ESPN:

The federal judge handling the lawsuit against the NFL ordered the sides to participate in court-supervised mediation, while saying Monday she still is considering whether to grant the players’ request for a preliminary injunction to lift the lockout.

U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson said formal mediation will begin Thursday before Chief Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan at his office in a Minneapolis courthouse. He will meet with representatives of the players Tuesday, then representatives of the NFL on Wednesday.

Yesterday’s nationally televised trouncing of the Boston Celtics by the endlessly hyped and overrated Miami Heat — the Celts had won all three previous engagements against them this season — was the starkest evidence yet that Celtics GM Danny Ainge’s decision to blow up a dominant team mid-season has backfired. The Celtics have lost their mojo, at the worst possible time.

Ainge’s most controversial move — trading center Kendrick Perkins, one of the NBA’s best low-post defenders and much-loved teammate, along with guard Nate Robinson to the Oklahoma City Thunder for forward Jeff Green, big man Nenad Krstic, and a future draft pick — made sense on paper. After all, Perk had barely played this season, recovering from a knee blown out in last year’s finals against the Lakers, and was a free agent next year, while the Celts had played brilliantly through the first half of the season with ancient Shaquille O’Neal clogging the paint, shooting a spectacular 67 percent from the field, and integrating seamlessly with the team. Moreover, Green is only 24, extremely versatile, and unselfish in the classic Celtic mold, and Krstic is a better offensive player than Perk.

Basketball is the most team-oriented of sports, however, and the trade, breaking up the starting five that won the 2007–08 NBA championship and has never lost a playoff series, has clearly poisoned the Celtics’ chemistry, costing them big games and the top spot in the east. The problem hasn’t really been the new additions: Krstic has been better than advertised and Green has shown flashes of brilliance, though he has had difficulty adjusting to coming off the bench. No, moving Perk has seemingly had its most damaging effect on the play of his close friend, point guard Rajon Rondo, who actually has seemed depressed on the court since the deal. And as Rondo goes, so go the Celtics — as his play has deteriorated, for example, so have Ray Allen’s shooting opportunities.

With only two games left in the regular season, the Celtics now look to the return of 39-year-old Shaq from various leg ailments to provide the spark missing of late — a scenario no one would have anticipated before the season began.

— Brian C. Anderson is the editor of City Journal and a fan of the Boston Celtics.

.206 and 2-13 vs. the Red Sox.

Good morning, campers!

If you are playing catch-up, here are topics we discussed in Right Field over the past seven days:

• The need to take sample size into account
  
• The greatness of Stan Musial
  
• A Barry Bonds trial update
• The likelihood of contraction
• The Yankees and Red Sox (Shock of shocks!)
• Milwaukee’s Miller Park
  
• Andrew McCutchen and his Pirates
• Manny Ramirez, pre-retirement
  
• A Rotisserie story
• Alec Baldwin versus John Krasinski
  

And here is some other interesting stuff that transpired:

• An advance copy of a book about Musial will reveal that the Cardinals legend has been battling Alzheimer’s Disease for several years.
• There is no one out and speedy runners are on first and second of an extra inning game. The batter hits a deep fly down the right-field line, but the ball is clearly foul. If you are the right fielder, do you let the ball drop? Scott Cousins did. Michael Jong of Marlin Maniac analyzed the decision.
• Sam Fuld might have made the catch of the year at The Cell on Saturday afternoon, but check out the White Sox fan who raced over to congratulate curse out the right fielder. Stay classy, South Siders!
• Given a choice, Pedro Martinez told The New York Times’ Joe Brescia that he would enjoy finishing his spectacular career in a Red Sox uni.
• Speaking of awesome pitching, has it really been 30 years since Fernando Valenzuela pitched in his first Major League game? Jon Weisman published a retrospective.
• Dave Cameron of FanGraphs explained the site’s new “minus” stats.
• Brien at IIATMS asked, “Does [Brett] Gardner take too many strikes?”

To be fair, Ed, the Rays do not owe Manny $2 million; he earned probably less than $75,000 (six games) before announcing his retirement.

