The St. Louis Cardinals franchise increased in value by 5 percent last year, Forbes magazine estimates in its latest ranking of Major League Baseball team values. The team is worth $484 million, in Forbes’ estimation, making it the ninth-most-valuable of 30 MLB…

The publicity-hungry folks at Challenger Gray and Christmas like to play fast and loose with numbers when we get close to NCAA basketball tournament time. This year, they project that employers face $1.7 billion in lost productivity from all those Web-surfing,…

Dave Checketts, owner of the St. Louis Blues, seemed to be in an expansive mood this morning when he spoke at a Regional Chamber and Growth Association breakfast. Last night’s 6-1 victory certainly didn’t hurt, but Checketts had plenty of other good…

If you want a visual representation of the Missouri Tigers’ sudden rise to national prominence, take a look at the above chart from TradeSports.com.   The online futures exchange, based in Ireland, is essentially  a way for  fans to bet money on…

Forbes magazine has just published a list of hockey-team valuations, and it shows a not-too-bright economic picture for the St. Louis Blues. The Note rank 29th in Forbes’ estimation of what the team is worth, and they’re only $1 million ahead…

With March Madness  coming to town tomorrow, now’s  a good time to reread a piece that former St. Louisan Russell Roberts wrote last month about the business side of college sports. Roberts, writing in the Boston Globe, notes that college sports have  come to…

Here at Mound City Money, we love to poke holes in  Challenger Gray and Christmas’ outlandish estimates of  time-wasting by sports-crazed employees. (See our Super Bowl post, for example).  The  Chicago outplacement firm’s latest figure is that employers will lose at…

When there’s a major sports event coming up, business reporters can count on getting a news release  from Challenger Gray & Christmas. The usual refrain is that the big game costs employers money because workers spend so much time gossiping…

The Super Bowl won’t be decided for nearly two weeks, but we already know which way the Super Bowl indicator is pointing: It says 2007 should be a good year for the stock market.

That’s because both Super Bowl teams, the…

The RCGA leadership trip to Atlanta is over, I’ve caught up on sleep and cleaned out my inbox. Now it’s time to pull a few final tidbits of information out of the notebooks and the memory banks.

• While we were listening…