Baseball is a cut throat industry in America, and quite often smaller teams will try to entice local fans into the ground with various crazy publicity stunts. The smaller independent baseball leagues are also well known for trying anything to get the would-be supporters into the many expensive stadia.
Lets have a 'nun throwing' event or 'egg and spoon' race, and before you know it, hundreds of would be baseball supporters are being inundated with cards, junk-mail and spam emails. Does it work? well that is what we are wondering, but at the end of the day it all comes down to money. It will be no surprise to any reader that many teams struggle to make ends meet. Sport is expensive, and players are not easy to come by. When you do get them, they often cost a fortune.
However financial stories don't come any weirder than the 10 bat trade which has interested all sorts of american news agencies over the last few months. Golden Baseball League hopefuls the Balgary Vipers signed a new pitcher 'John Odom', but couldn't get him into Canada due to a number of immigration rules. This made poor Mr Odom slightly useless.
The 10 bat trade
Luckily the Laredo Broncos of United League were willing to take a bit of a gamble on John Odom, (a good player with some nice moves). So they offered the Calgary Vipers 10 new Prairie Sticks Bats, in exchange for the player. This seemed to strike a chord with the Vipers and the deal was signed.
The Prairie Stick bars were finished in maple wood and double-dipped black. They were the 34" popular C243 style bat. If you visit the Prairie Sticks web site, their maple bats retail for 69 dollars each and you even get a discount to 65 dollars and 50 cents if you purchase six to eleven bats.
So with our calculators ready the RussetMoose team was interested to discover how much John Odom is worth. The result is a rather uninspiring 655 dollars! Quite a tidy sum for some people we know but when baseball stars often change hands for millions of dollars, the unfortunate Mr Odom could see it as a bit of a kick in the teeth.
About a month after being bought by a good Canadian team, he finds himself on the roll of a team playing on the Mexican border. All for the price of 10 Prairie Sticks - they were fashioned in maple though.
Why have a 10 bat trade?
The Vipers had recently signed Odom, and he must have had a criminal record that he, rather understandably, did not reveal to immigration officials before they scanned his passport.
Calgary found the Broncos were willing to use Odom, but the Vipers weren't really interested in any of the Laredo players, and even if they were, if would have cost them a lot of money to fly in the new player from from Laredo. So that is how the bat trade came about.
As for Odom - who didn't seem to want to talk to the media surprise, surprise - he's scheduled to be on the pitch as soon as possible, it will be interesting to see what happens. It just goes to show that when sports enthusiasts roll out the old "it's a funny old game" metaphor, they may just have something useful to say! The 10 bat trade is something we at RussetMoose will be talking about for months to come.
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- The first colour photograph was made by a James Maxwell in 1861. He photographed a coloured ribbon
- Picasso could draw before he could walk, his first word was the Spanish word for pencil
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the amazing baseball 10 bat trade and how john odom got the world talking
Copyright © December, 2008 Russet Moose Brian Horn - Cheshire, UK
