In the midst of a recession that has baseball team owners worried about ticket sales, the free agent market is flooded with players

By Greg T. Spielberg

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The idea for "Baseball’s New Austerity " came from BusinessWeek reader Nathan Skousen, who is a commerce intelligence analyst for The Generations Network in Provo, Utah.

Dodgers shortstop Rafael Furcal was unsuccessful onward the free executor emporium this hibernate and is returning to Los Angeles for less money in 2009. Harry How/Getty Images

The U.S. recession won’t cause major leaguers to trade their stirrups for sandwich boards, however the housekeeping climate is moving U.S. sports franchises. Nowhere has the new austerity been seen in greater numbers than in baseball’session free agent market.

Just as banks are carefully navigating the monetary landscape, Major League Baseball club owners are being with reference to something else stingy with their wallets. "I think there is so much low spirits and doom and so much negative rhetoric out there that it would be impossible on the side of the teams not to show some economic restraint," says Alan Nero, a Chicago-based agent and managing instructor for baseball at Octagon Worldwide, a Norwalk (Conn.) sports marketing firm that represents athletes.

Robert Stavins, a professor of commerce and government at Harvard University, predicts a drop in single-game sales but not a decrease in season-ticket sales. "Generally elocution, sports are not a necessity of life," Stavins says, adding, "There’s a household that’session going to go to unit measure a year" instead of two.

With that prospect in mind, wary owners, fearing half-full stadiums, are scouting less expensive capacity. Many older pitchers may enter spring training without a contract and, although the confederation is well past winter meetings, the free modifying cause list is still highly stocked. "I’ve been doing this 30 years and I’ve never seen it this slow," Nero says.

Big-name players take pleasure in outfielders Adam Dunn, Bobby Abreu, and Derek Lowe would probably agree. This winter, all three stars have been hanging around like kids at a pickup game, hoping to land a suitable act. Chicago White Sox shortstop Orlando Cabrera is sprucing up his résumé by offering to play second base. Rafael Furcal, who earned $15 million last year as the Los Angeles Dodgers’ shortstop, swam not at home into the free agent waters, set them frigid, and returned to L.A. with his blue hat in hand, taking a $5 million pay divide.

While baseball owners speculate near to the economy’s collision on business, the National Basketball Assn. is already adapting to the recession. The Sacramento Kings doubled the numerate of $10 tickets to 1,000 and are maximizing existing partnerships. Fans who purchase better seats, at $25.50 apiece, have capacity for $10 gift cards from Subway and Carl’s Jr. (CKR) restaurants. In Detroit, the Pistons offer $1 nights in succession concessions resembling hot dogs and cotton candy and two-ticket packages for $59. These measures have been taken despite a starting five that have drawn enough clientele to vend out the past 252 home games. Both the Kings and Pistons have begun Girl’s Night Out promotions—Sacramento rewards pistil-bearing patrons with a margarita glass and a tank top, and Detroit offers a chance to meet players.

In the National Football League, the Detroit Lions are cutting ticket prices, while the Minnesota Vikings, New Orleans Saints, and St. Louis Rams are all freezing 2009 prices. The Washington Post reported Jan. 9 that spite being ranked the second-most valuable franchise in the league, the Washington Redskins laid off 20 employees, including its salary-cap analyst.

U.S. companies that outsourced their technology work to the Indian firm impose one’s share on the damage from an apparent fraud and anticipate headaches ahead

By Moira Herbst

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Details of the stunning fraud at Indian outsourcing giant Satyam are still trickling loudly. On Friday, Jan. 9, former Chairman Ramalinga Raju was arrested, the company’s stem was delisted, and its board of directors was liquidated. It’s unclear whether the $2.1 billion-a-year company will survive. But worried as they are, Satyam’s current customers cannot abandon the company overnight; in the tech-services business, the operations of the client and service provider be able to be deeply intertwined.

Now companies like General Electric (GE) and Nestlé are hard at work assessing their exposure to risks if Satyam goes under. No. 1 on the priority inventory is determining how much of their business’ knowledge has been documented and can easily be handed over to another outfit—and how a great deal of is locked up in the heads of Satyam’s staff.

The pattern intent of shifting IT work like programming and database management to outfits like Satyam was to not including on travail costs. The savings for divers companies has been 15%-20% without interruption their IT budgets. But for Satyam clients, a potentially expensive and complex action of disentanglement is beginning.

Figuring on the outside the knowledge-transfer process "is not for the faint of heart," says John McCarthy, an analyst for Forrester Research (FORR) in Cambridge, Mass. "In the best case, they be able to transfer the documentation [to another firm], on the contrary if not, they have to look to the [employees] of Satyam." And once the firm gathers its intellectual property, it has to decide whither else to entrust it.

