ABC 10:

LeBron James’ mother was arrested Thursday morning after she reportedly assaulted a parking attendant in Miami Beach.

Gloria James, 42, is accused of hitting a parking attendant at the Fontainebleau Hotel. She was taken to Miami Beach police headquarters where she is being questioned. James is expected to be charged with misdemeanor assault, and then be released on her own recognizance. This is not James’ first arrest.In January 2006, she was arrested on suspicion of DUI.

0–5.

Evan Silva writes on ProFootballTalk about NFL draft analyst Mel Kiper’s recent comments on Auburn quarterback Cam Newton:

ESPN draft analyst Mel Kiper held a conference call with reporters Wednesday morning, and echoed some of the same concerns about Auburn quarterback Cam Newton that were expressed in Pro Football Weekly draft analyst Nolan Nawrocki’s scathing scouting report.

Specifically, Kiper has major questions about Newton’s work ethic and ability to handle adversity.

“We know he loves to play the game of football,” said Kiper. “But this isn’t the NBA,” referring to the amount of study time required by NFL quarterbacks.

“Things came easy to Cam Newton (at Auburn). I hope he doesn’t think they’ll come easy in the NFL.” Kiper also wondered how Newton would deal with it when/if people begin calling him a bust.

Kiper’s questioning of Newton’s capability to handle adversity is surprising. Newton led Auburn to a BCS Championship and won the Heisman Trophy with a major college football scandal hanging over his head. And the direct subject of the scrutiny was Newton’s dad.

I think what everyone is missing here is that there is no sure thing in the NFL. Here’s Mel Kiper from 2007 calling JaMarcus Russell — who could be the biggest first-round bust ever — “John Elway like.” Oops. The fact is, nobody knows how Cam Newton will do in the NFL and all this pre-draft talk is just that — talk.

Fox Sports:

Two of 10 players suing the NFL had valid reasons for skipping Wednesday’s preliminary hearing before a federal district court judge.

Neither one is named Tom Brady nor Peyton Manning.

The quarterbacks weren’t in St. Paul as their attorneys lobbied for legal action that would force the NFL to lift its lockout. In attendance were five of the 10 plaintiffs from Brady v. the NFL.

As in Tom Brady.

Think about that. The guy who lent his name to the class-action lawsuit didn’t bother to personally provide support for a request that would give players a major boost in their legal fight against the league.

If the lockout is ordered to end — which seems plausible considering Judge Susan Nelson’s statements from the bench and Wednesday’s lengthy grilling of high-profile defense attorney Davis Boies — the NFL must resume operations that include offseason programs, free agency and player trades.

Such a ruling also might prompt the league to make more concessions in a new collective bargaining agreement.

Brady’s no-show is as mind-boggling as the reason for this whole legal mess: the NFL and NFL Players Association’s inability to split multibillions in revenue at a time when the league has never been more prosperous.

What a minute. Boies is the lawyer for the players? Too bad the NFL doesn’t hire James Baker. Rematch!

I was given a wonderful and excruciating assignment: Consider the history of the Masters, and pick ten highlights, for an NRO slideshow. The result is on the homepage, in the middle column. (Can’t miss it.) Note that these are not the “top ten” highlights. That would be all too excruciating. These are just ten highlights, or “Masterly moments,” as we call them.

When I turned in my picks, my homeboy Ed Craig said, “What, no love for Lefty?” Meaning that I had left out Phil Mickelson, three-time winner of the Masters. I said, “Yeah, and no love for Demaret, Snead, Player, or Faldo, either!” They’re also three-time winners. I added, “And it almost killed me to leave out Seve!” (a two-time winner). I had his 1980 victory in there — he slashed gloriously around the course at the age of 23 — but ultimately cut him.

Again, damn near killed me . . .

Often, when you write something that is limited — which is just about everything you write — people say, “You failed to mention . . .” Yes, one “fails to mention” just about everything!

Anyway, happy Masters week.

