Here’s the question of the day:  who do we compare Major League Baseball to, Enron or FindWhat? 

First, a little background.  I grew up loving baseball, in particular, the Dodgers.  I bled Dodger Blue.  Each win was a triumph, each loss a dagger through my heart.   I was at the stadium to see Fernando pitch in the World Series.  I was there when Pedro Guerrero scored on the squeeze play.  I was there when Mickey Hatcher slid head first into home.  I was at a playoff game as a kid and got a pat on the head from Stan Musial, one of my dad’s favorite players.  Of course, he was of a different era, not this sorry “steroid era.”

I was turned off baseball first by the last players strike.  But, I have to admit, I was brought back in for a while by the home run chase.  We even named our last cat Sammy in honor of Sammy Sosa (it was during the summer he and McGuire were going at it, back and forth).   When it became clear (no pun intended, but ”the clear” was one of Barry Bond’s alleged steroids of choice) that many baseball players were just bloated, steroid-injecting junkies, I can’t tell you how deflating it was.  Now, I don’t even recognize it as the same sport I grew up watching. 

I think one of the things non baseball fans don’t realize is how important history and statistics are to the game.  It’s true for every sport to some degree, but baseball is a thinking person’s game that has always attracted a great deal of historical reflection amongst its fans.  To illustrate: as wildly popular as the NBA was and the NFL is, I can’t really imagine either league warranting the Ken Burns treatment.

But now, in just a few short years, two of the most important historical records in baseball, the single season and lifetime home-run records, have been erased.  And all of the asterisks in the world won’t bring them back.   This, of course, is just a kicker to add to the message that has been sent to every kid in America who plays the game.  Hey, kids, you don’t cheat?  What are you thinking?  How do expect to be the next big star if you don’t juice?  Even competitive cycling now seems clean by comparison.

Well, that was a lot of background.  How do Enron and FindWhat come into play?  Both companies had good core businesses, got greedy, developed a short-term focus and went down the tubes.  

First let’s take Enron and compare it to MLB.  Good core business, but they wanted more.  Top execs (at best) looked the other way while fraud was going on, as the fraud made them a tremendous amount of money.  The fraud was discovered and the company went down in flames. 

FindWhat has a similar story.  At one point they were the 3rd choice for search marketers after Google and Overture.  They didn’t have as much traffic, nor the same quality, but with the right bids you could generate decent ROI.  But, then they got greedy and started the now familiar downward spiral.  The traffic quality went lower and lower as they brought more garbage traffic into the network.  Naturally, CPC declines followed. To increase profits, they had to bring more and more garbage in.  CPCs collapsed to almost nil.  And, nearly a billion dollars in valuation evaporated. 

I know there are hundreds of more examples of companies taking very short-term profits over building long-term value.  But, it’s still spectacular every time it blows up so publicly as it just did for baseball.

Here’s the only reasonable resolution of the baseball mess. MLB commissioner Bud Selig needs to resign immediately.  He is baseball’s Ken Lay.  At the very least, he should have known what was going on and his inaction poisoned the game. Second, the player’s union needs to call immediately for random drug testing, including blood testing (to catch HGH cheats).  Why on earth do they sacrifice the majority of their players on behalf of the cheaters?  What can they possibly be thinking?

OK, end of rant.  If you’re not a baseball fan, you can count on this being my last post on the subject.