Are you going to write a column today, or what?

Buffalonian: So King baby, give us the facts so we can correct Wikipedia and if -- God forbid -- you ever come to a premature end in a bizarre gardening accident,

Rest assured, that's not going to happen.

your obit won't be wrong because some lazy ass journalist couldn't be bothered to do more than google you and read your Wikipedia entry.

Hey, I'll be dead. What will I care? I'll answer a couple though.

Is your wife very tall or are you not so tall? (See picture: http://www.indiebride.com/essays/king/index.html)

She's pretty tall, but she's also wearing some big ol' heels there. I'm about two and a half inches taller than she is when I stand up straight. I'm not quite 6 feet.

How does one not remember where the pick up a pair of USAF dress pants? Do you buy this sort of thing all the time?

Don't you?

How did you end up in St Louis?

I went to Kansas City and refrained from turning.

Having lived in Oakland, do you believe that there is a 'there' there?

Yes, and that quote is always taken out of context. She wasn't talking about Oakland. She was takling about her childhood home. I think.

JLS: hahahahahahahahaha...

The King and Steve Garvey. hilarious.

Of all the things ever ascribed to you King, that's gotta cut the deepest.

I did grow up rooting for the Dodgers, and for Steve Garvey, though my favorite player from that rather long era was Davey Lopes. I converted to Giants fandom as an adult.

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.

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?

J said: "A-Rod: The problem with A Rod is that he's paid twice as much, give or take, than any other player in the league and he's NOT TWICE AS GOOD. So he's NOT ALLOWED to fuck up or be in a slump. That's why people hate him. He hasn't, nor has he ever, earned that ridiculous paycheck - he's never been twice, or even ane and a half, times better than the next player. If he got paid 100 million, there would be much less bitching about him."

The first premise certainly isn't true: Alex Rodriguez makes twice as much as plenty of players, but certianly not "any other player" in the league. Manny Ramirez and Curt Schilling make more than half of A-Rod's salary, as do seven other Yankees, three Mets, Pujols, Thome, Bagwell, Petitte, Clemens (prorated), Mike Hampton, Andruw Jones, Bonds, Colon, Vlad, Magglio Ordonez, amd maybe a few others that I missed. (You can look here: http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/teamSalary?categoryId=71588)

The second flaw here is that being twice as good as any other player (let's substitute the "average" player here) is damn near impossible. Take, for example, the career OPS+ numbers in baseball history. (I would have used VORP or something else, but I couldn't find that stuff--someone feel free to keep looking.) Babe Ruth is 207 for his career, the only career OPS+ over 200 (see the rest here: http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/OPSplus_career.shtml)

An OPS+ over 200 happens for a given season (Bonds has done it several times, including some insane numbers of 262, 275, and 260. Ruth's highest was 239.)

To address Alex Rodriguez specifically, his career OPS+ is 145, which includes two anomolously bad years before he turned 20 and which makes him 14th among active players. (Check here for the rest of the list, which includes a few surprises: http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/OPSplus_active.shtml)

Note that he is pretty much 50% better than an average player.)

To use Jeter for the sake of comparison again, his career OPS+ is 121. He makes about 80% of Rodruguez's yearly salary ($20M compared to $25M), and the Yankees pay about $16M of Rodriguez's yearly salary, while they pay all of Jeter's. Yankee fans or anyone else is entitled to despise Alex Rodriguez, but to argue that he underperforms by the numbers is difficult, especially when plenty of ballplayers have subpar years by their otherwise impressive standards. See Ruth's "paltry" OPS+ of 137 in 1925.

With regard to "what happened to A-Rod", I always look back on his last game as a Mariner, Game Six of the 2000 ALCS with the Yankees. The Mariners had blown a lead (Lou Piniella didn't remember not to pitch Arthur Rhodes in Yankee Stadium) and in the eighth inning A-Rod brought them back into the game with a homer. Then in the ninth he doubled and you could watch him standing on second base literally trying to will Edgar Martinez to get a hit and keep the game going. Here was a man leading his team by example, even to the extent of pushing the man who was his mentor and surrogate father.

A lot of that fire seemed to disappear from A-Rod the day he got his contract with the Rangers, but at the same time, it never seemed to affect his day-to-day performance on the field. So the "swing" explanation makes a lot of sense.

The issue I had with King's position on Clarett's attempt at early entry was that it ignored the fact that it was for the NFL and the NFLPA to set the rules for who can be an NFL player by collective bargaining. Clarett essentially wanted to have a special set of rules for Maurice Clarett. Whether it's good or bad or indifferent for the NFL to deny an individual player the right to play before a certain age or period since high school is a nice issue to talk about, but it's longterm public policy in this country that such rules are subject to collective bargaining, even if the collective bargaining might leave persons who are on neither side of that bargaining out in the cold.