As for the Yankees you cited, or for that matter, Chris Young ($1.1 million) and Chris Capuano (ditto) of the Mets, today is the 10th of April. How about we refrain from doing cartwheels until at least Memorial Day?

. . . but will his oft-injured back make it for a full 18 today? As President Obama might say, I have the audacity to hope it does, and look forward to Couples winning the future. Sunday tee times here.

Yesterday, Manny Ramirez retired rather than serve out a second league suspension — this one for 100 games — for again testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

At the start of the Fox broadcast of the Yankees-Sawx tilt at Fenway today, it was interesting to hear Ken Rosenthal not only announce that he would not cast a Hall of Fame vote for Manny when he becomes eligible, but also speculate about possible PED use by Ramirez earlier in his career.

So, Jason, who’s the biggest free-agent bargain now that Manny will have to be Manny somewhere other than MLB-monitored rehab?

Russell Martin for $4 million and Andruw Jones and Eric Chavez for $1.5 million per are all looking pretty good to me right now — despite the fact that none of them earned mention in your season-preview column. 

A pretty good op-ed in today’s New York Times by Joe Nocera on how players are treated differently by the NCAA than the coaches.

Congrats on win No. 1.

Maybe we’ll start Rays watch, too?

Tampa Bay Rays slugger Ramirez retires in face of suspension

All seems right in the world when Freddie Couples is contending going into the weekend.

“It’s like being a huge fan of fascism!”

Alec Baldwin (Yankees) versus John Krasinski (Red Sox). Very funny.

Phil Hughes is currently getting beat up in Fenway Park — death by a thousand fly balls. I’ll check later whether the numbers bear this out, but it’s intuitively a terrible park for Hughes to pitch in. He’s a fly-ball pitcher (ground ball percentage 2007-2010: 40, 45, 40, 36)  whose velocity is down, meaning fewer strikeouts. Fly ball pitchers usually need relatively high strikeout rates to make up for the lack of grounders. Combine that with the fact that Fenway turns just about any hitter who can reliably hit lazy fly balls to left field into a stud. It’s arena baseball. It turned Mike Lowell from a fringe player into an all-star, and David Ortiz from a middling-slugger into a borderline hall-of-famer. Don’t believe me? Look at their home/ road splits for their best year.

“We finished eighth with you, we can finish eighth without you.”

Pirates great (and longtime Mets broadcaster) Ralph Kiner was fond of recalling that quote from Pittsburgh general manager Branch Rickey, his pithy explanation for why Kiner was being traded to the Chicago Cubs in the middle of the 1953 season. It also helps explain why Pittsburgh’s current front office traded away several fan favorites in recent years.

In response to my recent post on the Pirates, the Gunner expressed understandable skepticism that his beloved team will hold on to their young core four:

As a long sufferening [sic] Buccos fan, we all know that McCutchen, Tabata, Walker and Alvarez are simply doing their time in horsehide purgatory before they are shipped off to the Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox or Cubs in exchange for a handful of minor league, minor salary, minor talent prospects.

Since taking over a wreck of a franchise following the 2007 season, general manager Neal Huntington has traded many of the team’s starters as a means of rebuilding the organization from the ground up, a process which has convinced many fans that the front office has no interest in fielding a winning team. (On the other hand, gone too is the ludicrous notion that bringing in a pricey, over-the-hill veteran, such as Derek Bell, Jeromy Burnitz, or Matt Morris, while neglecting the rest of the franchise is the way to division supremacy.)

Here are the higher-profile players sent packing over the next two seasons:

• Jose Bautista
  
• Jason Bay
  
• Matt Capps
  
• Octavio Dotel
  
• Tom Gorzelanny
  
• Adam LaRoche
  
• Damaso Marte
  
• Nate McLouth
  
• Nyjer Morgan
  
• Xavier Nady
  
• Freddie Sanchez
  
• Jack Wilson
  

Other than Bautista — and who among us foresaw last year’s 54-home-run performance with the Blue Jays? — is there anyone on this list that you would want on the 2011 Pirates, let alone next year’s club? Probably not. Most are beyond their prime and/or injury-prone and/or have regressed. (Oh, before you grab a pitchfork and come looking for me, please look at their numbers since departing Pittsburgh.)

