On Marketable Skills

Most industries are feeling the wrath of the current economic situation. Chrysler has decided to stop production of cars for a month, etc.

One of the reasons I am currently unemployed is that the finance portion of my MBA doesn’t have the resonance it would have two years ago. Wall Street has laid off seven percent of its workforce in the past two years – that means more finance people competing for fewer jobs.

Even the baseball labor market has suffered some from the economic downturn. That said, I wish I had learned to hit a curveball. Mark Teixeira’s new contract with the Yankees, 8 years at an average annual salary of $22.5 million, sounds nice. He’s never finished above seventh in the MVP voting, but Tex has already earned approximately $46 million for his services, including an unprecedented $10 million signing bonus out of college. He didn’t even graduate and got that kind of money. I have two degrees.

Right now, the ability to hit a curveball is much more valuable to the open market than the ability to compare the values of two similar stocks or the ability to write rambling blog posts to no one in particular.

In high school, I was one of the better players on a less-than-mediocre little high school team that played shitty competition on a non-regular basis. My biggest weakness, one that none of my opponents ever discovered, was that I couldn’t hit a curveball to save my life. If a pitcher could get a curveball within ten feet of the plate, I was screwed. He could throw one over the plate and I’d bail. He could throw one two feet outside and I’d flail at it helplessly. Thank God no pitcher bothered to throw me three straight curveballs or I’d have dug myself into the ground like a corkscrew. Instead, I could hit the fastball that came next.

My coach figured out my weakness, though. The last practice of the year we had a homerun derby on the softball field. We were pathetic. Only two of us managed to hit homeruns. I hit one of them. My coach, perhaps sensing my cockiness, unleashed a series of junkballs like none I’d ever seen before. It was like I was hitting against Gaylord Perry. And I hacked and chopped and missed everything. From the outfield, where my teammates watched, I’m sure they didn’t understand. I was a good batting practice hitter.

The point is I was never meant to be a baseball player. I couldn’t hit a breaking ball. Mark Teixeira was already being scouted when he was that age. He’s guaranteed to have made more than $200 million before he turns 40.

In our current economy, it makes more sense to have good hand-eye coordination than to be good at numbers and business and whatnot. Of course, maybe this is because the finance world has found a way to become more corrupt than the baseball world. I never saw that coming.

Oh well. At least I’m not a Yankee.