Lizard's Rant

Really. He is, and he’s smarter than me. He gets SOOOO much publicity for being the collector that overpaid for the $3 Million McGwire 70th HR ball. Read this article on Portfolio.com and tell me what you think:

McFarlane’s baseball collecting, meanwhile, rather than being an expensive distraction, has helped open doors for his company’s expansion.

Without the publicity from his purchase of the McGwire home run ball, McFarlane says he may never have won a licensing agreement with Major League Baseball in 2000 to produce its action figures. And without that agreement, he would not be selling tens of thousands of action figures for the N.H.L., the N.F.L., or the N.B.A.

Indeed, before he bought the McGwire home run ball for a record price of $3 million, baseball wasn’t paying much attention to McFarlane. Carmen Bryant, former vice president of licensing for McFarlane Co., says she sent packages to Major League Baseball pitching an action-figure deal almost weekly.

“They sent them back unopened every time,” recalls Bryant, who is now McFarlane’s director of public relations. “They wouldn’t even talk to us.”

“There’s times you have to buy yourself into the poker game,” says McFarlane, sitting in his cramped, paper-strewn corner office on a recent day. “I wanted to do sports figures. I figured they’d say, ‘Who is this kid? He does action figures? Oh, he spent a lot of money-bring him in.’ 

“If you look at the intangibles, it actually works from a marketing perspective. How do I know that? I bought [the McGwire ball] in 1998. It’s 2007, and you’re asking me about it.”

Brilliant. We all fell for it. How does $3 Million sound in exchange for a large portion of Spawn’s $50 Million/year!