Sure, Capps performed very well while with the Nationals but, let’s be honest, the only reason a lousy team needs a good closer is to ship him to a contender at the trade deadline for a promising youngster . . . which is precisely what the Nats did when they sent Capps to the Twins for high-ceiling catching prospect Wilson Ramos, and, coincidentally, what the Bucs did when they traded Dotel to the Dodgers for pitcher James McDonald.

Yes, Bay had a fine year-plus in Boston, but do you really think Mets fans are dancing a hora over his signing? The middle-infield tandem of Sanchez and Wilson? When healthy, Sanchez has been reasonably productive for the Giants, but had he remained with the Pirates, Neil Walker would not have a position to play. The Mariners have moved the anemic Wilson to second base, where he will remain in the starting line-up until prospect Dustin Ackley gets called up.

Moreover, when the 12 players listed above did take the field at the same time, the Pirates did not win many games. In 2007, this roster lost 94 games; the following season, it lost 95. (Marte and Nady were traded to the Yankees shortly before the 2008 trade deadline.)

To be sure, one may take issue with the talent received in these trades. In addition to McDonald, three of the players Huntington received from the Yankees are currently on the 25-man roster: starting left fielder Jose Tabata, starting pitcher Ross Ohlendorf, and reliever Jeff Karstens. Otherwise, the return has been way less than stellar.

Matt Klaassen of Fangraphs analyzes what may have gone wrong:

While it is all about “the process” and perhaps the Pirates have just have some bad luck despite doing the right things, one does wonder how much of this has just been “bad luck” and how much of this is a failure of baseball operations — specifically, their scouting department — to identify the right targets. The Pirates may also have made a mistake in opting for quantity of prospects over quality in trade returns. It may have been the case that they weren’t offered quality. But the trade returns haven’t been impressive so far.

What should generate optimism, however, is team’s amateur-draft commitment: It has spent more in the past three years in the draft — $30.7 million — than any of the other 29 franchises. The Bucs have been active on the international market too, having signed Mexican pitcher Luis Heredia for $2.6 million last August and Cuban defector Cesar Lopez for $600,000 earlier this year.

Longtime fans have every reason not to drink the Kool-Aid, but I am increasingly confident that Huntington will make every reasonable effort to invest in youngsters Andrew McCutchen and Pedro Alvarez, and very possibly Tabata and Walker too. (Even if no contract extensions are signed, McCutchen is under team control through 2015, while Alvarez, Tabata, and Walker will not be eligible for free agency until after the 2016 season.)

As I noted in the previous post, doing so will send the clearest signal yet about the front office’s intention to build a winner.

Stay tuned.

Okay, so my team, the Rubin Amaros, had our big draft (really, an auction) last Sunday and we are currently sifting through the entrails to see how we did. So far, better than the Red Sox and the Rays, although not by much.

In the meantime, enjoy this brilliant piece about the legendary Hugh Sweeny by my friend and fantasy competitor, Bruce Buschel, writing in Deadspin about the day the notorious and historic “Sweeney Plan” was born in our American Dream League:

So the Sweeney Plan, as it has come to be known (misspelling and all), seemed only natural to him. That it is the most controversial of all plans is equally natural and a delight to Sweeny. In essence, you dump home runs and ribbies, and spend all your money on lead-off hitters who will win steals and batting average, and the rest of your funds go to the best pitching that money can buy in a 4×4 league. If done wisely, you are bound to walk off with some money; if done expertly, you will wear the crown.

