Milwaukee consultant who analyzes sports properties, called the Yankees “a money-making machine” with annual revenues approaching $100 million.

The likely price?

“You wouldn’t be invited to breakfast for less than $250 million,” he said. Steinbrenner and partners bought the club from CBS for $12 million in 1973.

The Daily News linked Steinbrenner’s interest in selling the team to his problems with baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent and the reluctance of Steinbrenner’s sons to take over the Yankees.

The Daily News quoted Steinbrenner as saying of the Paramount talks: “You can’t attach the exit of George Steinbrenner to it.”

However, the newspaper also cited a source familiar with the talks as saying that Paramount is not interested in owning anything less than the whole team.

Major league baseball has frowned on media companies owning franchises, but there are notable exceptions. The Atlanta Braves are owned by Turner Broadcasting System, and the Chicago Cubs belong to the Tribune Co., parent of superstation WGN.

A spokesman for Vincent said it would be “inappropriate to comment at this time” on the Paramount-Yankee talks.

Also on Thursday, Joe Molloy, Steinbrenner’s son-in-law and a Yankee vice president, was unanimously elected to succeed Daniel McCarthy as the Yankees’ managing general partner. Vincent had rejected McCarthy’s candidacy two weeks ago as “not in the best interests of baseball.”

On the field, the Yankees limped to fifth place in the American League East, their 10th consecutive season without a pennant.

That prompted Bob Gutkowski, president of Madison Square Garden and overseer of MSG Network, to speak with Yankee chief operating officer Leonard Kleinman (since fired) about team inactivity in the free-agent market.

“If the Yankees’ can’t get star players or look sharp on the field, naturally they’ll lose viewers, and lower viewership hurts Paramount as a cable entity,” said Harold Vogel, analyst for Merrill Lynch Global Securities.

After Gutkowski’s talk with Kleinman, the Yankees wrote big checks to acquire free-agent outfielder Danny Tartabull and infielder Mike Gallego.