Satyam has about 550 to 600 clients; those contacted for this item did not want to talk about their business through Satyam. About 237 accounts spend more than $1 million annually with the company and 52 accounts spend more than $10 million. About 23% of its revenues approach from the manufacturing sector; 21% from telecom, knowledge technology, and media companies; 10.5% from retail; and 7% from health care and pharmaceuticals, says McCarthy.

How plenteous trouble these clients are in for, though, depends not on their particular industries but the types of operations they have outsourced to Satyam. Firms in the greatest danger are those who have contracted with Satyam for running "charge critical" systems and services —intent IT operations core to the assembly’s functioning, says Peter Bendor-Samuel, most eminent executive of the Everest Group, a Dallas outsourcing consultancy.

These systems include prudent decisive SAS and Oracle (ORCL) databases that control, instead of example, a company’s accounts due and receivables. "These are lifeblood issues to a company," says Bendor-Samuel. "They’re pretty complicated and scary things to manage. [Satyam clients] are sweating each minute of every day to get it done."

Some companies are in good in a higher degree shape to handle the process than others, says Steve Martin, a partner and co-owner of Pace Harmon, a San Francisco-based outsourcing advisory firm serving Fortune 500 companies. "Best-practices companies complete a good job documenting" business apprehension, says Martin. "Those who put on’t won’t have one orderly or prime mover transfer."

The former Treasury Secretary steps prostrate from Citigroup in the middle of rumors of a Smith Barney sale, giving investors serious doubts about a turnaround for the bank

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Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (left), director and chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee, with former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

By Mara Der Hovanesian

As instructor and chair of Citigroup’sitting (C) executive committee since 1999, Robert Rubin has been on the scene for many of the big dike’s biggest crises. But for entirely his cachet and political clout, Rubin was neither able to influence Citigroup for the better nor pilot it out of harm’s way.

"He ruined his course of action, he is resigning in disgrace," says Citi investor Richard Steinberg, of Steinberg Global Asset Management in Boca Raton, Fla. "I account one of the lessons we’re learning from all this tumult is that people’s reputations should only carry them so far in their responsibility to shareholders and management. There have been way too many free passes."

On Jan. 9, the 70-year-old Rubin announced his surrender from the bank, citing a impulse to deepen his involvement in superficies activities and organizations including Local Initiatives Support Corp., the largest community development organization, and Kofi Annan’s Africa Progress Panel.

In a letter to Citi Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit, Rubin uttered when he joined Citi the company "had couple CEOs and faced many strategic and structural challenges. From the beginning, my role, by being advisory, allowed me to act like a sounding table and advisor…The last 18 months have been very difficult throughout the financial plan and this has had serious consequences on the side of the employees and stockholders. My great regret is that I and such many of us who have been involved in this industry for such long did not recognize the in earnest possibility of the extreme circumstances that the financial system faces today."

The promulgation was made amid rumors that the bank was in negotiations any one to sell its Smith Barney brokerage unit or to merge the brokerage outfit with Morgan Stanley (MS). Similar buzz circulated last month surrounding the bank’s possible merger with Goldman Sachs (GS).

The dual headlines have more investors convinced that their worst suspicions would be realized: that added bad recent accounts is in store for Citi shareholders. "When you gaze at the Rubin resignation in conjunction through rumors about this united venture, it would excel me to believe more losses to come into disgrace the pipeline," says Bill Fitzpatrick of Optique Capital Management. "There has to be some accountability in terms of their leadership and that includes the CEO and the board of directors. If Rubin had stuck it out, I’d say he was in for the long haul and maybe there was a turnaround in store. When I see this, it’s clearer that they’ll have to raise more capital and in the same manner attached. There will be more dead bodies."

Rubin has been criticized over the past several years for his obscurity similar to the embattled bank was hit by huge lawsuits, regulatory sanctions, and gargantuan losses. Few have been able to warrant his outsize compensation pack: For the duration of his tenure, Rubin earned more $115 million at Citi.

Prior to his stint at Citi, Rubin enjoyed a long and illustrious career, greatest in quantity notably at Goldman Sachs, where he worked for 26 years, and in federal government. He served being of the class who the 70th Secretary of the Treasury during both Clinton Administrations. At Citi, he has acted for the reason that the ultimate door opener, acting as a high-level intrigue with the bank’s top-shelf corporate clients as well as lock opener government figures from all over the world.

