"Sh*t, I forgot his name... nondescript name, no career, probably pitches in Japan or something by now. I'll get back to you on that."
Well, to his credit, the Indian Playa texted me his name before I even got home. Matt White. One of the more interesting stories. Since not too much as been written about him in the sports blogsphere, I thought I would dip my toes and write a brief recap of one of the wildest stories ever, of the rich getting richer variety.
Well, maybe not. Matt White isn't really much of a pitcher. He's pitched 9 and 2/3 innings in the majors for his career, and really is pitching in Japan right now, for the Yokohama Bay Stars. His MLB record was 0-2, with an ERA of 16.76. He's probably made decent money from his pitching career, but he was never a top prospect. He was a 15th round pick in the 1998 draft.
But he made enough that when his aunt needed to raise some money for the nursing home bills in 2003, he was able to help her out by buying her 50 acres in the mountains of Massachusetts, for 50K. When he tried to build a home there, the land was too hard. He called a land surveyor, who broke the news to him: his land was on top of solid Goshen stone, a type of mica schist estimated to be 400 million years old.
Turns out the rock is something special. It sells for $100/ton. There are 50 acres of the stuff on his property. One geologist estimated there was 24 million tons of that stone on his property. That estimated value of the rocks on his land, if he could properly excavate them, is $2.4 billion. That would make him the 131st richest person in America.
He's unlikely to realize that wealth. It makes for a cute little story, but it'll cost a ton of money in start-up costs to actually extract the stone out of the ground. He's made a whopping $60,000 so far extracting it himself. While that might be more than what he originally paid for the land, that's still a far cry from the figure that earned him a nickname in spring training in 2007, one that still follows him around: "Mr. Billionaire".
He wants to sell the land, which he thinks will net him a few million dollars, by most estimates.
Best joke related to this story: The SI article on Matt White includes this line... "sometimes schist happens". Love that one.
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A quick google search on costs of excavation didn't yield much, but I only looked for 30 secs. Maybe someone else can decipher it: http://www.google.com/search?q=Excavation+costs+mica+schist&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
I'm guessing that large-scale excavation costs probably would run 30-50% at most.
Brian: Played for various teams - drafted by the Indians, pitched for the Red Sox in a game against the Yankees at the Stadium (gave up six runs in 2/3 of an inning), and most recently was in the Dodgers spring camp last season.
Indian Playa: Good info. Yeah, the math is almost impossible for someone with limited knowledge in the field to do. The mica schitz under NYC = about $5-7 per cubic yard to excavate. Converting cubic yards to tons is hard... something about dividing by 1.42, and multiplying by the weight of the substance (rock is about 2200-2700), so my rough estimate (based on nothing beyond what I found on different sites) is about $319 million. That presumes the 24 million tons estimate by the geologist is correct. That's a lot of money to invest in something that may not work out right.
So yeah, Matt White's two best options are to either sale the land, and settle for about $2-10 million dollars, or to keep doing small scale excavations to help finance the larger scale excavations (very time consuming process, no doubt).
$2.4B worth of stone, you'd think some mining company would partner up w/ him and excavate. Or maybe they're waiting him out so they can get their hands on it for a couple mil and get rich(er).
Great story. Who did he play for?