From the air and with its retractable dome closed, Miller Park looks like a giant turtle. It squats on the outskirts of Milwaukee — in the wrong place, because it should be downtown. Instead, it stands alone, next to an interstate and surrounded by surface parking lots. A Wisconsin friend explains that former owner Bud Selig insisted on this location because it allows the Brewers to gobble up parking revenue.

Inside, Miller Park embraces its Milwaukee-ness. The fans make a pretty big deal out of the sixth-inning sausage race. During the seventh-inning stretch, after “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” they sing the polka “Roll Out the Barrel.” The bratwurst, a regional specialty that ought to be a highlight, is typical ballpark fare: overpriced and forgettable. The “special stadium sauce” is the mystery meat of condiments; it tastes like ketchup with a pinch of spice.

The grass is natural and looks like the turf of an outdoor park. The dome is a dull greenish-gray, which means that players can track fly balls and pop ups against its background — they don’t lose the ball the way they sometimes did at the Metrodome in Minneapolis. A big new HD scoreboard includes a welcome innovation: It displays on-base percentage and slugging percentage more prominently than batting average. They are of course more important as stats, but baseball clings to its habit of treating batting average as the fundamental number for hitters. I’m generally a traditionalist, but our national pastime is overdue to give batting average the heave-ho. It’s nice to see Miller Park already making the transition.

Ultimately, we go to baseball parks to watch baseball games. The one I saw on Tuesday night was a gem, with the Brewers beating the Atlanta Braves for their first win of the season. It was the Yovani Gallardo show. He pitched a two-hit, complete-game shutout and scored the game’s only run. To the extent that any pitcher can win a game singlehandedly, Gallardo did it. (I suppose you could grumble that he didn’t hit a homer; he hit a single and needed a teammate to knock him in. But still. The dude’s a pitcher.)

All in all, Miller Park is a very nice ballpark. I’d like to see it again with the dome open.

I’ve now gone to games in 14 MLB parks, including 11 that are currently in use.

Funny, Greg! Yeah, it’s amusing to imagine the panic that has gripped more than a few New England households over four whole games — well, five, for those convinced that the Indians batters will tee off on Dice-K this evening — but Howard Megdal advises these folks to relax:

A four-game losing streak could even be taken as an omen for the Red Sox. In 2007, Boston’s last World Series victory, the team had three such losing streaks. In 2004, the Red Sox lost five straight to start the month of May, then another four straight from May 31 through June 4. (They also lost three in a row to begin the ALCS against the Yankees.)

Alternatively, Red Sox fans getting grief from pinstriped friends should feel free to inquire about Derek Jeter’s batting line after five games (.167/.273/.167, 22 OPS+), then ask how meaningful they find the Captain’s pathetic numbers. (Come to think of it, I suspect that Boston has a better chance of reaching the postseason than Jeter hitting .300.)

From the Times-Picayune [hat-tip to the Journal edit page] on how NFL players are dealing with the league lockout:

“It’s really tough, because there is a sense of urgency, and guys are ready to get back out there on the field,” Lewis said. “Guys don’t know what’s going on, what’s going through the owners’ heads or when a deal is going to get done. So there is just a lot of he-say, he-say stuff going on. But I’m just ready to get back to football and what I love to do.

“We are just sitting back hoping things get better. Football is important in this country. It makes us a lot of money. It’s how we pay bills, so I just hope they get something done.”

Others hope an agreement can be reached soon, so they won’t become a burden on their parents. After being drafted in the third round, Keenan Lewis and [Bears safety Craig] Steltz figured their days of leaning on their parents for support were over.

However, the lockout also ended the players’ medical benefits.

Under the federal law known as COBRA, players can continue existing medical coverage for themselves and their families for up to 18 months, but it’s expensive. A new federal health care law allows those who are 26 years old and younger to return to their parents’ health insurance.