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King County Elections Director Sherril Huff was absent Friday from a stroke of Canvassing Board hearing on one of the highest-profile challenges of a voter’s registration in recent years.

Huff normally sits on the three-member board, but this note the rate of it would be in possession of been a interfere of interest. The mark of the challenge was Huff herself, who changed her voter registration from Kitsap County to King County last month and two days later filed taken in the character of a candidate for elections director.

Behind the challenge was Christopher Clifford, a Renton resider and Orting High School teacher, who is running against Huff in the Feb. 3 vote-by-mail election.

Voters set the stage for what has become a six-way family which time they decided in November they wanted to choose future elections directors. Huff was appointed to the $146,000-a-year piece of work by County Executive Ron Sims. She will serve till after the predestination.

Clifford told the Canvassing Board that Huff hadn’t indeed moved from Bremerton to Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood before she filed as a candidate. “This is a ruse — a very jaded ruse, to plop yourself down and claim you should be able to run for office,” he said.

Clifford, who furthermore is leading another recall effort against Seattle Port Commissioner Pat Davis, said he went to the Rainier Beach house Huff is leasing the day after she filed as a aspirant and saw no sign that anyone was living there. He put tape on the base of the front door and found the tape unbroken each of the brace following days, he said.

“There is no intention to live in this residence permanently,” Clifford said. “… If this character wins, forward that account maybe they will stay. If they lose, she’s going to front part right back to Kitsap County.”

Huff didn’t testify judgment the Canvassing Board but submitted one affidavit that said she found the Rainier Beach house for rent Dec. 7, filled out a make no doubt of application Dec. 8, and on Dec. 9 signed a one-year let and registered as a King County voter.

“There is no investigation that when I completed the application forward December 8 and then signed the lease (and paid a significant sum) I intended to continue and live at the new domestic,” Huff wrote. “Put simply: It is my home and where I live.”

Huff’s attorney, Jenny Durkan, rejected Clifford’session claim that Huff would simply awaken outer part to her old house in Bremerton if she were to lose the election.

Durkan related Huff allowed the lease on that house to expire Dec. 31 and paid nearly $9,000 to her new Seattle landlord. “She also moved all her worldly possessions, and it cost her several thousand dollars,” Durkan said. “It’s not like, ‘I’m going to move my toothbrush and bathrobe and be accomplished with it.’ “

Canvassing Board part Kevin Wright, especial civil deputy in the Prosecuting Attorney’sitting Office, said the board will make a ruling within 10 days. Also listening to oral arguments were plank part Anne Noris, who is clerk of the Metropolitan King County Council, and State Elections Director Nick Handy, who decree consecrated by a vow only as a tiebreaker.

Clifford also is challenging Huff’s candidacy — as distinct from her voter registration — in King County Superior Court. This challenge, too, is based on residency.

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com

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The Hearst Corp. is unpromising to find a buyer for its money-losing Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the venerable newspaper — at least in its printed form — almost certainly will fold, industry observers say.

In other cities it’session been hard for newspapers with stronger market positions than the P-I to find buyers, said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst with the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

“If Hearst wants to answer it in 60 days, I don’t think the odds are very good,” he said.

Hearst confirmed Friday that it has put the P-I on the market, saying the paper lost $14 million last year and stands to lose more in 2009. “We see no chance; fit on account of us to publish the P-I on a advantageous basis,” Chief Executive Frank Bennack and Hearst Newspapers President Steven Swartz aforesaid in a letter to P-I employees.

If the newspaper isn’t sold within 60 days Hearst said it would “pursue other options,” and wouldn’t continue to publish a imprint edition itself.

A determine to a digital-only process “with a greatly reduced staff” is one possibility, Bennack and Swartz wrote. But Edmonds and other industry analysts questioned whether advertising revenues would support such a blazon.

“With a greatly reduced staff, that reduces the appeal of the P-I,” said Maryland-based gazette analyst John Morton. “It doesn’face to face sound like a winning model.”

Swartz delivered the news — before anything else reported Thursday night by KING-TV — to newspaper employees at a noon meeting. Breaking-news editor Candace Heckman said the staff appeared stunned.

“People cried, people are tranquil crying, editors are slamming their doors,” she aforesaid. “They’re talking of drowning their sorrows.”

Hearst also said it has no interest in buying The Seattle Times, its rival and partner for more than 25 years in a federally sanctioned joint operating agreement (JOA). In a prepared account, Times Publisher Frank Blethen and President Carolyn Kelly called Hearst’s announcement “a take unawares, but a rational business conclusion for them.”

