Battle of the Brands: Robinson Cano vs NY Yankees

Robinson Cano in Seattle
(photo: sfgate.com)

The New York area's sports pages were recently roiled over the contract negotiations between the New York Yankees, its star second baseman Robinson Cano, his agent Jay-Z, and the Seattle Mariners. After considerable back-and-forth, Cano signed with Seattle for $240 million. This move led to consternation in New York, as if the Yankees, with an aging, suspect lineup, had stepped off a steep cliff.

From a talent perspective, Cano's move from Yankee pinstripes is unquestionably a loss for the team that calls The Bronx home. However, the negotiations were more than simply about the money. I think what soured the Yanks on Cano was Jay-Z's ploy to make his first MLB client a personal brand. The Yankees, in that scenario, were a splendid platform from which to launch the Robinson Cano product. The baseball team, with its own brand indissolubly linked to its successful, high-profile players, would not have been able to control the Cano brand. The notion that a player would be bigger than the team -- clearly Agent Jay-Z's talent management goal -- was something the Yankees could not tolerate. (Jay-Z's wife, Beyonce, recently demonstrated the clout of a personal brand with her no pre-publicity, iTunes exclusive release album. Yes, I think the Yankees watched that development quite closely.)

Jay-Z
(photo: npr.org)

The Yankees had experienced the emergence of personal branding in the early days of its contract with third baseman Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod had his eyes on branding from the start of his move from Texas to baseball's lucrative Northeast markets. The Yankees were not alone in that situation. Many fans forget that the New York Mets seriously entertained signing Rodriguez at the apogee of his on-field success. At the time, one demand from the Rodriguez camp was a personal marketing representative for A-Rod. In essence, he would develop and exploit his personal brand. This business scheme would have been under A-Rod's control, and quite separate from his team's success and marketing drives. The Mets could not or would not swallow this negotiating demand, and eventually took a pass on A-Rod's services.

Alex Rodriguez
(photo: Wikipedia)

While times have changed since Alex Rodriguez explored ways to create a personal brand, the lust for branded gold has accelerated. This year, common stock is now available in selected NFL players. You can purchase 100 shares of Houston running back Arian Foster, for example. Enterprises such as the Yankees have kept a close eye on these developments; my guess is that personal brands could significantly and irrevocably disrupt the teams' revenue and marketing plans. For star-driven teams such as the Yanks, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Dallas Cowboys, personal brands are red flags. The Yankees just drew a line with Robinson Cano, so definitively that the team would willingly say adios to a tremendous, homegrown infielder at the prime of his career. The feeling was that "the Yanks didn't want to pay Cano." That's true, but misses the point. The Yankees are determined to maintain their brand. No player, not even Robinson Cano, could be permitted to be bigger than one of the world's great franchises, certainly not while on the Yankee roster. As for Jay-Z, the team sent a message: we don't need you and we don't want you. Tell your client to have a ball in baseball's version of marketing Siberia, far away from his natural Hispanic fan base, and even further from appearing in post-season play.

Hey, didn't Alex Rodriguez make his name in Seattle?

My Favorite Ten Fiction Books

Leonardo Sciascia

Someone I know recently posted on Facebook a list of her top ten books. Since nonfiction did not make her cut, I'm assuming she kept the list limited to works that required little or no fact checking. (I'm not counting litigation considerations in this case.)

Well, I'm going to post my ten here, while fully acknowledging I could easily add another ten, ten times over:

• Day of the Owl/Leonardo Sciascia
• Creation/Gore Vidal
• The High Window/Raymond Chandler
• Cotton Comes to Harlem/Chester Himes
• Libra/Don DeLillo
• The Idiot/Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Tropic of Cancer/Henry Miller
• The Plague/Albert Camus
• Scoop/Evelyn Waugh
• Flight to Canada/Ishmael Reed

Report: Saatchi Tried to Game His Book's Best-Seller Status

Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson,
in presumably happier days
(photo: dailymail.co.uk)

Charles Saatchi casts a long shadow in the global advertising game and the big-time contemporary art world. Befitting one of such stature, he published a book and shared his thoughts with a global audience. Saatchi, who understands publishing's inside game, desired best-seller status. According to a report in today's Los Angeles Times, the British ad/art maestro was not leaving his book's sales fate entirely to the vagaries of public taste. The story, noting highly public and nasty Saatchi-Nigella Lawson divorce court proceedings, cited Saatchi aides allegedly being directed to purchase their employer's books. The notion was to game the best-seller list.

