Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Takin’ it to the streets


They're protesting public funding for the Marlins' ballpark down in Miami:

Elected officials, community organizations, business owners and others gathered outside the Fillmore at the Jackson Gleason Theater in Miami Beach on Tuesday, explaining how the proposed Marlins baseball stadium would divert needed money from the local economy.

One member of the coalition, City of Miami Beach Commissioner Dee Dee Whitehorn, said, "I implore we go slow and do our homework" . . .

. . . The coalition also claims that current agreements to build the 37,000-seat stadium could force the county to tap into its general revenue funds, which it suggests would affect on local services.

Coalition members includes Clergy for Change; Urban Environment League; Human Services Coalition; Miami Neighborhoods United; Democracy for America; The Workers Center; Health Care For All; Former Rep. Gus Barreiro; Philanthropist Anthony Shriver; Miami Community Activist Jack Spirk; FIU law school student Mayowa Odusanya; South Miami Commissioner Valerie Newman; Kendall Community Activist Pat Erwin; Hialeah Community Activist Mercy Dominguez.

Given my leanings on issues like this I'd like to think that this represented something important, but really, protesting is a dead art. These days no one moves anyone in mass about much of anything. Instead, you issue press releases and make sure that your smallish group fills up the five seconds of TV air time the locals allot you. As such, you never know if a movement is truly a groundswell or simply an assemblage of motivated fringe types.

I hope this sort of thing actually moves Miami-Dade officials to say no to the stadium, but I kind of doubt it will.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 3:40pm (6) Comments

The Dodgers make their move


If you would have asked me three months ago whether it would more likely that Manny Ramirez or Jeff Weaver had a job come mid-February, I would not have bet on Jeff Weaver. Of course, I would have lost that bet.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 3:08pm (1) Comments

CRS Report on the Curt Flood Act


Legislation geeks -- and I know you exist and read this blog -- will be interested to know that the Congressional Research Service (i.e. the outfit which does all of Congress's research) is working to make its reports available to the public. One of the reports made public last week was the report that ultimately led to the enactment of the Curt Flood Act of 1998, which stripped the owners of its antitrust exemption in the area of labor matters.

Like the steroid stuff, you'll either think it's really cool or it will bore you to tears, but I made it my mission long ago to bother everyone at one time or another, so there you are.

(thanks to reader Redsauce for the link)
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 2:42pm (2) Comments

When it rains it pours


I know everyone wants to talk about real baseball right now, but this blog has always followed the news, and the news just seems to be going this way lately:

Former Baltimore Orioles shortstop Miguel Tejada was charged today with lying to congressional investigators about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

Federal prosecutors accused Tejada of making misrepresentations to congressional staffers during an interview in a Baltimore hotel room focusing on the prevalence of steroids in the game.

The charge came in "a criminal information," a document that can be filed only with the defendant's consent and usually signals a plea deal is near. Tejada, who now plays for the Houston Astros, is scheduled to appear at 11 a.m. tomorrow in U.S. District Court in Washington, court officials said.

Prosecutors did not charge Tejada with lying about allegations concerning his own steroids use.

Instead, they accuse Tejada of giving false statements to congressional staffers about his conversations with another player about steroids and human growth hormone.

He will later be charged by the ESPN Outside the Lines police force for not responding to inquiries about his age last year.

Ya think it's a coincidence that both this and the A-Rod leak are happening all a couple of weeks before the Bonds trial? I sure don't. In fact, I can almost see this as an orchestrated operation in order to bolster the opening and closing statements of the Bonds prosecutors. Rather than refer to lies about a raid five years ago, the prosecutor can stand up and say "this was no innocent lie! The headlines in just the past month show that the scourge of steroids is as rampant as ever! Like A-Rod and Tejada, Bonds is a ballplayer who thinks he's above the law and worked to thwart an important government investigation!"

Now excuse me, I'm off to adjust my tinfoil.

(thanks to Shane S. for the link)
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 2:00pm (2) Comments

MLBPA’s Statement (with UPDATE)


I'm bumping this back up to the top because I have an update in response to several good comments and I want to explain my thinking further. Scroll down to the update to see it.

Via Maury, the MLBPA has issued a statement regarding the destruction, or lack thereof, of the 2003 tests:

We are issuing this statement today to respond to two questions that have been raised in the last few days in connection with reports about Alex Rodriguez and the 2003 MLB testing program. First, it has been asked why the results from our 2003 survey tests were not destroyed before they were seized by the government in the spring of 2004. The short answer is that in November, 2003, before that could take place, a grand jury subpoena for program records was issued. . .

