The ARod Saga Continues

Mike Schilling

Mike has been a software engineer far longer than he would like to admit. He has strong opinions on baseball, software, science fiction, comedy, contract bridge, and European history, any of which he's willing to share with almost no prompting whatsoever.

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9 Responses

  1. Stillwater says:

    ARod’s now acting so rational he must have recently gone insane.Report

  2. There is a fourth, much more likely, possibility here: the lawsuit was always little more than a strike suit intended to give ARod negotiating leverage to reduce his suspension by trying to create public uproar in ARods favor. His lawyers never intended it to go very far in the courts themselves because the suit was borderline frivolous and sanctionable. Not coincidentally, yesterday was the deadline for ARod to respond to MLB’s pre-motion letter arguing for dismissal (pre-motion letters are a peculiarity of the SDNY and EDNY federal courts- basically in those courts you often have to send the judge a letter saying why you intend to file a motion before the judge will allow you to file the actual motion). Because they had no actual legal arguments to justify the suit (and never did have any), continuing with the charade any longer would have started to risk sanctions, and once the hoped for public uproar failed to materialize and MLB showed no signs of budging, it was time to give up.Report

    • Mike Schilling in reply to Mark Thompson says:

      Create a public uproar in favor of the most hated current player in baseball? That would have been completely delusional.

      So yeah, could be.Report

      • In ARod’s extremely limited defense, the mere act of filing a frivolous lawsuit is not terribly expensive for someone like ARod; even for expensive lawyers, it surely wasn’t more than $10k to do that, pocket change for ARod and just a tiny fraction of what the arbitration cost him. So for someone who is already despised universally and has no regard for that thing some might call “ethics,” it’s close to a no risk strategy.Report

      • Stillwater in reply to Mike Schilling says:

        That’s certainly a possibility Mark. But how would you account for the suit against Bud Selig personally? The suit against the Yankees team physician? When you include those (and other behaviors) in with the the MLB/MLBPA suits, it’s hard to sustain the view he was acting out of purely pragmatic desires to reduce his suspension. For me, anyway. To do so stretches the definition of “pragmatic” beyond the breaking point.Report

      • Stillwater in reply to Mike Schilling says:

        Sorry, that was confusing. Of course he wanted to reduce the suspension. What I don’t think he was doing was merely trying to create a public outcry to serve those ends.Report

      • Well, in general, if you’re just throwing shit against the wall anyhow, the more shit you fling, the more chance you have that something will stick. But if you’re at all serious about trying to win a lawsuit when you file it, you don’t just voluntarily dismiss it before you even get a motion to dismiss filed against you. It’s not as if they learned anything new in the last couple weeks that would have had the potential change their minds about the merits of the lawsuit, and it’s not as if they were surprised that MLB immediately indicated that it wanted to dismiss the lawsuit. To dismiss it voluntarily before a formal motion is even filed tells me that they were planning on dismissing it at this stage all along, which in turn tells me that it was always a strike suit.Report

  3. DRS says:

    This place is turning into a suburban man-cave. Sports, sports, sports, mansplanations about sexual harassment, sports again. Geez.Report