Comment of the Day

I never run a "Comment of the Day" but I just got one so good that I have to set it apart somehow. Here's reader Ted Spradlin absolutely crushing my bailout parody from this morning:

Bud and the owners found their perfect storm. Wall Street exploited housing, now lets get them to exploit bad baseball contracts.

The owners can sell their crummy contracts (Zito, Andruw, Sarge Jr, Wells, Rios, etc) to the surviving Wall Street banks at par or even at a premium. Wall Street can take
$1bb in contracts and turn it into $3bb in new SIV's, Derivatives, Credit Default Swaps, Options, ETF's, Contract Backed Securities, etc.

The GM's get to experience Brian Cashman's luxury of wasting money on over the hill players with no recourse. Ned Colleti and Brian Sabean don't look so stupid
after all.

The owners already got the money for selling off the contract and don't have to pay Lloyd's for contract insurance.

Players and agents are thrilled with the unprecedented salary boom. "Miguel Cairo is a premium utility player and the market recognizes that," said Scott Boras at the press conference introducing Miguel Cairo as the highest paid utility player in history at $12,500,000/yr.

Bud has a great new revenue source and "new media" explosion on mlb.com. He can create a Fantasy Contract Derivative League where people can trade all these new fancy financial instruments of crummy players, just like a real Wall Street trader. MLBTV airs 2-3 hours of "Fast Contracts" and "Squawk Box Baseball," ala CNBC. Jim Kramer was rumored as a host, but loses out to Erin Andrews, which turns out to be a ratings bonanza.

This opens up an entirely new world of quantitative analysis for Sabermetricians as well. Rob Neyer never saw it coming. VORP and OPS are a thing of the past.

Bud Selig needs to pounce on this opportunity. Baseball needs it and Wall Street needs it. The infrastructure is already in place. If something goes wrong, march to Congress for taxpayer relief because these institutions are "too big to fail."