There's something naive in the belief that cash purchases of a number of books could generate sufficient sales to achieve best-seller levels. It's more likely that Saatchi wanted to create "buzz" that would create the impression of a fast sales start for his tome.

More dippy than Saatchi's concern about his book's performance is the notion that anyone would care about the work's "best-seller" halo. The idea that readers' choices need to be guided by the supposed popularity of a book denigrates the quality of its prose, the substance of its ideas, the delivery of its entertainment values. You don't need an egotistical ad man's chutzpah, manufactured online "reader comments," or sales popularity charts to help you draw your own conclusions about what book makes sense for you.

Is Bitcoin's Lure the Cure for Currency Uncertainty?

The recently invented currency known as Bitcoin has drawn more than just raised eyebrows. A growing number of enterprises and individuals are accepting Bitcoin for payment transactions. From what one can understand with some degree of reliability, Bitcoin fans tend to have a global business perspective. There's also, at least in the Anglo-Saxon nations, a strain of libertarian perspective animating the Bitcoin crowd. Governmental boundaries and regulation, which Bitcoin is specifically intended to avoid, offend both libertarians and globalists, adding to the currency's attractiveness.

Institutions such as large financial services firms and governmental entities are lukewarm to Bitcoin's flash. They worry about money laundering, whether the source is creepy oligarchs or sinister underworld elements. Another concern is Bitcoin's ability to dodge institutional insider skims such as currency value differentials. That fret is not trivial. A November 2013 Venture Beat story noted an automobile sale involving Bitcoin in Australia. In the article, the manufacturer's CEO, David Brim, pointedly noted the savings the Bitcoin transaction generated:

using Bitcoin reduces costs, since the company uses it to pay overseas suppliers without incurring currency trade and transaction costs. All purchases, however, still do include Australia's goods and services tax.

Brim also touted Bitcoin's promise of "disruption" to the current payment systems. If there were ever a word that is quickly pushed front and center to promote "progress" as an irresistible, inarguable good, "disruption" comes to the head of the line. That "disruption" might just suck rarely enters this sort of dialogue.

The calculation of Bitcoin value, and its secure housing, depends upon a trustworthy electronic network. Bitcoin advocates seem to take a smug view of the digital world and the arrogant assurances of tech's high priests. Anyone who has lost "content," such as book readers did in flaps involving Amazon's removal of George Orwell works, should harbor mistrust of such breezy sentiments. Those who have tasted credit card transaction "issues" have had up-close-and-personal experience with "Sorry, we can't complete your purchase, unless you have cash." I'm not suggesting the solution to Bitcoin's proposition is to stash money in a mattress or hoard gold. And it's fair, in light of the 2008 financial crash, to doubt the staying power and integrity of major financial firms. The question comes down to trust. If your answer is God, more power to you. However, as the late Jean Shepherd said, "In God we trust, all others pay cash" seems spot on. Whose cash? Now there's the conundrum.

Murdered Illinois Lottery Winner's Heirs Settle Estate Squabble

Urooj Khan
(photo: abcnews.go.com)

In May 2012, Urooj Khan won a million dollars in a scratch-off Illinois lottery game. However, his seeming good fortune became Khan's fatal destiny: the Chicago-area small businessman was poisoned shortly after he flashed a million dollar smile. The incident became much more curious when the Cook County coroner's initial ruling of death by heart attack was re-examined at the insistence of a brother of the deceased. The law's second crack at the corpse found cyanide.

The dead man's two heirs had a strong interest in the distribution of the lottery loot. Eventually, the case entered the courts. Today's Chicago Tribune reports that a settlement has been filed in which the heirs each obtain a portion of the deceased's estate. One of them, a daughter from a previous marriage, gets a third of the gambling proceeds and a handful of real estate properties the deceased owned. Heiress #2, the presumably bereaved widow, keeps her husband's dry cleaning business and what remains of the jackpot.

According to the Trib story, no one has been charged in Khan's murder. Maybe the perp is just plain lucky.