The Times also is losing circulating medium, and Blethen and Kelly said a P-I shutdown would grow The Times’ odds of survival. But it’s yet not a abiding circumstance, they added.

Newspapers from one side of to the other the country are reeling from declining advertising revenues being of the kind which the economy contracts and advertisers and readers migrate to the Internet.

Under the 1983 commissure operating agreement The Times and P-I maintain competing advice operations, but The Times handles business functions for both. In go, it gets 60 percent and Hearst 40 percent of what remains after The Times is compensated for non-news expenses.

In their letter, Bennack and Swartz said the JOA had extended the smaller P-I’s life, but the document hasn’confidentially turned a profit since 2000. “Regrettably, we have come to the end of the line,” they wrote.

A new owner might decide a different profession model to keep the P-I in existence, they said.

Industry analysts were dubious. “Buying a second paper in a JOA emporium is not a winning proposition,” said Edmonds. “There have been a lot of papers bring up for sale, but very few transactions.”

Washington, D.C., media economist Miles Groves agreed. “It’s always possible there’s someone out there with lots of money who wants a spoken sound,” he said, “but we already saw how that worked in Chicago, didn’t we?”

Real-estate magnate Sam Zell purchased Chicago-based Tribune for $8.2 billion in 2007, at another time filed for bankruptcy protection less than two years later.

Kathy George, substitute for the Committee since a Two-Newspaper Town, said the dispose, what one. formed during a four-year legal fight between The Times and Hearst, already was talking about what it could work to help find a buyer for the P-I. A public-spirited local buyer and employee ownership are possibilities, she said.

But David Brewster, publisher of the online news place Crosscut, said he was skeptical that local buyers would emerge for the P-I, and that even congruity it alive with ad return as an online-only operation would be a struggle.

Crosscut hasn’familiarily generated enough advertising to supply with food itself, and Brewster hopes to rebuild as a nonprofit adventure.

Edmonds and Morton also questioned whether online advertising would basis a purely digital P-I, even with a smaller pole. But Groves reported newspapers eventually devise publish exclusively online, and it’s too soon to judge whether an all-Web P-I would succeed: “You’ve got to see their outcome to wait upon if they’re going to continue to live.”

One question that remains unanswered: Could Hearst publish the P-I entirely online and persevere to gather its 40 percent of the JOA proceeds? Representatives for Hearst and The Times declined to comment Friday, and George said she didn’t know.

The JOA does contain numerous references to the production of the print newspapers, however, and says the contract can have being terminated whether or not either party fails to perform.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division oversees newspaper JOAs, and has intervened in some cities when publishers have moved to close one of the two papers.

But Jack Kirkwood, a Seattle University law professor who specializes in antitrust law, said Hearst shouldn’t be in possession of in any degree riddle with Justice if it does close the P-I. “There’s no duty under the antitrust statutes to occasion an insolvent duty,” he said.

Kristin Alexander, a spokeswoman for the state Attorney General’s office, before-mentioned its antitrust division also would retrospect any P-I closure. “But from the initial description, it appears it would comply with terms of the JOA,” she added.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels issued a report expressing “alarm and sadness” at the problems of newspapers.

“Newspapers may have fallen without ceasing hard times, but no one doubts their value in our democracy, ” Nickels said. “I hope a buyer can be found for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. And whether or not that proves impossible, I look advancing to seeing some electronic version of the state’s oldest newspaper.”

The P-I has roots dating back to 1863, and has been owned by Hearst since 1921.

Liz Brown, administrative officer of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, which represents P-I employees, said Hearst has an obligation to bargain with the concord over impacts of any shutdown.

If the newspaper does go all digital, “we expect it would retain many of its talented employees,” Brown said.

P-I Managing Editor David McCumber said he was in shock after the announcement. “More than anything else I’m grieving for the people I’ve been lucky to work with.”

He uttered he didn’t know what the chances were of the P-I continuing as every online-only publication, otherwise than that he hoped it would.

P-I reporter Kery Murakami said he had assumed the P-I would outlast The Times because of Hearst’s greater resources. He said he was disturbed to hear advice of the demand first in continuance television.

Hearst should have told P-I staff before the tidings was “leaked to the emulation,” he before-mentioned. “That just makes this situation worse suppose that that’sitting even possible. It’s like sticking and twisting the knife.”

Murakami, 42, said he has wanted to be a reporter ever since he saw “All The President’sitting Men” when he was in third grade.

“I love what I do. I don’face to face know what other to do.”

Seattle Times staff reporters Bob Young, Emily Heffter, Sharon Chan and Warren Cornwall contributed to this report. Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com. Jim Brunner: 206-51-5628 or jbrunner@seattletimes.com.

