Allan Kreda
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Pitching, pitching, and more pitching. That's what teams sought most at Thursday's Major League Baseball draft at The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS)'s Wide World of Sports in Orlando. Dreams do come true, especially if you're a southpaw.

Top pick David Price of Vanderbilt, selected by the almost hometown Tampa Bay Devil Rays, is sure to quickly reap the rewards of his talents, since he is represented by Scott Boras. That would be the same Scott Boras who helped Alex Rodriguez secure the largest contract in professional sports history, the 10-year $252 million deal he signed heading into the 2001 season with the Texas Rangers. Price was one of seven lefthanders selected by baseball's 30 teams in the first round of the draft.

Overall, 17 of the 30 were hurlers. Young baseball talent isn't surrounded with the level of hoopla that goes with college players heading for the National Football League or National Basketball Association drafts. But the money will still be there for those lucky enough to hear their names Thursday. Last year's top pick, pitcher Luke Hochevar, also a Boras client, signed with the Kansas City Royals for a reported $5.3 million plus a $3.5 million bonus. Two years ago, it was shortstop Justin Upton, taken with the top pick by Arizona. The Diamondbacks finally signed him to a deal that included a $6.1 million bonus payable over five years.

David Price is sure to garner similar dollars from the moribund Devil Rays, who dream about not finishing last in the American League East.

How much money would Barry Bonds be worth if he liked the media and the media liked him? That is the proverbial $64,000 question with the brawny outfielder just 10 home runs shy of Hank Aaron's career home run record of 755.

The 42-year-old Bonds has a one-year $16 million contract with the San Francisco Giants and if he has saved and invested well during his lucrative playing years, he should have no financial worries heading into his life after baseball. His career earnings dating back to his rookie season with Pittsburgh in 1986 are at least $172 million. But with potential legal bills mounting, Bonds is probably saving every penny he can. He still may be indicted by federal prosecutors on charges of perjury and he could be fined hefty amounts by the U.S. government in tax penalties.

With all this going on for the soon-to-be home run king, he's practically invisible on the endorsement front. Companies don't want to go anywhere near Bonds because of still unproven suspicions of steroid use. That and his general unfriendliness towards the media, and he really is alone on an island most days at the ballpark. But that didn't seem to bother him much this week as the Giants visited Shea Stadium and the New York Mets.

Bonds didn't even speak to the media before the first game of the series on Tuesday. The most intriguing aspect of the Bonds home run-record chase is how Aaron himself says he won't attend when the record is broken. And Commissioner Bud Selig has not confirmed whether he will attend either. Some way for baseball to treat its most hallowed record. The same Major League Baseball which clearly turned its collective heads the other way when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa (both bulked up beyond rational belief) were chasing Roger Maris' single season record of 61 in 1998. McGwire went on to hit 70 dingers that summer, a record Bonds surpassed with 73 in 2001.

Will Bonds ever reap the financial rewards of the record he's about to shatter? The answer, quite clearly, is no.

What lessons can investors learn from the return of Roger Clemens to the Yankees next week, possibly against the Boston Red Sox? Plenty.

Like great investors, great baseball executives know where to find value. On the face of it, spending lots of money on a 44-year-old pitcher seems like a poor investment. But this isn't just any player. Clemens has already won 348 games, along with seven Cy Young Awards, making him one of the best to ever play the game.

The Yankees are going to pay him an astounding $4.5 million per month for four months work. That works out to about $9,000 per pitch regardless whether they are balls or strikes. Sure is nice work if you can get it, but is Yankee owner George Steinbrenner going to get his money's worth from Clemens? They have to reach the postseason, period.

The Bronx Bombers faced a double-digit deficit to the Red Sox last weekend, before rebounding slightly. They've been forced to start a record seven rookies in the team's first 42 games, so adding Clemens surely will be a welcome injection for the decimated starting staff.

Could there be a better example of hockey's irrelevance to General Electric Co.'s (NYSE: GE) than what happened last Saturday afternoon when the network quit showing Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals between the Ottawa Senators and Buffalo Sabres just as it headed into overtime?

Faced with the dilemma of covering a game which could theoretically go last hours more, NBC went to the Preakness Stakes 20 minutes early (at 4:40 pm) while hockey was switched to Versus, the league's cable outlet which is a available in about half as many homes as NBC.

And Versus had trouble with the transfer, so viewers had no idea what was up until the game finally reappeared. NBC would have better served running recaps of the dreadful 2006 Winter Olympics from Turin, Italy (the lowest rated in Winter Olympics history) or maybe infomericals for the 2008 Summer Olympics leading up the Preakness. At least those could have perfect time constraints so as not to affect coverage of the horse race.