AP Report: NSA-Silicon Valley Struggle Centers on Profit That User Data Generates

The Snowden leaks revealed the global reach and evisceration of personal privacy the American military-tech complex routinely conducts. While Silicon Valley's highest profile search and social media firms have cried "foul" over the NSA's stunning data mining and analysis activities, these libertarian entrepreneurs are reticent to come clean about the depth and relentlessness of their collection of personal data. Of course, the money and power firms such as Google (yes, thanks for Blogger), Facebook, and Amazon now command should make one pause. However, few media outlets feel any urge to upset these data titans. (To this day, some major media outlets continue to identity data-driven Amazon's principal business as a retail concern, as if Jeff Bezos' ambition is simply to open an online version of The Home Depot.)

An Associated Press article appearing in today's siliconvalley.com attempts to illuminate certain truths animating the NSA-Silicon Valley struggle. AP reporters Michael Liedtke's and Marcy Gordon's useful piece gets to the heart of the matter: profit. The NSA's "violation of trust," according to the piece, has upset the Valley's expansion plans into emerging nations and their economies. Oops. Now nations such as Brazil are now at least publicly determined to keep close the data its citizens generate. Meanwhile, the Valley's lustful data expropriation and exploitation, along with its trumpeting of the virtues of "sharing," has produced a 21st Century version of colonialism that must certainly rub formerly colonized nations a very wrong way.

Facebook server farm in Sweden

The stakes are high for the Valley. As the AP story noted, countries in addition to Brazil "and international regulators are considering strict rules for data-handling by U.S. tech companies. If that were to happen, it could cripple the companies' crucial drive to grow in overseas markets, and could fracture the Internet's seamless inner-workings."

Yes, you're welcome to share or post this story.

100 Greatest Movies of the 1950s

My good friend Mark Sprecher recently reposted a list of "100 Greatest Movies of the 1950s" that David Ehrenstein originally posted on Facebook. The list includes posters from nearly all of the one hundred domestic and foreign films.

I have not seen the entire body of work, although I was surprised by how many I had viewed at some point in my life. I was not raised in a movie-watching household, except for the odd movie shown on network TV.

There's plenty of room for agreement, puzzlement, and outright disagreement. Have fun with the list.

I can't resist a few comments:

• A few of the 100 are from the world of Japanese cinema. I've never acquired a taste for it, so the choices seem esoteric to me.

• Some of the Disney selections were fun, and demonstrated an open-minded perspective (art house devotees, this is aimed at you).

• The mix of 50s b&w and color films is worth noting.

Michael Jordan's Mansion to Be Auctioned

Basketball court inside
Michael Jordan's Illinois home
(photo: Concierge Auctions and NY Daily News)

When F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed the rich were different from financial mortals, he didn't have Michael Jordan in mind. At his athletic zenith, MJ was a world celebrity who became a global brand. The NBA star made zillions of dollars, some of which paid for a 56-room mansion north of Chicago. The basketball Sun King's version of Versailles is now going to be auctioned, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune.

I can't handicap the winning bid. However, when the house was made available for an old-fashioned sale, the asking price was $29 million. Apparently, there were no takers for the former Bull's luxurious corral.

MOOC Player Coursera Hires Netflix, Facebook Execs

MOOCs, a/k/a Massive Open Online Course, have touted their ability to "disrupt" traditional academic education by changing "delivery models." These Internet-based schemes offer open courses, worldwide participation, and replay capability. Much as in traditional higher education programs, the Q&A sessions are left to poorly paid teaching assistants. What they don't offer is a walk-in classroom and a live human being delivering "knowledge."

Coursera, started by two Stanford University computer science professors, is in the vanguard of the MOOC movement. Their desire to reshape the higher education landscape recently took an interesting turn. Earlier this month, Silicon Valley Business Journal (SVBJ) reported that Coursera hired two Valley executives. One was poached from Netflix; the other was swept away from Facebook. What do these two men (yes, they are men) have in common? Well, neither are educators. The Netflix wiz understands algorithms that use predictive models to suggest "choices" for end-users. In Coursera's case, that would mean students. The Facebook "engineer" has a background in making video and other groovy "necessities" function in a social network environment.

The SBVJ story noted that Coursera was in Series B venture funding. In other words, it had a long way to go before the VC crowd could cash in on the bull rush to MOOC Ed. However, it also noted that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg just invested in an "education analytics" firm called Panorama Education. There was no word on whether Panorama Ed received any interest from the Newark, New Jersey school system, which Zuckerberg so publicly donated stock around the time of the opening of the unflattering movie The Social Network.