“I’m 24, so I got lucky,” Steltz said. “All this health insurance stuff came around, and I was scrambling about what to do. They sent us COBRA. And out of the blue, someone reminded me that ‘Man, you are 24; you can get on your parents’ insurance.’

“I said, ‘Man, this is awesome. I’m a professional athlete and I am getting on my parent’s insurance.’ I got lucky on that, but some of the guys have families and children, and they are having to pay for their own health insurance now. It’s just the little small things that you are having to pick up now in this uncertainty that you wouldn’t have had to worry about before.”

Added Keenan Lewis . . . “It’s scary not to have insurance.”

It’s still early you say? Nope. It’s over for Beantown:

The scarlet record: Simply because the Red Sox have dropped to 0-4 with a 3-1 loss to the Indians on Tuesday night, it would be easy to say that the sky is falling and there’s no hope for the rest of the season.

That’s because the sky is falling and there’s no hope for the rest of the season!

Or something.

The Boston Globe’s Peter Abraham reports on Extra Bases that no 0-4 team has ever won the World Series. No 0-4 team has even reached a World Series, if you were thinking about making hotel reservations anyway so as to enjoy the experience.

Yesterday’s new evidence “found” by the prosecutor? Never mind:

However, based on the comments by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston the tape will probably never make into the trial. Although no formal decision has been made, Judge Illston’s called the tape “almost entirely inadmissible or irrelevant” and added that she could only hear Hoskins clearly on the tape, and couldn’t hear Dr. Ting very well at all.

The content of the tape was also mostly commentary on news articles that were recently published around the time of the recording, which wouldn’t be much more than a waste of the jurors time.

However, the trial goes on today, with the prosecution calling three lab workers to the stand. The government is expected to rest its case shortly thereafter, though they must feel incredibly disappointed with how the trial has gone.

Strike three for the prosecution?

I did it on BloggingHeads the other day with Noam Scheiber of The New Republic:

Contraction talk in baseball is heating up again. Rumors suggest that the A’s and Rays would be the affected franchises this time.

However, The Biz of Baseball’s Maury Brown is pretty certain that such talk is impractical, in part because no one believes that owners are hurting. “The league is in an incredibly healthy state, something it was not in 2001,” when the Marlins and Twins were unsuccessfully targeted for extinction.

According to Brown, the issue boils down to the difficulties associated with the franchise relocation attempts, which helps explain why only one move — the Expos move from Montreal to Washington — has occurred in the past 40 years.

[N]o owner in MLB is willing to allow relocation out of a club’s given territory. The owners of clubs that don’t have financial issues (and, ironically, that now includes the Twins), would rather try and contract teams rather than have them land in their “backyard”. After all, with less mouths to feed, those left standing reap the monetary benefits.

In the penultimate paragraph, Brown explains what all the chatter boils down to:

And really, in the end, isn’t this really about trying to [have] new stadiums built [for the A's and Rays] at taxpayer expense? It was the case with the Twins and Marlins, and it worked. Whether politicians are any wiser now than they were then remains to be seen.

Brown concludes, “Baseball needs to figure out its own problems with relocation before the hollow threat of contraction is passed around through the press.”

EDIT: The Twins and Expos, not the Marlins were contraction targets in 2001. It was in 2009 that the Marlins were mentioned along with the A’s. Thanks, Jonathan F!

Maybe it was the annual spectacle of March Madness. Maybe it was the Jim Tressel imbroglio at Ohio State. Maybe it was the lingering aftereffects of the Cam Newton scandal. Maybe it was Ed O’Bannon’s ongoing lawsuit, which contends that former NCAA players should be able to profit from uses of their image or likeness (as in video games, rebroadcasts, DVDs, etc.).

Whatever the reason, journalists have ignited a fresh debate over the merits of paying college athletes. Last week, PBS and HBO each aired major specials on the relative injustices of a system that allows players to generate billions in revenue each year but prohibits them from receiving a dime of it. Coaches can sign multimillion-dollar contracts, endorse products, and rake in lucrative speaking fees — that’s all in the game. (Just ask Alabama’s Nick Saban.) But if a star quarterback sells even one autographed jersey, he is violating NCAA rules.

