Sports Biz

Getty Images Curt Schilling, former member of the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks World Series team.

In a remarkable reversal of fortune, former major league pitcher Curt Schilling has laid off the entire staff that formed his videogame company, 38 Studios, just months after the company designed its first game.

While Schilling had said he was pleased with the success of the game, "Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning," the company was late on a payment to the state of Rhode Island, which had loaned 38 Studios $75 million in exchange for moving its headquarters to the state.

The Boston Globe has reported the company didn't have enough money to make its May 15th payroll.

Schilling has been quiet amidst the criticism that he failed to live up to his end of the bargain, but was open about his predicament when he appeared on "CNBC SportsBiz" two months ago, though he didn't say at the time his company was in trouble.

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Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton is having an incredible season, leading the American League in average, home runs and RBI.

Getty Images Josh Hamilton

Despite Hamilton’s tear, which included a four home run game on May 8, collectors aren’t exactly fighting for the centerfielder’s memorabilia.

Much of the hesitancy to invest in Hamilton has to do with his past, including drug and alcohol addictions that took him out of baseball for years after he was picked No. 1 overall in the 1999 draft by the Tampa Bay Rays.

“Collectors are scared,” said Matt Powers (@powersco), owner of online sports and memorabilia company, PowersCollectibles.com. “They’re not confident that his story has a great ending because he’s still very active in dealing with his disease.”

Powers says he is one of the largest purchasers of autographed items of Hamilton, who has an exclusive deal with the Major League Baseball Alumni Association. He is pre-selling a ball that Hamilton will sign that includes his four home run inscription with the date.

While it retails for $449, Powers tested the marketplace over the weekend by putting the balls on Groupon for $149. Even at that discount, he didn’t move much.

“I sold maybe 50 balls,” Powers said. “When I did a similar deal with Brian Wilson, who signed ‘Fear The Beard’ on 2010 World Series baseballs, I sold 700 really quickly.”

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In November of 2009, Novak Djokovic signed a 10-year apparel deal with Sergio Tacchini, as his former sponsor adidas put its money in Andy Murray. It was a huge coup for the brand, who once had Pete Sampras and John McEnroe, but hadn’t been able to find relevance.

Getty Images Novak Djokovic

But on Tuesday, Tacchini announced in a statement that the two had mutually decided to part ways. The reasoning? The small brand couldn’t handle the success that the Serbian player had with them.

In their clothes, Djokovic has won four majors, including the Australian Open twice. He has also won 84.7 percent of his matches (161 out of 190) and has been No. 1 in the world for nearly 11 consecutive months.

The story of how the deal unraveled is hard to fathom.

Sources tell CNBC that Tacchini was able to sign Djokovic by offering him a smaller guarantee than the larger companies would pay, but promised bigger should he do well. When Djokovic kept winning, the company fell behind on payments to the tennis star.

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Getty Images

A few years ago, I attended a military recruitment session with NASCAR driver Ryan Newman, who is sponsored by the U.S. Army. Many had criticized the sponsorship as a waste of money, but Newman and an Army official told me that day that the numbers actually made sense.

I took their word for it.

Fast forward to this week. On Thursday, an amendment attached to the $608 billion defense bill that prohibits every sports sponsorship from the U.S. military, was passed by the House Appropriations Committee.

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The hottest NFL rookie endorser, Robert Griffin III, has scored yet another sponsorship deal.

Source: EvoShield

On Thursday, athletic protective gear company Evoshield told CNBC it had signed the No. 2 overall draft pick, who had carved the niche market out of his adidas deal so that he could sign with the brand.

Justin Niefer, Evoshield’s director of product development, said that RGIII was wearing Evoshield since his freshman at Baylor, thanks to a relationship the company had made with the football team’s equipment managers and trainers.

With more people than ever before paying attention to preventative protection on the field, companies in the sports protective gear space have seen sales skyrocket. Niefer says that Evoshield’s revenues have doubled every nine months for the last couple years.

“In the past, no one wanted to wear protective gear until after they got hurt,” Niefer said. “But that has changed. “Schools, teams and now players themselves are finally realizing that their body is their biggest investment. Guys like RGIII have worn our stuff not after he got hurt, but to protect himself from getting hurt.”

The company liked the speedy RGIII to be its first football endorser to help them shed the stigma that protective gear has to be bulky.

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AP

In October, a week after its chancellor agreed to explore leaving the Big 12, the University of Missouri produced a 45-page document, outlining the pros and cons of going to the Southeastern Conference (SEC).

In the report, which the Associated Press said it had obtained, Missouri said it could earn as much as $12 million more per year from an new TV deal in the SEC compared to the deal it had in the Big 12.

The Big 12 asked to see the report, and asked Missouri to show them who did the study and how they came up with the number. Missouri wouldn’t.

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F. Carter Smith | Bloomberg | Getty Images Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp.

As the Oklahoma City Thunder gets ready to take on the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference semifinals tonight, there’s an off-the-court distraction that could impact the team’s business.

Chesapeake Energy

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[CHK  Loading...      ()   ] CEO Aubrey McClendon, who owns 19.2 percent of the Thunder, has been under fire in recent weeks for admitting to his participation in a program that enabled him to buy a personal stake in every well the company drilled.