Hockey fans got screwed because NBC focused on the Preakness, which for sure makes it more money and gets better ratings. The network's deal with the NHL is a revenue-sharing arrangement for which NBC gets zero dollars from the league is why.

But why inflict that arrogance, which begins and ends with NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol, on the handful of hockey viewers who bothered to watch?

By the way, the game ended midway through the first overtime with Ottawa winning to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals.

With news that a New York state judge has ruled that Comcast Corp. (NASDAQ:CMCSA) can finally move the NFL Network from basic digital cable platforms to a more expensive digital sports tier, does this signal a new era of pay TV for sports? Maybe.

This is special territory the monster cable operator has been angling for since it and the league-owned network couldn't reach agreement to place National Football League games on the Comcast-owned Versus network before last season.

The NFL in January 2006 rejected Comcast's offer of about $400 million a year for just eight regular-season games to be put on Versus, which already carries National Hockey League games and which Comcast was hoping it could build into a network to rival Walt Disney Co.'s (NYSE: DIS) ESPN. Instead, the NFL chose to place the eight games on its own nascent network, thus forcing cable operators to find room for it to avoid the wrath of football fans.

If the ruling of Judge Bernard Fried is upheld (the league is appealing), it means the NFL Network would only be available for Comcast customers willing to pay an extra $5 a month on what most customers already consider exorbitant cable bills to see those eight games per year.

Cable companies like the arrangement because they believe customers with basic digital shouldn't be forced to pay for what a select group of sports nuts wants.

Ever wonder why NBC broadcasts hockey?

Like arena football, the NHL is a time filler. It costs the General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) network next to nothing to produce so any ratings benefits it gets are gravy, That's why NBC has to be happy the New York Rangers squared their best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinal series against Buffalo on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden. That guarantees a Game Six back in New York on Sunday afternoon following Friday night's fifth game in Buffalo.

And since one team will have a chance to clinch and advance to the Eastern Conference Finals against the New Jersey Devils or Ottawa Senators, ratings presumably will rise. The network can hope the game does better than Game Three, which drew a 1.8 Nielsen rating in New York, compared with a 2.1 for Fox's coverage of the NASCAR Nextel Cup Aaron's 499 and a 1.9 on CBS for its broadcast of the PGA Tour Byron Nelson Classic.

Those ratings are decidedly better than comparable NHL playoff games a year ago, but the fact that hockey trails every other major sport is worrisome.

The game does very well in regional markets such as Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis/St. Paul, but the days of drawing ratings comparable to baseball, basketfall and football are in the distant past. It hasn't helped that the NHL had a falling out with Walt Disney Co.'s (NYSE: DIS) ESPN following the lockout-lost 2004-05 season and chose Comcast Corp's (NASDAQ: CMCSA) VS network (formerly the Outdoor Life Network) as its cable home. The price tag: $67.5 million per year for two years versus $120 million per year for the previous five seasons on ESPN. Last year's average playoff rating on VS: a paltry 0.3%.

What can the NHL hope for June 2007? That the top U.S. media market has a team in the Finals for the first time since 1994.

General Electric Co.'s (NYSE: GE) NBC is thanking its lucky stars that the New York Rangers are in the National Hockey League playoffs as the month of May dawns. Otherwise, its ratings would probably be as pathetic as national numbers usually garnered by rodeo, lacrosse or the network's Thanksgiving Day tape dog show.

NBC yesterday saw a 44 percent surge in large-market Nielsen ratings for the double-overtime New York Rangers-Buffalo Sabres playoff game, won by the Rangers 2-1. NBC drew viewers in 1.3 percent of homes in the 56 largest U.S. media markets, which encompasses about two-thirds of the 111.4 million U.S. households with televisions. The game lasted more than four hours, ending at 6:15 pm Eastern Time, thus entering near-prime hours in the East.

Last year's comparable telecast on NBC, a contest between Anaheim and Colorado drew 0.9 percent of the same potential audience. Just to show how critical the New York market is, NBC's national coverage of the San Jose-Detroit game on Saturday had a 1.0 large-market rating, down 9.1 percent from coverage of a New Jersey-Carolina game a year ago.

Clearly, it's a case of as far as the Rangers go in these Stanley Cup playoffs, so goes the NHL's national television ratings on NBC, which has a revenue-sharing agreement with the league. Unlike other sports, the network pays the league zero dollars for rights to broadcast its games. Nonetheless, it's amazing that the sport is broadcast on network television at all.

Unfortunately for NBC, the ratings bump may not last.

The Rangers trail Buffalo two games to one and face an uphill battle to make it to the finals. Another big market team, the Detroit Red Wings, is in the playoffs as well, but chances are remote that they will wind up facing one another.