The perceived unfairness of those rules has spurred critics to demand a radical overhaul. It is time, they say, to give the players — “the employees” — regular wages or salaries. Broadly speaking, there are three common objections to this idea:

(1) “Top-tier college athletes already do get paid, in the form of lucrative scholarships. Moreover, those with professional aspirations benefit from critical training and exposure that enhances their draft prospects.”

(2) “What part of ‘student-athlete’ don’t you understand? Turning these kids into de facto salaried professionals would irrevocably transform college sports, make a further mockery of the ‘academic mission’ that schools claim to be pursuing, and exacerbate corruption.”

(3) “Yes, it’s unfair that certain football and basketball players produce enormous riches for their schools and don’t get to reap the spoils. But paying them would be a logistical nightmare; indeed, it would prove impossible to devise a truly ‘fair’ revenue-distribution scheme. There are better ways to make college sports more equitable.”

The third objection is the most compelling. Paying student-athletes represents an ethically dubious solution to a legitimate problem. But the strongest argument against it is a practical one: How exactly would the payment system operate? Between 2004 and 2009, fewer than 7 percent of all Division I sports programs generated positive net revenue, according to NCAA data. Fewer than 12 percent of all Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools — 14 out of 120 — did so in fiscal year 2009. For that matter, the NCAA reports that only 50 percent to 60 percent of FBS football and basketball programs make money.

In other words, a significant chunk of top-level FBS programs are losing money. Should those programs be obliged to pay their football and basketball players, even though they aren’t actually producing a net profit? Or should only moneymaking programs be forced to offer player salaries? Would it be “fair” to have a system in which roughly half of all FBS schools paid their players while the other half didn’t? Do we really want blue-chip recruits picking a college based on financial compensation? Wouldn’t the wealthiest programs just scoop up all the best talent?

Meanwhile, would each salaried player on a given team be paid the same amount? If not, who would decide whether the All-American linebacker deserved more money than the All-American wide receiver, or whether the star point guard was more valuable than the star power forward? Would 18-year-olds be negotiating “contracts” with officials in their athletic department? Would they be hiring agents before high-school graduation? And how would all this affect those sports programs that depend on football and basketball revenue to stay afloat?

To pose these questions is to realize that paying college athletes is simply unfeasible. Still, the current NCAA rules are deeply flawed, and many players are indeed being exploited. Let’s face it: Big-time college football and basketball basically function as minor-league systems for the NFL and the NBA, respectively, while creating massive profits for everyone except the athletes. Scholarships are financially valuable, sure. But according to PBS, “The average scholarship falls about $3,000 short of covering” an athlete’s “essential” college expenses. Closing that gap — i.e., boosting scholarship aid — would be an easy way to help cash-strapped players meet their living costs.

Renowned sports economist Andrew Zimbalist proposed such a reform two years ago in a New York Times online symposium. He also made a broader point about the NCAA’s stated commitment to amateurism: “It is one thing to demand that a college athlete lose amateur status when he or she signs a professional contract, but quite another to bar an athlete from entering a professional draft or hiring an agent to explore the opportunities of going pro.”

In the same symposium, University of New Haven business professor Allen Sack (who played football at Notre Dame during the 1960s) noted that college sports have already effectively become professionalized. “Given the N.C.A.A.’s abandonment of time-honored amateur principles,” he argued, “no good reason exists for preventing athletes from engaging in the same entrepreneurial activities as their celebrity coaches. Big-time college athletes should be able to endorse products, get paid for speaking engagements and be compensated for the use of their likenesses on licensed products. They should be allowed to negotiate an actual contract with the N.B.A. as part of a final project in a finance class, and have an agent.”

