"I call investing the greatest business in the world because you never have to swing. All day you can wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you stand up and hit. Like an oversexed guy in a whorehouse, this is the time to start investing."

- Warren Buffett, Forbes magazine, 1974.

Since the mighty Omaha slugger Warren Buffett made that statement 32 years ago, many fielders have been caught napping and shares in the company Buffett founded, Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRKA), have soared from $5,700 to $87,675 US. That's an approximate 16-fold return. Berkshire shares are up about 5,000 times since 1966 when Buffett took control of the company.

However, times have changed, and the Warren Buffett party has turned into a sombre affair.

If I were a Berkshire shareholder these days, I'd be fed up with watching Buffett stand in the batters' box with his bat on his shoulder, much like a washed-up baseball star who has overstayed his welcome. I'd be wondering if the 75-year-old chairman of Berkshire Hathaway should be considering hanging up the cleats on a dazzling career (fortunately I am not a shareholder as I've been boycotting the stock until such time that Buffett splits Berkshire shares 10,000-to-1 to accommodate us minor-league investors).

The investment world continues to worship Buffett, and yet the world's most famous investor has been nothing but an ordinary investor in the past decade. His batting average has plummeted and it's not the fielders who have been asleep. He has also put his shareholders in a slumber with uninspiring results from a portfolio of unexciting companies well past their prime.

In the past 10 years, Berkshire has merely matched strides with the S&P 500 Index with an annualized return of about nine per cent. That's the sort of return you'd expect from a mediocre mutual fund, but it's hardly what one should expect from the legend regarded by many as the world's greatest all-time investor. Buffett has clearly lost some of his clout.

That became apparent when Buffett recently announced that he was stepping down as a director of Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO), one of the underachievers in Berkshire's portfolio. Shares in Coke, a longtime underperformer, fizzed on the news, gaining 2.5 per cent in four trading days after the announcement.

Buffett, who is said to have a six-pack-a-day Cherry Coke habit, did not say he was stepping down to spend more time drinking them. He said he was stepping down to spend more time with Berkshire Hathaway. Considering his recent track record, some shareholders may want him to spend more leisure time drinking Cherry Cokes.

Buffett was also under pressure to vacate the board by Coke shareholders, who cited a conflict of interest because of Coca-Cola's business dealings with some other Berkshire holdings.

Coca-Cola is a classic example of how the buy-and-hold philosophy that Buffett preaches has failed miserably. Coca-Cola was all the rage in the late 1980s when Buffett began investing in the company, and the stock peaked at $89 US in 1998. But since then, the shares have been cut in half, recently trading at $41.79.

Buffett was a powerful influence on the Coke board and has been roundly criticized for opposing a proposal to buy Quaker Oats in 2000. Coke's arch rival PepsiCo (NYSE:PEP) wound up buying it, benefiting from a robust sports-drink market with Quaker Oats' Gatorade brand.

Buffett, a minor league baseball owner, frequently compares baseball to investing, so he should have known that baseball's best hitters hit to all fields. Yet by shunning technology, Buffett hasn't used the entire field. Ironically, the world's second-richest man rubs shoulders with a technology whiz kid who is even richer, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

As a member of Berkshire's board, it's unlikely that Gates has taken the time to explain to Buffett how upstart Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) has stolen some of Microsoft's thunder.

If the tight-fisted Buffett would get with the times and cough up for a laptop at Costco (Nasdaq:CSCO), another Berkshire holding, he could discover the appeal of the Google brand by simply searching "Warren Buffett" on the Internet, in which case he would get 1,820,000 hits and perhaps grasp the power of this powerhouse search engine.

Since Google went public at $85 US in August 2004, the shares have rocketed 333 per cent while Berkshire shares - leave the room, Berkshire shareholders - have stayed flat during those 19 months.

Ironically, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are great admirers of Buffett and heaped praised on the Oracle of Omaha at the time of the IPO.

While Berkshire shareholders have had to watch a sizzling brand such as Google from the sidelines, Buffett has plodded along with stodgy investments such as Coke and old news such as the Washington Post (NYSE:WPO).

Buffett's latest foray into the market has also been a dud. Since Berkshire started buying Anheuser-Busch (NYSE:BUD) in late 2004, the shares have fizzled by almost 25 per cent.

Buffett was unfairly maligned for ignoring technology in the late 1990s, but a value investor could hardly be blamed for not participating in dot-com mania.

However, he has also had his bat on his shoulder most of the time during the recent raging bull market in commodities.

Although he was reported to be buying silver a few years ago, Berkshire's portfolio hasn't reaped the benefits of any of the major oil and gas or mining companies, many of which have doubled or tripled in recent years.

Berkshire's recent portfolio has been comprised of companies such as Nike (NYSE:NKE), American Express (NYSE:AXP), Outback Steakhouse (NYSE:OSI) and Shaw Communications (NYSE:SJR). Berkshire trimmed its holdings late last year in Calgary-based Shaw just in time to watch the shares run up 25 per cent.

When Berkshire shareholders flock to Omaha this spring for Berkshire's annual meeting, Buffett will be peppered with the usual questions about retirement and succession. But this time, the crowd may become a little ornery.

Nothing much will change though. The unflappable Buffett will be sporting the same brown suit and delivering the same song and dance, perhaps joking once again that he will retire from Berkshire about five years after his death. Two years ago, in Berkshire's annual report, Buffett wrote: "The primary job of our directors is to select my successor, either upon my death or disability ... or when I begin to lose my marbles."

Buffett might even humour his shareholders with more amusing baseball analogies, as he did in that 1974 interview with Forbes.

"It's like Babe Ruth at bat with 50,000 fans and the owner yelling, 'Swing, you bum!' and some guy is trying to pitch him an intentional walk," Buffett said in the 1974 interview of his investing style. "They know if they don't take a swing at the next pitch, the guy will say, 'Turn in your uniform.' " Well, many of Buffett's shareholders may now want the Babe Ruth of investing to turn in his uniform.

And if Buffett doesn't get the bat off his shoulder soon, his stockholders may be the ones yelling, "Swing, you bum!"

* SAGE WORDS: "If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians."

- Warren Buffett.

(Gyle Konotopetz may be reached at gyle@businessedge.ca)