Great sports franchise, bad investment…

It costs $250 a share, pays no dividends, benefits from no earnings, isn’t tradeable and has no securities-law protection.

Although the offering document calls the shares “common stock,” they confer almost none of the advantages of a traditional stock. The document warns that buyers “should not purchase common stock with the purpose of making a profit.”

via Are the Green Bay Packers the Worst Stock in America? – Total Return – WSJ

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today regarding MLB.com and how they outsource their streaming video technology and expertise. I watched some of the NCAA tournament games in the first round via CBS Sportsline which was powered by MLB.com. This is a great example of turning your leadership in a market niche into a nice burgeoning revenue stream.

More than five million people have flocked to CBS Corp.’s Web site to watch March Madness college-basketball games free online. For that, they and a growing number of sports fans world-wide owe some thanks to the entrepreneurial efforts of another sports leader, Major League Baseball.

It’s one of the more unlikely stories of Internet-inspired business evolution: In just a few years, Major League Baseball’s Web site (www.mlb.com) has become a major force in providing live streaming video — the equivalent of live television on a computer — for large audiences. MLB.com’s success isn’t just helping to transform the business of sports; it’s also transforming consumers’ expectations of what the Web can deliver.

MLB.com first mastered the technology to show baseball games live on its own site, itself a wildly popular business. Now, it sells its expertise, having already signed up 25 clients, including CBS, Major League Soccer and the World Championship Sports Network. Entertainers Jimmy Buffett and LL Cool J, too, have hired MLB.com to promote albums and concerts by streaming video of interviews and live performances.

Additionally, MLB.com says 15% of its total revenue last year came from these types of deals.

Not sure why I’m on a baseball tangent today. It’s not like my team (the Pittsburgh Pirates) is doing very well this year. I just read an intriguing post though at Om Malik’s site theorizing that Six Apart and Major League Baseball have a baseball blog project in the works called mlblogs.com. Very interesting and nice sleuthing Om!

Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post lists the best places on the web to follow baseball games. As MLB charges for live video feeds (that aren’t great quality anyway), monitoring games on the web is the next best thing for fans.

Some of the sites he recommends:

Fox Sports’ GameTrax
Yahoo’s GameChannel
ESPN’s GameCast
CBS SportsLine’s GameCenter
Major League Baseball’s GameDay

As a fan of a team from another city than where I live, it’s either this or I get the DirecTV MLB package. And since I already give them my money for the NFL package, it’s just not going to happen with baseball. Although, baseball is a slow moving sport and you can multi task while games are on…

With the NHL hockey season officially lost, some fans are taking matters into their own hands. An article in today’s WSJ discusses how some fans are coming to grips without NHL. Taking fantasy sports one step further, WhatIfSports.com allows users to simulate entire seasons using any combinations of past or present players. WhatIfSports says the participation in their hockey sports simulation games have increased 40-50%. With links from the NHL site, their traffic has been spiking. Raised outside of Pittsburgh and being a Penguins fan, I desperately miss the NHL (ok, not as much as if it were the NFL). But this simulation stuff may be taking it a little bit to far…

After a few big wins by my alma mater, I was curious to see if our pathetic RPI ranking had moved up a bit. For those uninitiated in this arcane metric for college basketball, the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) is the formula used by the NCAA to rate both men’s and women’s college basketball teams. The RPI is then used by the NCAA selection committee for picking teams for the tournament and establishing the brackets.

The Rating Percentage Index (RPI) was created in 1981 to provide supplemental data for the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee in its evaluation of teams for at-large selection and seeding of the championship bracket.

The RPI is intended to be used as one of many resources used by the committee in the selection, seeding and bracketing process. It never should be considered anything but an additional evaluation tool. No computer program that is based on pure numbers can take into account subjective concepts, e.g., how well a team is playing down the stretch, what the loss or return of a top player means to a team, or how emotional a specific conference game may be.

Ken Pomeroy has a re-creation of the Ratings Percentage Index for the 2005 NCAA men’s college basketball season. Pomeroy discusses the formula calculation here and here.

As interesting as all this is, the bottom line to me is where Virginia Tech falls. As of 2/19, the Hokies have an RPI of 101. Still bad, but at least we’re moving in the right direction.

Steelers’ nation is in mourning today. A magical season was slammed shut and given a depressing ending yesterday evening. Deep down though, I thought this loss to the New England Patriots may happen, but I think I was in denial. It’s more fun that way. Why screw up ignorant bliss? I guess there really is a reason why no rookie NFL quarterback has started in a Super Bowl.