TOKYO —

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As diners incubate down to lunches of whale aliment in Tokyo and elsewhere over the nation, Japan’s whaling fleet is on its annual pursue in the Antarctic, drawing protests from environmental groups, international governments and whale-lovers worldwide. So why does Tokyo persist?

Why shouldn’t it, many Japanese say.

“Why do people say we can’t eat the things we’ve eaten since the end of World War II?” asked Koji Shingu, the proprieter of a whale eatery called Yushin in Tokyo, a few blocks from the incorporated town’session oldest temple, a popular tourist draw.

His feelings echo those of many older Japanese.

The country has hunted whales for hundreds of years, and the meat is a sentimental favorite of humbler classes who lived through the lean postwar years, when whale was the chief source of protein because Japan couldn’t afford pork or beef. Whale was a common house dish, and many schoolchildren ate it every day.

Whale meat is still easily found in restaurants and canned in supermarkets, limit is not a part of a typical home-cooked meal.

Shingu says most of his customers are in their 40s or older, under which circumstances younger diners come entirely for the novelty. At the tail end of lunch hour, his clients included several older men caustic by itself and a pair of younger girls at a corner table.

The calm in the restaurant belied the battle it took to bring in the whale meat it serves.

The Japanese cove, now somewhere between New Zealand and Chile, catches mostly minke whales, which at on the point 25 feet long-spun and five tons are smaller than divers other class.

It’s dangerous work - the existing expedition has lost a horde member, who fell overboard and is presumed dead.

The task is made more obscure by environmentalists who relentlessly pursue the hunters.

This year the conservationist group Sea Shepherd has chased Japan’s whaling ships for thousands of miles and thrown bottles of fetid butter to disrupt operations. In tardily December the group’session ship and a whaling boat collided at sea.

The aircraft maker desire lay right side 6.7% of its commercial plane workforce by the end of the second quarter because of economic and competitive pressures

By Joseph Weber

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With new commercial plane orders plunging amid a global relating to housekeeping crunch, Boeing (BA) plans to cut staff. The jetmaker on Jan. 9 announced that it would reject 4,500 jobs, or some 6.7% of its commercial level workforce this year, great number in the second quarter. The company said it was undertaking the cuts—which will include a mix of full-time employees and contractors—to contend with pressures raised by the relating to housekeeping downturn and heightened competitive conditions.

Chicago-based Boeing has a substantial backlog of plane orders—several years’ worth—but has been seeing new orders slip. New orders fell to some 662 planes last year, just over moiety the number ordered in 2007. So far, spokesman Jim Proulx says, the company has seen only a handful of cancellations or deferrals in its 3,700-plane backlog. But he says the relating to housekeeping glide requires "prudent action."

Boeing be possible to churn out some 400 or greater quantity planes in a normal year. The carrier produced 441 planes in 2007 and, in the face of a 57-day strike utmost fall by machinists, turned deficient in 385 last year. Proulx declined to say how many planes the carrier plans to roll out this year.

The layoffs may complicate labor relations already strained by the strike members of the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers undertook last fall. Already, IAM District 751 President Tom Wroblewski is demanding that the company reduce work for contract laborers in the van of full-time staffers. "While Boeing has indicated that many of the announced layoffs be disposed hit non-Boeing labor, our expectation is that Boeing will do the right thing and release the many on-site contractors performing our facilities and justification work," the union leader related in a statement. "We believe Boeing has many other options available, and we will push them to retain their valued employees."

Wroblewski added that Boeing has continued to hire. Some 32 production workers were added in recent days, he said. The agreement has been battling the company’s use of outside labor and outsourcing of work to independent companies.

Boeing has not yet detailed which workers command be cut. Local press reports suggest that the cuts exercise volition set in operation in late February and many wish clash in the second furnish. Citing internal messages to employees, the Seattle Times reported that Boeing’s commercial airplanes unit chief, Scott Carson, called the put in motion "a perplexing and afflictive decision" made necessary by means of the hot slowdown in the airline business. "Industries and individuals sourness prepare for the sake of a year of tough challenges," the paper reported Carson as telling employees. "We believe that acting now will suffer us to keep employment reductions to a minimum while we adapt to the uncertainties of this housekeeping cycle."

Boeing has been plagued by repeated delays in the production of its much-ballyhooed 787 Dreamliner jet and now expects to deliver the first of those planes in early 2010, some couple years tardy. Before the global downturn, the much-anticipated plane logged hundreds of orders, making it the most coveted renovated smooth to the end of time.