This, along with pushing the company’s debt up to a reported $15.6 billion and running a hedge fund on the side, resulted in the company agreeing to terminate the program and forcing McClendon to relinquish his chairman title.

So why does this have any impact on Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden?  » Read More

Source: 1-3-dimethylamylamine.com Ten days after the FDA sent warning letters to manufacturers of supplements with DMAA in it, the nation’s largest supplement retailers still have the product on the shelves.

Ten days after the FDA sent warning letters to manufacturers of supplements with DMAA in it, the nation’s largest supplement retailers still have the product on the shelves.

Both GNC

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[GNC  Loading...      ()   ] and Vitamin Shoppe

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[VSI  Loading...      ()   ] continued to sell the popular pre-workout like OxyElite Pro and Jack3d in its online and physical stores as of Tuesday morning.

Vitamin Shoppe CEO Tony Truesdale told analysts on a conference call that he didn’t see the category as an area that could have a material impact on the company’s business. Truesdale pointed out that the company has 8,000 different product offerings and believes it’s diversified to make it through a possible government shutdown of the ingredient.  » Read More

I’ll Have Another wasn’t exactly a huge longshot, but he certainly was getting treated like one. But there was the horse, in Friday’s New York Times, predicted to come in dead last.

“Santa Anita winner has overachieved,” wrote the well-respected Times horse racing reporter Joe Drape,” but there won’t be any magic here.”

Drape was one of the few who boldly predicted how the entire field would finish and decided to put 12 horses with longer odds ahead of I’ll Have Another, who of course went on to win the Derby.

“I did hear about that particular prediction,” said J. Paul Reddam, the horse’s owner. “At first when you read what the pundits say it can kind of be a little bit unnerving because it will be different from your own opinion and you wonder how much bias you have. But if you go and you look, you’ll see that that particular writer had him last, but somebody else had him first.”

That actually would be quite hard to find.

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At the 2010 Keeneland Yearling Sale, bargain hunter Bob Zollars had his eye #1475.

Unable to spend big for a horse by a top sire, Zollars followed the family history of the horse’s mother, Follow Your Bliss, whose was fathered by Thunder Gulch, best known for his win in the 1995 Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes.

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Sports fans have long ditched the fancy hats for caps, except for Derby weekend in Kentucky.

Photo by Karen Stern for CNBC.com

Last year, a hat called the fascinator was all the rage.

The tiny hat owed its rise in popularity to the royal wedding, which took place just weeks before.

Hat maker Christine Moore says the fascinator is still hot, with about 35 percent of her customers still asking for it.

The hot trend this year?  » Read More

The makers of a deer antler velvet product are suing Major League Baseball for libel.

Getty Images

Nutronics Labs alleges that, last summer, the league told its players to stop taking what became one of the latest performance enhancers so as not to risk testing positive for methyltestosterone, even though it wasn’t listed as an ingredient. As a result of what the company calls “false, misleading and malicious” statements by MLB, Nutronics says its business was significantly damaged and as much as $50 million in business could have been lost.

“We were getting calls left and right,” said Dr. Ricardo Lentini, CEO of Nutronics Labs. “People wanted refunds. We kept telling them that what baseball [league] was saying wasn’t the truth. But we’re the little guy, they wouldn’t believe us.”

Major League Baseball spokesman Matt Bourne told CNBC that the league hasn’t seen the lawsuit and therefore cannot comment on it.

Deer antler velvet is harvested from the antlers of young deer that produces a substance called IGF-1, which deer antler velvet sellers say stimulates muscular development and, in athletes, helps to aid recovery.

Major League Baseball sent out its letter a few weeks after St. Louis Rams linebacker David Vobora was awarded $5.4 million in a lawsuit against a company with the brand name Sports With Alternatives to Steroids (SWATS). Vobora tested positive for methyltestosterone after he said he used the company’s deer antler spray. His attorney, R. Dan Fleck, said an independent lab confirmed that fact.

But Lentini, who made the product for S.W.A.T.S., says no deer antler velvet has ever tested positive for methyltestosterone or any steroid contaminant, including a sample Lentini includes in the lawsuit tested by an independent lab. Vobora won a default judgment, as S.W.A.T.S. didn’t show up in court. Soon after, the company filed for bankruptcy.

Although IGF-1 is not banned by Major League Baseball, Lentini said the note had the effect of a ban. Colleges, including Harvard, told their athletes not to take deer antler velvet based on the stories they had seen concerning baseball’s note to its players. Professional athletes stopped ordering the product. The lawsuit includes a letter from two companies who tell Lentini they have to cease business with his company because of Major League Baseball’s opinion.

In August, seeing that his business was slowing down, Lentini sent a letter to commissioner Bud Selig saying that his products did not, in fact, contain methyltestosterone.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Lentini said. “They never even said, let us test one your bottles. Let’s put it this way, if my product had methyltestosterone in it, the FDA would be busting down my doors and I’d be going to jail.”

While the NFL stopped players and even a coach (the Raiders’ Hue Jackson) from endorsing deer velvet companies, they didn’t go as far as Major League Baseball did by making any sort of statement about the legitimacy of it being a clean product.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story should have referred to Dr. Lentini as Dr. Ricardo Lentini.

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