MLB Removes References To Current Players On MLB.com Due To Lockout
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Whether your a baseball fan, or a sports fan in general, or not, regular readers here will know that we've covered aspects of many sports leagues and Major League Baseball in particular. As you'd expect with any major business like MLB, some of those posts have dealt with some nonsense intellectual property actions the league has undertaken, but many more of them have been positive articles about the forward-thinking folks at MLB when it comes to how they make their products available using modern technology. The league's website work has always been particularly good, whether it's been the fantastic MLB.TV streaming site the league operates, or even simply the base MLB.com site itself.But that latter site has now become a petty pawn being played by MLB as part of the owner's lockout of players that just kicked off. For non-MLB fans, the quick version is this: the collectively bargained labor agreement between owners and players expired this week without a new agreement inked. As a result, the players are now locked out of team facilities by ownership. That last bit is important, because many people have been describing this as a labor strike. It isn't. At all. This is the owners refusing to let the players fulfill their duties. And as part of that, it seems, MLB released the following news update on its MLB.com website.You may notice that the content on this site looks a little different than usual. The reason for this is because the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the players and the league expired just before midnight on Dec. 1 and a new CBA is currently being negotiated between the owners and the MLBPA.Until a new agreement is reached, there will be limitations on the type of content we display. As a result, you will see a lot more content that focuses on the game’s rich history. Once a new agreement is reached, the up-to-the minute news and analysis you have come to expect will continue as usual. It's unclear precisely what game MLB is playing with this move, but the end result is a website that is almost entirely bereft of content on any current MLB player. While the stats and standings from last season are still available in their tabs, the entire main page is now filled only with content about players no longer playing. Players that are on this year's Hall of Fame ballot, for instance, or check ins with Ichiro showing up at a high school to hit home runs. Interested in Vin Scully's thoughts on Gil Hodges? MLB.com has you covered! Want to know anything new about Kris Bryant or Mike Trout? You'll have to go elsewhere.The league is making noises about having to comply with federal labor laws regarding the use of player likenesses in promotional or advertising material, but that doesn't make that much sense in the context of simply listing players currently under contract and on team rosters. Instead, this looks to be an attempt to, in some manner, punish current players by ripping away any fame or notoriety they might get via the MLB.com site. It's also notable that each individual team site gets feeds directly from MLB.com and those sites too are changed in a similar manner. Perhaps most strangely, the headshots of all current players have been removed and replaced by generic avatars of faceless headsIt could be that MLB is just playing it really, really safe on the labor laws situation... but I doubt it. This is more likely part of the overall strong-arm tactic by team owners that are crying poor to the players' union while beating the CBA buzzer to hand players millions and millions of dollars at the same time. And, just to add more to the mix, this all is happening at the same time MLB admitted it has been messing with the types of balls within the game, introducing multiple differently behaving balls in a league that is absolutely driven by statistics for what is supposed to be a uniform game.Not exactly the ammo the owners need going into CBA negotiations, to be sure.
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posted at: 12:00am on 03-Dec-2021
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Colorado Appeals Court Says A Drug Dog That Alerts On Now-Legal Weed Can't Create Probable Cause For A Search
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"Probable cause on four legs." That's the cop nickname for drug dogs, which need to do nothing more than something only perceptible to the officer/trainer to allow officers to engage in warrantless searches. For years, drug dogs and the "odor of marijuana" have allowed both cops and dogs to follow their noses to all sorts of otherwise-unconstitutional searches, much to the delight of law enforcement and its desire to make easy busts and seize cash.Then came the creeping menace of legalized marijuana, which meant cops in some states could no longer assume the odor of marijuana was reasonably suspicious enough to convert pretextual stops into full-blown searches. These legal changes also promised to put their dogs out of business because they were trained to detect weed along with other illicit substances. With marijuana no longer necessarily illicit, the dogs became more of a problem than a solution. As far too many law enforcement officials claimed, the legalization meant the literal death of drug dogs, rather than just a speed bump on the road to warrantless searches.Marijuana has been legal in Colorado since 2012. And yet, cops still use drug dogs that obviously cannot indicate via an "alert" whether it has detected now-legal weed or something still actually illegal under state law. That inability to tell officers "hey, I detected a legal substance" is now causing problems for drug convictions and their underlying drug dog-enabled searches.The Colorado Court of Appeals has just ruled [PDF] that a drug dog alert no longer generates the required amount of probable cause necessary to allow cops to engage in deeper, broader searches of people and their property. (via FourthAmendment.com)Here's how it began:In 2017, drug task force investigators were following a suspected “high level” drug dealer when he visited Restrepo’s house. After the drug dealer drove away, some members of the task force stopped him; they found firearms and a quarter pound of methamphetamine in his vehicle. At some point, the drug dealer told officers that he had been at Restrepo’s house to sell him methamphetamine, as a customer.Meanwhile, other members of the task force remained watching Restrepo’s house. When Restrepo left in his car, they followed for a couple of hours. During that time, the task force “decided to make a traffic stop.” After Restrepo rolled through a stop sign, the task force asked Jeremy Sheldon, a uniformed officer with the canine unit of the Colorado Springs Police Department, to stop Restrepo’s car. During the stop, Officer Sheldon patted Restrepo down and found $1,200 in Restrepo’s pocket. He then commanded his dog to perform a drug sniff of Restrepo’s vehicle. The dog, trained to alert to marijuana as well as to other controlled substances, alerted to Restrepo’s car. Officer Sheldon then searched the vehicle and found suspected methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia in a backpack in the backseat. The district court saw nothing wrong with this and refused to suppress the evidence. It said the dog's ability to also detect illicit substances gave the cops permission to perform the search of the backpack. In effect, the court told cops it was okay to use dogs that detected legal substances to generate probable cause to search for illegal substances. But it did rule that the sniff itself was not supported by reasonable suspicion. For whatever reason, it combined these two almost-contradictory conclusions into a single ruling that allowed the state to keep the evidence it recovered from the backpack.The Appeals Court says this ruling is wrong. Since marijuana is legal -- and drug dogs trained to detect this odor will continue to detect it -- cops must have more to go on before they bring a drug dog into the mix. They must have probable cause to justify the deployment of a drug dog to sniff for contraband. It's no longer acceptable to run one around a stopped car or their belongings just because you happen to have one on hand.When a dog trained to alert to both marijuana and illegal drugs alerts, the handler does not know if the dog is alerting to contraband or to a legal amount of marijuana. See McKnight II, ¶ 35. Therefore, a dog sniff from a dog trained to detect marijuana is a search under article II, section 7; it intrudes on a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy in lawful activity. Id. at ¶¶ 43,Accordingly, there must be probable cause to believe a vehicle contains illegal narcotics under state law before deploying a drug detection dog trained to alert to marijuana. There was no probable cause here. All the cops had at that point was an unverified assertion from an alleged drug dealer in their custody that drugs had been sold to Restrepo. What they didn't have was anything allowing them to escalate the pretextual stop to a full-blown search. The drug dog's alert changed nothing.The evidence seized from the backpack vanishes, along with the conviction. And cops in Colorado are on notice they'll need to develop probable cause before they bring a drug dog in or risk losing their evidence in the future. Probable cause no longer walks on four legs in Colorado.
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posted at: 12:00am on 03-Dec-2021
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