Baseballhead
Swimmin' Pools, Movie Stars

Michael Cox

Sure, their asses were saved by the live bidding last night, but how embarrassing must it be to have the Mac/Sosa/Aaron home run ball auction flop so badly on eBay this past week? The online portion of the auction closed Monday night with one bid. Not one for each ball, one bid period (for McGwire's 70th, natch). There was more action for post-Christmas Furbies at the online auctioneer.

My guess is that the moneyed (and boy, are they moneyed) types who would bid at such an auction were not about to entrust their bids with something as déclassé as an online transaction. However, since the letters of credit had to be in prior to the start of the online portion of the auction, I'd surmise that plenty of folks registered, but leveraged their wealth in order to bypass the week-long electronic bidding and be ushered directly in to Madison Square Garden.

Still, there's a little matter of the stated rules:

The online component will start at 12:00 PM PST on January 5, 1999 and will end at 12:00 PM PST on January 11, 1999. It will consist of individual online auctions for each item that will be held in eBay's traditional proxy format.

The online auctions will be used to narrow down the number of participants to the top three validated bidders for each auction. These three bidders will be able to participate in the Live auction by bidding through eBay. This integration of Internet bidding into the Live auction is called the On-Live™ auction.

In other words, the rules were thrown out as the big money talked. There was no online bidding, and so no narrowing. Rich guys were shepherded straight to Madison Square (or in the case of the disembodied voice that successfully threw wads of cash at Mac's Big Dinger, his call was taken) where they could bid without having to worry about the server crashing or someone called EZ-JAY hacking in to ask, "Are their any gurlz in heer?"

And in the end, the bidders could have cared less about anything but the balls that actually set records. Hank Aaron's 755th (in my mind, the ball that means more to history) went for $800K and Sosa's 66th actually made 50% more than its $100K minimum, but all the other Sammy 'n' Mac balls likely could have been sold for more to the collectors who brought cash to the ballpark.

And lest you think these things don't have repercussions, eBay's stock lost 51 points on Tuesday...

Item: The Dodgers, who have spent the offseason trying to put together a team as glitzy as the celebs that attend the games, started the show early with a combination winter workout/press event on Monday. And although the Basic Agreement clearly states that players need not report until mid-February, it was clear that someone had their people calling other people's people, if you get my drift.

The team had all their big-ticket free agents there, brand new Taiwanese signing Chin-Feng Chen on the field (and later, in a special conference for the Chinese press) with almost zero rest after his 14-hour flight, and even notorious laggard Gary Sheffield was present, and this year his back seems to be just fine. "That [Dodger] uniform looks very good on you," says paid Dodger employee Ben Platt to Davey Johnson, while I can only mutter to myself, "nothing looks good on Davey Johnson."

But there was more than team workouts and press meetings on tap: there was Kevin Brown's press meet-and-greet, and with the highest-paid man in baseball donating $167K per year for six years to an academy to be named The Kevin Brown RBI Academy of Excellence, most of the hard questions about hardball bargaining were swept aside.

If it sounds like I'm a little cynical about the event, you're right, but not because I think Brown is not sincere about his donation, however small a tax-deductible percentage of his income it may be. It's 100% the right thing to do. It's valuable educational funding for inner-city youth via the RBI program which MLB administers.

My problem is with the staging, which not only featured an academy named after Brown (hint: a tribute when others do it for you; pompous when you do it with your own money) but unfortunately included Brown's agent, the insufferable Scott Boras. The best thing for Brown to do in order to gain fan respect right now is to have Boras lay as low as possible. But this is L.A. we're talking about, I guess, and if anybody in the Dodgers' extended family exemplifies the town, it's Boras. It's episodes like this that make people think ballplayers only do it for the tax deduction.

If anyone in the position to donate money in such a way is reading (my guess: no), give Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa a call before you think about making it a media event. They'll tell you do do it from your heart, with your heart, for a reason dear to your heart (as opposed to the acknowledged request of MLB) and most importantly, to leave the agent at home.

about the author

Michael Cox thinks maybe he's been too hard on eBay. He'll offer up some of his voluminous Monkees LP collection to the highest bidder there, but you'll probably have a better chance of buying if you mail him directly at mc@strikethree.com.