Big inning, but game’s not over — The Marketplace

It’s the bottom of the third inning, and the batter steps up to the plate. The pitcher winds up and lets it fly.

Baseball season in any typical October has been all about the playoffs and the Series. It’s not necessary to even stand up and support your favorite team; the excitement generated on the field is more than enough.

During the season there are ups and downs and the boys of summer play ball as if the world revolved around them. Hitting streaks come and go. Pitchers find their groove and lose it. Each game has avid fans in the stands cheering on the success of the team, and jeering the failures with equal enthusiasm.

Going to the park in San Francisco and sitting on the first baseline, surrounded by buddies cheering on our favorite team in the cool of the autumn night, still draws me back to the game.

When someone said that things will change when they move to a new park, we all scoffed, because we knew it wasn’t true.

When James Earl Jones, playing the part of Terrance Mann, in the movie “Field of Dreams,” said, “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”

I have to believe in it.

Yet, too many people have looked down at the game with their noses turned up saying the drug-altered, high-paid, stodgy ballplayers of today aren’t what they used to be. Remember, the public had as much influence in making them stars as the game itself.

Today’s economy is much the same. Banks and lending institutions have been a mainstay in the American economy. They’ve been a constant through the years, trying to serve the public need. They’ve been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.

In the ‘20s, the ‘30s, the ‘60s, and the mid-‘80s, with the S&L scandal (a banking adjustment that I really remember) there has been a sifting process.

And now, at the beginning of a new century, regulators are seizing a handful of banks that show thin bottom lines. Projections from the best of the banking industry suggest that the number of banks that could fail during the crisis will number as many as a 1,000.

William Speigel, managing director at Pine Brook Road Partners, a New York-based investing firm, is quoted in the Wall Street Journal: “We’re still pretty early [into the cycle of failures]. We’re not in the first inning, but maybe the third.”

And so, like the great game of baseball, we are on the sidelines of a bigger picture game. A “World Series” of sorts plays out before us in the market of finance. If we take the inning by inning approach to the game, we can jeer or we can cheer, but the game of banking, in the historical perspective, will continue to be played in one form or another.

Just like baseball, the investment game is part of our past, and once again, will be part of our future.

Robb Hicken is managing editor of the Idaho Business Review. Direct e-mail to [email protected].