It is the most hated and most beloved of all strategies. It requires very little research. It perverts the value of every player. And it causes so much tension that leagues have disbanded because of it — it is deemed unethical by some, non-reflective of baseball by others, brilliant by many, and ugly by most. The ADL has instituted a minimum at-bat rule (5,200 ABs) and a minimum innings rule (1,200 innings) to discourage any such shenanigans. No longer can you fill a staff with all relievers or buy just a few rabbits for your offense. Yet, the Sweeney Plan remains viable, as well as a source of deep frictions, 20 years after it was hatched. When the founding fathers gave birth to rotisserie, in 1980, none of them could have imagined the plan or the man who unleashed it upon the game.

Those of you who know what a “Sweeney” is will enjoy this stroll down memory lane, Those who don’t, and want to play the game the way the big boys do, should read and learn. (Mild language warning, but you probably expected that.)

Shockingly, I find myself agreeing with Dan on baseball. It’s not summer, much less fall, yet. Just sayin’.

Boston’s Pythagorean Record is a more robust 1-5, while the Yankees are only 3-3!

A reporter asked Tampa Bay DH Manny Ramirez if we was “pressing” trying to make a good impression on his new ballclub. I don’t know what’s funnier, the notion that Manny “Being Manny” Ramirez would ever try too hard, or his actual response:

“I don’t need to impress nobody. I’ve got almost 600 home runs.”

Greg, make that 0-6. But you know what, as much as I wish it weren’t the case, the Sox are going to be fine. The 2005 Yankees started 11-19 and were 9 games out of first in the middle of May. Then they snapped off 10 wins in a row to get back over .500 and never looked back, winning 95 games and the AL East that season. Baseball’s streaky. It’s April freaking 7th, the Sawks Nation needs to unbunch its collective panties.

Ed, another thing that makes sports conservative is that they are a true meritocracy. If one group predominates at the highest levels in a given sport — blacks in basketball, Kenyans in marathon, East Asians in women’s golf — almost no one blames racism. Admittedly, if you speculate publicly about why this or that group might be better at this or that sport, you will get your head handed to you pretty quick. But almost everyone tacitly accepts that the demographic breakdown of a team’s roster cannot be expected to mirror that of the general population — and that whatever the reason for any discrepancies, the sport should reflect them, not be responsible for correcting them. That’s another example of conservative sports thinking.

. . . other than by winning?

Has anyone noticed that the best center fielder in the game may play in, of all places, Pittsburgh? Yup, I am referring to Andrew McCutchen, the charismatic, five-tool 24-year-old who is making a measly $452,500 playing for the habitually hapless Pirates.

Just how good is McCutchen? According to a FanGraphs leaderboard of regular center fielders encompassing the 2009–10 seasons, McCutchen ranks first in park and league-adjusted runs created (wRC+), second in on-base percentage (OBP), and sixth in wins above replacement (WAR).

In other words: pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.

Writing in Beyond the Boxscore, Dave Gershman offers a recommendation to the Bucs front office:

If the Pirates haven’t already considered locking up their young superstar they should certainly do so now. Andrew McCutchen continues to impress the baseball world day after day it seems. On a team that many believe isn’t that far from being competitive, it’s extremely crucial that McCutchen stay in black and gold.

As Dave Golebiewski of the Duquesne Duke explains:

Rather than potentially watching McCutchen’s salary soar through arbitration each winter, the Pirates should try to sign their star to a long-term deal right now. Doing so would give the club cost certainty. Also, these types of deals typically buy out a few years of free agency, meaning McCutchen would be in a Pirates uniform past 2015. 

Approaching McCutchen’s agent on this issue would hardly be precedent-setting. Gershman compares McCutchen to another talented center fielder, 27-year-old  Denard Span, who the Twins inked to a $16.5 million contract over five years in March 2010. And while Minnesota’s payroll is nearly $70 million higher than Pittsburgh’s, another small-budget franchise, the Rays, have received generally positive reviews for locking up several young players well into their free-agent years, most recently pitcher Wade Davis.

More importantly, signing McCutchen to a long-term contract would show a desperate fan base — one which last saw a winning season during the George Herbert Walker Bush administration — that team president Frank Coonelly and general manager Neal Huntington are committed to building a winner around a superior player with several prime seasons still to come.