The baseball season is well underway and as any rabid fan will tell you; a baseball game can be very much like the game of life. Several financial executives recently used baseball as a metaphor while discussing what stage we’re at in the credit and distressed debt crisis.

Mary Ann Bartels, chief market analyst at Merrill Lynch, said she thinks we’re in the seventh inning of the credit crunch. “We’ve seen the vast deleveraging of financial assets by financial services companies, and we’re now in the final stages,” she said. “We’re seeing the final wave of capital raising , with common stock sold or direct investments from sovereign wealth funds.”

“Now it’s time to think about how credit issues will ripple through the economy,” she added. However, she said that there is “so much cash on the sidelines waiting to buy cheap assets,” that there should be money for cash-strapped companies that want to avoid bankruptcy.

A very different point of view came from Pamela Lawrence, founder and co-portfolio manager of Restoration Capital. She said “I think we’re only in the second or third inning of the credit crisis.” She added that in the distressed debt market she thinks there is a lot more bad news to come.

“Where is the future in distressed debt—I don’t think all the bad news is out,” she said. She pointed out that the banks are not lending money and that there are still a lot of companies “with little room for error on their balance sheets.” She thinks more companies are going to start defaulting on their debt. “The default rate is starting to creep up,” she said.

The industries that she thinks could have severe problems include autos, retailing and homebuilders. “There are a lot of retailers with a lot of debt and very little room for error on their balance sheets,” she said.

Derek van Eck, principal of Van Eck Associates, which manages commodity funds,
said in terms of the commodity markets “we’re going into extra innings in the ball game.”
He believes that the forces driving commodity prices higher “are very powerful.”

He said that with global growth and with countries such as China willing to pay high prices for commodities, prices should continue rising. He added that while speculators have played a part in driving up prices “it’s impossible to say how much impact they’ve had.”

He’s also bullish on the prospects for coal, which is “the cheapest fuel around and very cheap in relation to natural gas.” In countries such as China and India where there is less attention paid to environment concerns, coal could become a major fuel for their power plants.

Why would a woman help her boyfriend evade the police and then take the fall for that deed?

Lots of smart women do dumb things when they’re in love, and this seems to be especially true when the boyfriend is a loser.

Debra Ryan, the girlfriend of Bayou Group founder Samuel Israel, helped the hedge fund fraudster disappear on June 9, the day he was due to report to federal prison hospital in Massachusetts, to serve a 20-year sentence for the crimes he committed with other people’s money.

That day, his SUV was found abandoned on the Bear Mountain Bridge, with the words “suicide is painless” scrawled on the hood.

Ryan was arrested last week and charged with aiding and abetting Israel’s flight from justice. She could face as much as 10 years in prison if convicted of the crime. Currently, she is free on $75,000 bail.

Israel was sentenced earlier this year to 20 years in prison for his role in defrauding investors in Bayou Group LLC of more than $400m.

Ryan, 45, admitted she helped Israel prepare a recreational vehicle on the days before he fled, and even helped him stow the RV at a rest area 20 miles from the Bear Mountain Bridge where his SUV was found, and then drove him back to their Armonk, NY home.

So they were close enough to share a home. Maybe they can get the feds to let theml share a prison cell.

There’s a nationwide alert out for Israel, who’s believed to be driving a $50,000 2007 white Coachman Freelander motor home. Israel is believed to still be in the area and living in the RV, which may have a blue 2005 Yamaha motor scooter strapped to the back end, according to a story in the New York Post.

Ryan, according to the complain filed against her, admitted she “helped Israel pack the RV with (his) belongings,” And then, on the morning he vanished, Israel “woke (Ryan) up and told her that he needed her help” and then had her follow him in her own care while he drove the motor home to a highway rest area near the junction of Interstate 684 and I-84.

Why did she do it? As I said, lots of smart women do dumb things for love, especially, for some strange reason, when the guy is a loser.