Those changes seem reasonable enough. Writing in the 2009 Times forum, former Penn basketball player Stephen Danley suggested another: Schools should take a slice of the profits generated by their revenue sports and add a fifth-year option to athletic scholarships. As Danley explained, many student-athletes competing at the highest levels just do not have the time to handle a normal academic load. “In certain programs, players aren’t even allowed to take enough classes to graduate in four years” (emphasis added). Of course, some players were never adequately prepared for higher education in the first place and wouldn’t be attending university at all if not for their skills on the field or the court. But if America’s richest college-sports programs are going to continue treating many “student-athletes” as full-time athletes, they should at least give those athletes the financial means to return for an extra year of schooling and complete a degree after their playing days are over.

(Cross-posted at The Corner.)

Nearly every sports fan living in North America knows the names Jeffrey Maier and Steve Bartman, two spectators whose desire to grab a souvenir have been carved into baseball lore.

In contrast, this dude’s boorish behavior during last season’s ALCS did not lead to his name being plastered in every single newspaper. , , disgust of Yankee fans may have hit an all-time high thanks to this dude’s behavior during last season’s ALCS.

What makes the first two incidents so different from the latter?

I’ll be at the Brewers game, making my first visit to Miller Park. You would think that a guy with my last name would have gotten there by now. At any rate, the wait is almost over.

Any advice on what do there? Besides watch baseball, that is. What’s best for dinner? Comments welcome.

Cheering for Butler, predicting UConn.

Via The 700 Level Phillies blog, we learn that tailgating is mass transit-compatible. (Warning: The video was filmed in Philadelphia and alcohol was being consumed in significant quantities. What are the odds that profanity was uttered?)

I am fairly certain that Cliff Lee’s wife did not get to witness these feats of strength when riding Philly’s trains in 2009.

I was happy to see Artis Gilmore, who finished his long professional career with a short stint on the Boston Celtics during the late-Bird era, recognized at last by the basketball gods.

Gilmore utterly dominated the ABA for several seasons — only Julius Erving could compare — and after the ABA folded, led the NBA in field-goal percentage for four straight seasons (1980–81 through 1983–84), playing for the Chicago Bulls and San Antonio Spurs. He was an excellent rebounder (still the per-game-average NCAA Division I leader) and consistently logged big minutes, while rarely getting injured. His lifetime averages in many categories are right up there with the all-time greats.

I’ve never understood why he kept getting snubbed by the Hall of Fame. Plus, he looked awesome on the court, with his giant afro (which must have made him seven-foot four or five) and menacing goatee:  

His major drawback was lousy hands — he led the NBA in turnovers for the 1977–78 season — and he never won a championship in the ABA or NBA. But lesser players have made it into the Hall of Fame, including a couple this year. Long overdue congratulations to the A-Train.

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

It looks like the prosecution gets one more trip to the plate:

SAN FRANCISCO — Barry Bonds’s perjury trial had been on schedule to wrap up by the end of this week, when the jury was expected to start deliberating. Until the government sent an e-mail to the defense at 11 p.m. Sunday, that is.

That e-mail, sent on the eve of the trial’s third week, disclosed to the defense that a government witness — Steve Hoskins, Bonds’s childhood friend and former business manager — had unexpectedly found a piece of evidence that could be pivotal in the case. The e-mail said Hoskins had located a tape recording he had repeatedly said was long lost: a recording between him and Dr. Arthur Ting, Bonds’s orthopedic surgeon.

The tape recording had been on a cassette recorder, so the government transferred it to digital form. When court began Monday, it was in the process of transcribing the conversation.

Hoskins testified two weeks ago that he and Ting had about 50 conversations about Bonds’s steroid use and their concerns about it. But Ting, a prominent Bay Area doctor, denied that when he was on the stand last week, saying that conversation never happened.

The taped conversation between them will show that Hoskins was not lying when he said he and Ting often talked about Bonds and steroids, prosecutors said Monday.

The rest here.

Raiders WR Louis Murphy arrested with unprescribed Viagra.