The first three rounds of baseballs First Year Player Draft will take place this evening. The first round of the draft will be shown live on MLB Network. There will be five selections in the first round that constitute compensation for Type A free agents that were signed during the off-season. The list is as follows: Number 17 – Diamondbacks from Dodgers for Orlando Hudson; number 24 – Angels from Mets for Francisco Rodriguez; number 25 – Angels from Yankees for Mark Teixeira; number 27 – Mariners from Phillies for Raul Ibanez; and number 32 – Rockies from Angels for Brian Fuentes.

more…

After Ohio State star running back Maurice Clarett won a sweeping victory before U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in his 2004 case challenging the NFL’s age eligiblity rule, the NFL appealed Judge Scheindlin’s ruling and a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit heard the oral arguments. Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whom President Obama has nominated to the Supreme Court, was one of the three judges and she wrote the opinion in favor of the NFL. The opinion excluded Clarett and similarly situated players from the 2004 draft.

more…

Jimmy Golen of the Associated Press interviews several people, including Harvard Law prof Wendy Seltzer and me, over St. Louis Cardinals’ Manager Tony La Russa’s recent lawsuit against Twitter and subsequent settlement over a guy creating a fake Twitter account, purporting to be La Russa. An excerpt of the story is below.

more…

Mike’s post about Congressman Cohen’s letter to David Stern urging repeal of the NBA’s age limit raises an interesting question. Past efforts by members of Congress on the issue of steroids (hearings, letters to the Union and the Commissioner’s Office, etc.) have been derided as political grandstanding and a waste of time and met with a jeering “don’t they have better things to worry about than baseball?”. Same with criticisms of, and hearings about, the BCS (led, if I recall, by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch).

more…

New York labor and employment attorney Louis Pechman of Berke-Weiss & Pechman has a very interesting analysis on the possibility of the NBA’s age limit violating age discrimination laws. Here is an excerpt from his piece:
more…

U.S. Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee) has written to NBA commissioner David Stern and NBPA executive director Billy Hunter asking them to eliminate the NBA’s age limit, which requires that a player be 19 years old plus one year removed from high school in order to be eligible for the NBA Draft (the rule was negotiated in 2005; previously, players could join the NBA right after finishing high school). The NBA and NBPA will be negotiating a new CBA in the near future and the age limit will likely be a source of tension between the two bargaining units. There are several stories on Congressman Cohen’s request. Gary Parrish of CBS Sportsline has one of them and it’s excerpted below.

more…

On Saturday evening, the middle game of a three-game series between the Minnesota Twins and the Tampa Bay Rays, Francisco Liriano and David Price, were the starting pitchers for their respective teams. Price picked up his first regular season win in the game after throwing 108 pitches in five and two-thirds innings, while Liriano dropped to 2-7 and his ERA increased to 6.60 in the 5-2 victory for the Rays. Early in the season, a number of reporters and bloggers were surprised that David Price, the 2007 number one draft choice from Vanderbilt, was being sent down to Durham for more minor league work. Jayson Stark of ESPN was one who offered some observations in Believe it or not, Price headed to minors. Although his spring performance included a 1.08 ERA, Stark reviewed Tampa Bays reasoning and argued that the move was not done for financial reasons because the terms of Prices initial six-year deal protected the Rays. However, when looking closer at the terms of Prices $8,500,000 contract, it appears that he has the right to void the annual salary in the original deal and file for arbitration in any year where he reaches arbitration-eligibility.

more…