- They're erecting a statute of Bud Selig outside Milwaukee's Miller Park. Cleaning/security costs are going to be a fortune.
- Did you know that from 2011 to 2035, the New York Mets will be paying Bobby Bonilla $1,193,248.20 per year? That's what the Mets' Steve Phillips agreed to in January 2000 to get out of Bonilla's remaining $5.9M/1yr contract. Now, I may not be a genius when it comes to present value of money calculations, but I'd say Bonilla did pretty well here.
- Via the Green Bag's annual Almanac of Useful and Entertaining Tidbits for Lawyers for the Year to Come & Reader of Exemplary Legal Writing from the Year Just Passed (for which I serve as an adviser), which carries a baseball theme this year, I heartily commend to you Commissioner Bart Giammati's Decision in the Appeal of Kevin Gross (1987).
- J.C. Bradbury, in support of dynamic pricing of baseball tickets.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
PITCHERS AND CATCHERS ARE PACKING THEIR BAGS: A few baseball bullet points as we shift from the NFL to MLB/Idol/Survivor season:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I still think that statue of Selig is defensible. I mean, we're not talking Gary Bettman here.
ReplyDeleteRemember this for next September: Hernandez-Lee-Bedard.
ReplyDeleteI was at the infamous Kevin Gross game, which saw Gross replaced, post-ejection, by soon-to-be-journeyman swingman Todd Frohwirth in his major league debut. Frohwirth was lights out in relief, and we thought we might be seeing the birth of a real talent. As usual with Phillies pitchers in the latter half of the 1980s, such was not to be the case.
ReplyDeleteLosing pitcher for the Cubs that day (Phils beat the Cubs 4-2, 8/10/87)? Jamie Moyer.
A number of wags have suggested that the Selig statue should capture this pose:
Heh. It'd still be better than Harry Carey walking on skulls in hell:
ReplyDeleteYikes! Is that a cruise missile in his right hand?
ReplyDeleteSure, we'd trade for one of them before September 1 if we have to.
ReplyDeleteIt's his microphone, with a cord trailing a bit. Please to note they had to put a barrier around it since people kept putting beers in his left hand. Or hanging goats from him.
ReplyDeleteWow, that is an f'ing incredible statue. Is it by Robert Arneson?
ReplyDeleteas for the bonilla thing, while the undiscounted numbers certainly sound ridiculous, that deal implies about an 8% discount rate ($1.193m/year from 2011-2035 is worth about $6m in 2000 if your discount rate is 8%), which isn't unreasonable.
ReplyDeleteGiven that the S&P 500 has returned 1.2% annually over the period from 2000 to the present, Bonilla has to be extremely happy with an 8% return. In January 2000, an 8% return probably looked like a discount, so I'm not saying it was unreasonable at the time. It's just that whether it was a good bet or a bad bet at the time, Bonilla won it.
ReplyDeletei don't really think bonilla "won" the bet. at the time, the 30 year treasury yielded 6.5%, so 1.5% is a quite reasonable spread. what i'm sure the team did was simply buy an annuity for the $5.9m that they owed bonilla, so they were done with this transaction back in 2000. the insurance company that sold the annuity then owes the $1.19m from 2011-2035, and as long as they could do better than 8%/year, which they could have owning 30 year treasuries, then they'd win.
ReplyDelete