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.