Blog Kiosk 3/1/2009

Ignore the drama, pay attention to the game.

• Check out these great photos from Spring Training at Boston.com.
  
• FanGraphs does a Present Value analysis of the Dodgers most recent offer and determines that Boras and Company are crazy.

  The sum of the differences between present value and future value is $2.09 million. Manny’s $25 million deferred is worth $22.91 million in today’s dollars.

  They’re haggling over $2 million dollars in value. They’ve got a sweetheart deal on the table, and they’re haggling over $2 million.

  (Hat Tip: 6-4-2)
  
• Garvey Cey Russell Lopes talks about Frank Howard and shares his 1965 Topps card.
  
• Check out this new Dodger collector blog called "Them Bums."
  
• I love the Antique Roadshow. Check out this recent find of a whole albums worth of 1914 Cracker Jack Baseball cards. Wow! (Hat Tip: SCD)
  
• Time writes a great story about the man who first spoke out about steroids, Rick Helling.

  It's unfortunate that there were a lot of people I knew who thought, 'I need to do something to keep up.' You hear the excuses of the guys who admitted it: 'I felt like I had to do it.' The way I looked at it, when I wasn't good enough to do it myself, it was time to move on. A lot of players didn't think like that. Guys always had an excuse of why they could do it.

• Forbes.com highlights vintage Baseball memorabilia as investments. Are they a hedge against this rough economy?
  

  "A Babe Ruth-signed ball is always a Babe Ruth-signed ball," says Hunt, who
  claims to have had his best year ever in 2008, including a record $5 million at
  the baseball All-Star Game. And it's not just the five- and six-figure items
  holding their own throughout the industry. Signed baseballs from living Hall of
  Famers like Willy Mays that often go for around $300 haven't seen much drop off during the tough economy, according to Dunbar.

• Mantle family buys F-bomb autographed Baseball. Mantle was known, when in the right mood, to be willing to write just about anything alongside his signature. He was a funny guy like that.
• The Sacramento Kings might move to Anaheim?
  
• Read Fielder's Choice review of the book Card Sharks which details the early miserable history of the Upper Deck company.

  When Upper Deck saw that cases of the French hockey cards were selling for $10,000, McWilliam ordered a reprinting of the cards with 960 more cases being produced. Given the secondary market value, these new cases were worth $9.6 million. The cases were distributed to Upper Deck executives and board members, and many of them sold the cases, thus increasing the supply that was on the market, and bringing the value of the cards down dramatically.

• You got to love office pranks.

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