MLK wasn't an athlete, but he understood importance of sports

By Dave Zirin

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One thing about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: the man understood sports.

I don't mean that King was any kind of a star athlete. The only sport that the young, roundish "Mike" King was known to excel at was pocket billiards, which isn't exactly a sport (the golden rule: anything that you can gain weight or smoke cigarettes while doing is not a sport). But Dr. King understood with remarkable acuity the political and symbolic power of sports. He understood that the athletic field -- and athletes -- could be a powerful megaphone for civil rights and racial justice. 

Not Another Sports Show

As of today, Broadcaster At-Large welcomes "Not Another Sports Show" to its sports page. NASS is intended to be a weekly audio podcast produced by Damian, Neil, Lori and Caroline. The first episode is about college sports and school priorities. The second episode is about the NFL concussion problem and other health issues. 


These first two episodes are 70 minutes each. Please give them a listen when you can.

Feds Want Rehearing of MLB Drug List Ruling

News Item-- SAN FRANCISCO Tuesday, November 24, 2009 (AP) —  Federal officials are asking for a rehearing of an appeals court decision that said the government illegally seized a list of Major League Baseball players who tested positive for steroids.

Officials say their investigations have been hampered by the ruling, which established new rules for digital searches.

In a court filing Tuesday, the government asked the 27 judges of the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals to reconsider the case.

A panel of 11 9th Circuit judges ruled in August that investigators trampled on protections against unreasonable searches and seizures when they seized the list of 104 players who tested positive in the 2003 season. The investigators were armed with warrants for only the test results of 10 players.
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I hope the feds lose this appeal and you should, too, even if you never watch baseball. They had warrants for ten sets of results and that is all they should have gotten. Those were the results relative to the investigation they were conducting. If they later found evidence indicating that they needed to get results from other players, they could have gone back to a judge for an additional warrant. Grabbing 104 results when they had warrants for 10 is clearly overreaching.

The feds had no excuse for overreaching here. One wonders why they needed as many as ten results, except for the possibility that they wanted a pool of players some of whom they could pressure to rat out the drug designers at the BALCO lab. This was a run-of-the-mill drug investigation, not a terrorism case with lives in imminent danger. The only reason they didn’t get another warrant is that they think they it’s a pain in the butt.

Baseball Videos

I have begun the videos on this page with footage from baseball's dead ball era. All of the footage was taken from You Tube, some of it coming from clips of Ken Burns' great documentary "Baseball." I wanted to include Negro League players, so I looked up Satchel Paige.  I found a two-part documentary, just over 10 minutes long, created for National History Day 2009 by one Thomas Gunn, aged 15, of northern Vermont.  This home-schooled teenager has created a documentary that is worthy of the efforts of someone three times his age.  Have we here the next Ken Burns?

ARCHIVE: Welcome to airline pricing at the ballpark (YUCK!)

by Kellia Ramares

[Originally published on my baseball blog on January 5, 2009]

News Item from MLB.com:

The Giants ... will become the first Major League team to use a "dynamic" pricing structure, in which the team adjusts ticket prices up to the morning of a game based on market demand. [The Rockies do some price adjustment the day of the game but the Giants program is more full-out airline style pricing--KR]. By using a computer model created by Texas-based qcue, the Giants can shift ticket prices -- up or down -- based on the market demand for the game. Among the factors that could influence ticket prices are team performance, the starting pitcher, promotional giveaways or an opponent's team performance.
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qcue's website says: "qcue exploits the synergies between the primary and secondary markets by integrating elements of airline pricing and NASDAQ trading into current selling platforms, providing primary sellers the ability to dynamically price-to-market while hosting a seamlessly integrated secondary market."
Does anyone out there really like airline pricing?

ARCHIVE: The Beauty of Baseball

By Kellia Ramares

[Originally published on by baseball blog on April 24, 2009]

Danny Haren pitched seven innings of shutout ball for the Arizona Diamondbacks against the Colorado Rockies, Wednesday, striking out nine along the way.  But the score at the seventh inning stretch was 0-0. So unless the Diamondbacks scored in their half of the seventh, it looked as though the best Haren would do would be to gain a no-decision.
 
The lack of run support for Haren has been thoroughly frustrating.  In his three previous starts, all quality efforts that met with defeat, the Diamondbacks could manage only one run for him, total for the three games.  Diamondbacks broadcaster Daron Sutton, the former play-by-play man for the Milwaukee Brewers, saw Rockies starter Jorge De La Rosa in the Midwest.  He said Jorge was erratic in those days, showing flashes of brilliance, but then blowing up. On Wednesday, however,  he was every bit the ace Haren was.

ARCHIVE: Pete Rose

[Originally published on my baseball blog on July 30, 2009]
We have just had inductions to the Hall of Fame and the ritual would not be complete without a mention of Pete Rose.
ROSE SHOULD BE IN THE HALL OF FAME. Yeah, he bet in baseball, but unlike the 1919 Black Sox, there is no evidence that he bet against himself or his team or otherwise did anything to throw a game.
Of course, it would have been better if he hadn't gambled at all. Now he's just a parody of himself hawking whatever he can sell. But I wonder if his ban hasn't been lifted because of his attitude rather than his misdeeds. And if so, MLB should look itself in the mirror about its own attitude toward gambling. It's a lot different from the days when Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were suspended from involvement in baseball because of their PR jobs with casinos that involved things like playing golf with the high rollers. Now you can go to Chase Field and watch the players drape themselves over the dugout fence that has VeeQuiva Casino written all over it.
Either Baseball gets the casino names out of its stadiums or it lets Pete Rose back in. I prefer the latter considering the Hall is full of reprobates who have done far worse things than waste money gambling.

ARCHIVE: Greening MLB

[Originally published on my baseball blog on August 8, 2009]
I just got a notice on my Facebook page that there was article talk about how the sports world was looking to be more clean and green. Here is my response:
Speaking as a baseball fan, I think MLB could be more green by going retro at the park. Manually operated scoreboards instead of these monster electronic jobs that use so much electricity. Also day games on the weekends. Take out the free WiFi that is starting to go into stadiums. That must have a carbon foot print. New stadiums should be built with public transit access. Domes in places like Phoenix should be used sensibly. There they leave the dome open and run the A/C in all but the hottest weather so as to give the fans the feel of an outdoor stadium without Phoenix's 100 degree weather. Speaking of Phoenix, what baseball stadium really needs a swimming pool? We have got to get back to the days when we went to the ball park to see a baseball game, not to swim, be on computers or wave our VISA cards to the cameras on the big screen. That would save a lot of energy!
UPDATE: Let's hear some other ideas. How about going back to traditional 2 for the price of one doubleheaders on Sunday and off days on Mondays and Thursday? Having the stadiums dark two days a week would save energy. It would probably be better for the players as well. Most other jobs get two days off per week, why not baseball players? I just heard this weekend that the San Francisco Giants just concluded a streak of twenty days in a row. That's got to mean tired players who are more likely to get injured. And we wonder why players might use amphetamines?