2 Jeter, Derek $ 20,600,000 New York Yankees

So much for the old adage that Jeters never prosper.

smileyy said:

Given that the NFL and NFLPA constitute a monopoly on the highest level of professional football, could an athlete argue he was being discriminated against based on age by that monopoly?

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) prohibits discrimination based on age only against those 40 and older. It doesn't prohibit discrimination because people are too young.

One of the problems in both football and basketball is that there is no minor league system to help groom younger players, so the college versions of those two sports has acted as their minor leagues. Unlike with baseball, though, movement from the minors to the majors is strictly a one-way street.

Because of that, there is value in encouraging athletes in those sports to hold off attempting to join the major leagues until they are somewhat older and have some college education under their belt.

Unfortunately, the rules have been written in such a way that they punish those who choose incorrectly and go undrafted. Why should an athlete lose all eligibility just because they made themselves available to be drafted? Those who go undrafted are in a bad situation.

Any of the organizational bodies involved could solve that. The NCAA could decide that making one's self eligible for the draft doesn't strip a player of eligibility if they go undrafted. The leagues could say that all players above a certain age are eligible to be drafted--it's then the teams that take a risk in drafting a player who may or may not decide that they want to leave school that year.

smileyy, was that you who added the Buster reference to the Wikipedia article?

Whoever did it, good job. Now it just needs to mention King's obsession with curling. Oh, and the What The Heck™ Pick (or is it What the Heck Pick™?)

I can't believe that King's Wikipedia article doesn't mention his main claim to fame--his offspring, Buster, the coin-flippingest (however many years old he happens to be at the time)-year-old in America. An accompanying picture of Buster's thumb would be appropriate, too.

It's sad about Maurice Clarett.

We can never know what would have happened if Maurice Clarett hadn't tried to, and been prevented from, entering the NFL early, but if anything, his case can be an argument against the ambiguity at the time. If it had been clear that he wouldn't be allowed to enter the NFL early, then he wouldn't have lost his NCAA eligiblity, at least not in the way he did.

On the other hand, if he had been allowed to enter the NFL draft in 2003, perhaps he would have been drafted early, shown up to camp in shape, and be well on his way to a successful career. That's also a plausible scenario.

It seems not many people have caught this part of Tony Snow's remarks yesterday:

"Now, when the United States walked away, in the opinion of Osama bin Laden in 1991, bin Laden drew from that the conclusion that Americans were weak and wouldn’t stay the course and that led to September 11th."

This says to me that he's putting a large part of the blame for the attacks of 9/11/01 on the first Bush administration.

The video can be found at http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/09/snow-lamont/

So it's a little strange to go to the IHYH site and see ads for Hummers.

Besides, if they really wanted to be edgy, their site would be "igaveahummerinyourhummer.com".

We're living in a difficult time for sports. Individual sports, for the most part, are taking the biggest hit. As I've written here before, when an athlete in an individual sport tests positive, the fans lose the ofject of their fandom. When an athlete in a team sport tests positive, the fans just lose a piece of that object.

There are numerous problems with the current approach to drugs in sports. Two of the problems stem from the same issue--the tests themselves aren't perfect, so it appears to the public that some people are able to cheat and not get caught, while others test positive even though they weren't cheating. It seems unlikely that we'll ever perfect the testing technology to eliminate false positives and false negatives.

Given the status quo, which I don't foresee ending anytime soon, one way to reduce the damage caused by false positives is to strictly enforce a policy of non-announcement of a first positive test. Every time there's an announcement that an athlete's A sample has tested positive, that athlete will be under a cloud of suspicion for the duration of their career, even if the B sample tests negative.

Another part of the problem is that some of the marker tests use assumptions that may be faulty--we don't really understand how exercise effects hormone levels, but it's clear it does have an effect. Floyd Landis' elevated testosterone level may simply have been a result of physiological processes.

I'm sad to see the effect of multiple doping scandals on cycling--it truly is an exciting sport, demanding more from its athletes than any other sport. It may take a very long time for the sport to recover.

Great list, hnutsworth, (though I'd substitute Gin-n-tonic for Vodka-tonic), but there's one more to add:

Platoonic: There are actually two definitions for this one. The first is the relationship among soldiers, the second is the relationship between two players who share playing time at the same position (see, I was able to make it sports-related).

That must be one that comes around every 248 years. Ya gotta be patient to have one of those, I'm telling ya.