. . . The MLBPA first received results on Tuesday, November 11. Those results were finalized on Thursday, November 13, and the players were advised by a memo dated Friday, November 14. Promptly thereafter, the first steps were taken to begin the process of destruction of the testing materials and records, as contemplated by the Basic Agreement. On November 19, however, we learned that the government had issued a subpoena.

The real question -- and I'm guessing someone has already answered this already, but I can't seem to find it -- is what that November 19, 2003 subpoena actually sought. My understanding is that it sought the results for the BALCO 10, and not every player in baseball. This squares with Jon Heyman and Mark Fainaru-Wada's reports that, after the subpoena, the MLBPA litigated the crap out of things for months, and then and only then did the feds swear out a search warrant for the test results of all players.

If that was the case -- and please, someone correct me if I'm wrong -- Fehr is being disingenuous here, because it means that A-Rod and every other non-BALCO player's results were not subject to a subpoena at that time and thus could have been legally destroyed. Yes, I presume someone could make the argument that destroying non-subpoenaed records when a subset of those records had been subpoenaed is a dangerous game, but as subsequent court rulings have shown -- and common sense could have dictated at the time -- the non-BALCO player's records had no place whatsoever in the underlying litigation, and were not discoverable/seizeable/whatever. And I will not accept a response that goes "well, we kept them around out of an abundance of caution." Maybe you do that with ordinary documents when a subset is subpoenaed, but MLBPA had affirmative legal duties with respect to the non-subpoenaed records. First, to keep them confidential, second to destroy them. Those duties at least equal any duty to vastly overpreserve records in response to a subpoena of dubious enforceability to begin with.

So again, if I am wrong about the timeline here, someone please correct me. If I'm not, Fehr has some more explaining to do than this.

UPDATE: Several commenters and emailers have taken me to task for counseling such a cavalier approach to document destruction. The gist of these comments: True, the non-BALCO samples were not technically in the subpoena, but surely you're not so reckless as to have destroyed something related to the subpoenaed items, are you? No wonder you're unemployed you unethical jackass!

OK, no one said that last part because you're all polite, but that's where it's heading. Anyway, here's my response:

I don't think they should have just destroyed the non-subpoenaed samples without thought, because yes, that is risky. However, the fact remains that the MLBPA had duties to the all of the players -- especially the non-BALCO players -- to protect their confidentiality and to eventually destroy the samples. As such, merely saying "let's hold these samples indefinitely and see how it plays out because we'd hate to run afoul of a future subpoena" was irresponsible. It elevated a potential future duty above an actual current duty, and that's not acceptable.

But it's true: you dance with the devil whenever you destroy anything that you can one day imagine being subpoenaed. But when presented with these two incompatible options, rather than simply ignore the duty to the players, why didn't the MLBPA ask the court for guidance? Why didn't they file a dec action -- or at the very least request a conference with the judge -- in which they (a) explained their duty to destroy the records that were not subject to the BALCO subpoeana; and (b) explained that in carrying out that duty, they don't want to run afoul of any future claim by the government that the records were necessary to a prosecution. In other words, why didn't they say "Help us Court!"

If they had done that, at that point the government would have to come in and make the argument for the relevance of and necessity for the non-BALCO samples. Which, as subsequent history shows, they wouldn't have been able too (they've been ruled as improperly seized and not-relevant). If the court had ruled in favor of the MLBPA, they could have destroyed them. If the court had ruled in favor of the government, well, at least the players would have had a lot more advance warning of the possibility that their samples were compromised. If the court couldn't decide at that early time whether the records were relevant it could have taken possession of the samples and held them in safe keeping until the matter became clearer.

But none of that was ever on the table. Rather, the MLBPA just sat on their current obligations to the players in deference to a hypothetical later subpoena. With the playing field wide open, the government took the initiative and seized the non-BALCO records. From that point forward, the MLBPA had to play defense instead of offense, with the consequences being the leak we just had. Personally speaking, I find that unacceptable.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 1:30pm (13) Comments

Quantifying the blowback


Yesterday I dismissed the notion that the A-Rod stuff would have a negative impact on the Yankee brand, as it were. I still believe that, but that doesn't mean that there won't be some repercussions in fanland. I am far too old and lame to understand how social networks actually work, but THT's own Bryan Tsao -- whose day job is to design sports-related apps for you young hipsters to plug into the Facebook and the Prodigy and the GEOS and whatnot -- has noticed something interesting:

Well, it just so happens that here at Watercooler, we have a New York Yankees fan community across the major social networks that allow users to express their fandom. And here is a table with the total number of users with our application installed, along with the number of new users added per day for the past two weeks [table delted here because I keep messing up the formatting, but click through to see it]

So while users have continued to add the app, the number of new users from this past weekend represent a 20% drop from the number of new users from a week before, despite 71% of Yankees fans in our app saying that they accept A-Rod’s apology for using steroids. Of course, there could be structural factors causing a decrease in the rate of new fans. However, while a check of MLB-wide stats also shows in a decline in the rate of new fans, the fall in rate is only 5.5% across all baseball apps in our social networks.

