So, why aren't you watching NASCAR? According to USA Today, NASCAR "solicited opinions from drivers and team owners in a 'town hall'-style meeting" earlier this week on why attendance and television ratings have dropped.

I know that I haven't watched NASCAR since Rusty Wallace made his last call and pulled off the track into the broadcasting booth. So, why am I not watching?

It is simple, I am now a tad busier (with a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a newborn) on a daily basis, and I can't (and won't) carve out the time to spend a Sunday afternoon watching a NASCAR race. I'm not alone, as Fox has seen ratings drop 13% compared to a year ago.

Baseball is not always a perfect metaphor for life, but it is a good one for investing.

Good teams know how to find value where others may not see it. Spending gobs of money on expensive players does not always pan out and successful companies do the little things well. There is no better illustration of this than the current sad state of the New York Mets and New York Yankees.

Despite investing more money than the GDP of some small, developing countries on high-priced talent, the New York Mets and New York Yankees are being outperformed by teams from the vast baseball wasteland known as Florida. The pain being felt by New York sports fans pales in comparison to the anguish in the executive offices of Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS)'s ESPN and News Corp. (NYSE: NWS)'s Fox Sports, which spent big bucks tor the rights to broadcast baseball games. I bet ESPN and Fox ad sales representatives would break out in a cold sweat at the thought of an all-Florida World Series.

What's ironic is that the people in Florida don't seem to like baseball. More than 80,000 people showed up to watch the football games of powerhouses University of Florida and Florida State in 2006. Last year, the American League Rays attracted an average of 17,148 fans to their games and the NL Marlins drew 16,919, according to the Baseball Almanac. That's roughly a third of the 52,739 who went to see the Yankees or the 47,579 who went to watch the Mets.

News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch is probably too busy plotting world domination to spend much time worrying about something trivial like baseball -- until now.

America's pastime is about to start post-season play, most of which will be televised on the company's Fox television network. Already, there was one huge surprise as the Philadelphia Phillies overtook the New York Mets to win the National League East. But this isn't the type of surprise that the media mogul probably likes because a team from a smaller media market beat one from a larger one.

Remember that last year's series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Detroit Tigers had record-low television ratings. Advertisers pay a premium price for television spots on the World Series because of the huge audience it attracts. Fox probably has guaranteed that the commercials will be seen by a set amount of viewers and must refund money to advertisers if these targets aren't hit.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today notified my friends and I that the time we spent last night on our fantasy football draft was wasted because of server problems. Excuse me?

How can Yahoo not have enough server capacity to accommodate the scores of fantasty drafts that happened last night? It's not like Yahoo hasn't done this before or that this weekend's start of the football season is a closely guarded secret.

"We have fixed the issues that caused the problems and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused you," the company said in an email. It set up a new draft for my league for this evening. I'm not sure my friends and I are going to bother.

This could have serious problems for the Internet portal. People who play fantasy football are desireable to advertisers since they stay on Web sites for long stretches of times while they live out their NFL dreams. That means that they are more likely to notice advertisements.

As it faces growing competition from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and everyone else under the sun, Yahoo can't afford to anger its loyal users particularly for popular features such as fantasy football users. Walt Disney Co.'s (NYSE: DIS) ESPN, Time Warner Inc's (NYSE: TWX) AOL and News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) Fox Sports are bound to benefit from Yahoo's misstep.

Fox Sports, a unit of News Corp (NYSE: NWS), agreed to a deal with the NFL and MySpace (also owned by News Corp.) that it hopes will attract advertisers and perhaps lead to higher rates. Fox Sports will offer marketers a web presence [subscription required] on MySpace during the big game.

According to The Wall Street Journal, a number of Super Bowl viewers already go online during the game to participate in web-based promotions involving the event. The Journal writes: "This winter, MySpace had 126,000 unique viewers of the game's ads for the week ending Feb. 11, according to comScore."

Under the arrangement, MySpace will carry interactive features for advertisers and coupons and other promotions to increase sales for the Fox Sports customers.

The move by Fox, however, may be too clever by half. It risks the perception that MySpace, with its massive social networking audience, is an effective place for brand advertisers to market their products. MySpace remains a large collection of individual posts by people interested in communicating and having an identity online.

If MySpace does not produce results for Super Bowl advertisers, it will have failed during the most closely watched marketing event of the year. To recover from that stumble in the eyes of the world's largest advertises will be nearly impossible.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.