CLEARWATER, Fla. - Just catching up on some reading here at sunny Bright House Field before the Phillies take on the St. Louis Cardinals with Chase Utley hitting leadoff. Chances are Utley will get a handful of ABs before calling it an afternoon, but the Phillies have to feel good that their All-Star second baseman is trying it out for a second straight game.
This one, though, is an actual game without bloused uniform pants and mucho sock exposure, so it will be interesting to see how Utley performs in the formal structure.
Chances are he'll do well.
Meanwhile, Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus and his own FiveThityEight blog, wrote an interesting story in the latest edition of Esquire sizing up different investment strategies. The premise of the story was if a person put $1,000 in the stock market, cash, real estate, etc. in 1998, how much would they have made in 2008?
Across the board the returns were pretty consistent, except for one entity:
Major League Baseball.
A $1,000 investment in a big-league ballclub in 1998 would have quadrupled one's investment in '08. Better yet, though such high returns have slowed slightly, count on the growth to continue.
Writes Silver:
A catastrophic collapse of the baseball market remains unlikely, however, for two reasons. First, major league baseball is a monopoly with a legal exemption from antitrust laws, and therefore it's not subject to the ordinary laws of supply and demand. In 1908 - the last time the Cubs won the World Series - there were sixteen major league baseball clubs for about 89 million American citizens, or one team per 5.6 million potential fans. But now there are thirty clubs for around 300 million Americans - just one to go around per 10 million of us. If not for its monopoly status, there might be forty or sixty major league baseball clubs, and the individual franchises would be less valuable. But because of it, buying a piece of a baseball club is a bit like marrying into the Rockefeller trust.
Second, and a little surprisingly, the sport has already begun to do something that so many other industries have struggled with: rationalize its pay structure. In the winter before its 2007 season, the industry spent a total of about $1.7 billion in commitments to free-agent contracts. But that amount dipped to "only" $1.1 billion last winter and should finish at around the same total this year.
So there you go. Take your money and put it into baseball.
Batting practice time... be back in a few.