I'm not sure what's better: democracy or statistical analysis.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 10:15am (6) Comments

Selena and A-Rod


I'm not sure what to make of Alex Rodriguez's claim that Selena Roberts "stalked" him in the leadup to this weekend's story, but it's certainly the case that Rodriguez has been in Roberts' sights for a long time. Let's take the wayback machine to December 7, 2007, when Roberts ran a hatchet job on A-Rod in the pages of the New York Times.

For those of you too busy or too lazy to click the link, the upshot was that Roberts snooped around A-Rod's Miami business and charitable interests and found some mildly unflattering things. The article itself, however, was full of over-the-top bombast and even distortion, all of which made Roberts' disdain for Rodriguez abundantly clear.

Like I said, it doesn't detract from the current story, which appears to be straight up and factual, but it certainly should put us on guard for what Roberts writes in order to capitalize on this big scoop. Like, say, the A-Rod book she has written and which will soon be published.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 9:30am (13) Comments

Contempt


I certainly wouldn't want to be Alex Rodriguez right now, but it would be way better to be him than whoever it was dropped the dime on him:

The judge in the Barry Bonds perjury case could find BALCO prosecutors, investigators or officials in contempt if evidence connects them to the leak of formerly anonymous 2003 Major League baseball drug tests that resulted in allegations that Alex Rodriguez took steroids.

A source familiar with the proceedings between the government and MLB players union said, “It is not possible this was leaked without there being a violation of the law.”

There's a lot more to it, so anyone interested should read it all. The kicker here is that the question of whether those tests -- A-Rod's included -- should ever have been seized in the first place is still pending before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. If they find that the original search warrants were illegal, the leaker will not only have violated the court order of a U.S. District Court judge, but he will have exacerbated the violation of the players' Constitutional rights. The former will get that person sanctioned by Judge Illston. The latter, assuming the leaker was a lawyer, could very well get him disbarred.

In any event, I sure hope Selena Roberts is enjoying her victory lap over her scoop, because she may very soon find herself in front of Judge Illston being ordered to reveal her sources.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 7:20am (6) Comments

Today at THT


What to read while trying to get your mind around the fact that a guy who makes more than $25 million a year casually uses the term "loosey-goosey." Yes, the rich are different than you and me:

  • Done with the position-by-position thing, Treder lists the ten best right-handed batting, left-handed throwing players in Major League history. I won't give away #1 on the list, but man does he stand head and shoulders above the other nine.


  • Dan McLaughlin (a/k/a the Baseball Crank) has part two of his series on the best catchers in the post-1920 period, this time focusing on guys with shorter peaks. As with the BR-TL guys, it's somewhat surprising to see how quickly you get into more or less ordinary players as you go down the list. I mean, there simply haven't been a ton of truly, truly outstanding catchers, at least in the terms in which we normally think of superstar baseball players. This, by the way, only makes me more upset that Crash Davis never got a real shot despite his obvious ability to work with pitchers and considerable pop.


  • Josh Kalk examines pitch sequencing. You won't be surprised to learn that there's an advantage to having a plan when you take the mound.


  • Finally, over at Fantasy Focus, Paul Singman talks replacement level. If you have trouble identifying replacement level for yourself, just look at the Padres lineup this year and you'll have a good idea what it replacement level truly is.


    • In closing, I'd just like to say how sorry I am for what happened back in December when I fist came to THT. Back then it was a different culture. It was very loose. I was young. I was stupid. I was naive, and I wanted to prove to everyone that, you know, I was worth, you know — and being one of the greatest bloggers of all time. When I arrived at THT, I felt an enormous amount of pressure. I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day. And I did take a banned substance -- Mrs. Shyster doesn't allow Red Bull in the house, but I drank it anyway.

    And, you know, for that I’m very sorry and deeply regretful. And although it was the blogging culture back then, you know, I’m just sorry. I’m sorry for that time. I’m sorry to reader. It wasn’t until then that I ever thought about energy drinks of any kind.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 5:53am (6) Comments