Linked List: May 7, 2015

Thursday, 7 May 2015

Wallace Matthews, reporting earlier this week for ESPN New York:

For the first time since the next potential court battle involving Alex Rodriguez became public, a New York Yankees official has gone on record confirming that the club has no intention of paying the controversial slugger a $6 million bonus for hitting his 660th home run.

“We have the right but not the obligation to do something, and that’s it,” said Yankees general manager Brian Cashman before Saturday’s Yankees-Red Sox game at Fenway Park. “We’re going to follow the contract as we follow all contracts, so there is no dispute, from our perspective.”

In other words, in the Yankees’ interpretation of the contract, they are under no obligation to pay off on a deal they feel is no longer valid due to Rodriguez’s 162-game suspension for drug violations last year.

On Twitter, people are asking how I square criticism of Brady and the Patriots with my rooting for Alex Rodriguez. It’s true, I am rooting for A-Rod now that he’s back. But, I’ll forever be disappointed and embarrassed by his cheating with PEDs. I wish he’d never done it. It will forever taint his personal accomplishments and the success the team had while he played. He’s emerged from suspension a tragic figure, who I would argue is getting exactly what he deserves.

I don’t expect Patriot fans not to root for Brady next year. But I do think they should also forever be disappointed in him for this.

Also, to be clear, I consider PED abuse to be a far more significant offense than ball-doctoring.

Remember Amazon’s Fire Phone? ★

Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica on a major software update for Amazon’s universally-disparaged Fire Phone:

Still, for those who have taken the plunge, Amazon continues providing software updates. Fire OS 4.6.1 includes a fair number of changes, but the largest is one Amazon doesn’t mention — it updates the underlying version of Android from 4.2 Jelly Bean to 4.4 KitKat. KitKat is still a year-and-a-half old at this point, but that’s a year newer than Jelly Bean, and it’s still the most-used version of Android according to Google’s developer dashboard.

KitKat is responsible for a bunch of the new things Fire OS picks up, including Bluetooth 4.0 support, improved accessibility, printing support, security and accessibility features, and an emoji keyboard (Amazon uses unchanged versions of Google’s emoji, the same you’d see on a Google-blessed Android phone).

Given how ubiquitous emoji have become, it’s hard to believe that Fire Phone didn’t have any support for them at all until now. And even still they’re only now catching up to a year-and-a-half old version of Android. It just goes to show how hard it is to go with a “we’ll fork our own version of Android” strategy.

I wonder too, if this update is a sign that Amazon has not given up on Fire Phone. It used to be said of Microsoft that they shipped horrible 1.0’s but stuck with it, for years if that’s what it took, until they had a winner. You can still see that today with the Surface line. Amazon might be like that, too.

NFL Report: ‘More Probable Than Not’ Tom Brady Knew Footballs Were Doctored ★

John Branch, reporting for the NYT on the NFL’s long-awaited report on the Patriots’s systematic under-inflation of game balls:

A short time later, Anderson looked around the locker room. The two bags of balls were gone. It was the first time in his 19-year career as an N.F.L. official that Anderson could not find the footballs before a game, he told investigators.

McNally had taken them out of the locker room without anyone’s noticing. He turned left, then left again, walking through a tunnel toward the playing field. Just before he got there, he entered a bathroom to the left.

He locked the door and was inside for 1 minute 40 seconds, surveillance footage later showed. He left the bathroom and took them to the field. And when 11 balls were tested with two gauges at halftime, after the Colts had raised suspicions following a second-quarter interception of a Brady pass, they were all below 12.5 p.s.i. Most were substantially lower. One was at 10.5.

The text messages and phone records are damning (and funny). The report makes clear that this was an ongoing effort, not a single-game aberration. This guy McNally called himself “the deflator”.

Here’s the thing. Stating that a cheater won does not imply that he won because he cheated. Tom Brady was an elite quarterback before teams were even allowed to supply their own game balls. (Ironically, Brady himself pushed for the rule change that allowed teams to supply their own balls, subject to pre-game inspection.) He played great in the Super Bowl, a game where the league still supplies the game balls. “They would have won anyway” is no excuse — and it can’t be proven. Cheating is cheating.

Seahawks and Ravens fans might feel differently, but the harm this has done to Brady’s and the Patriots’ reputations far outweighs whatever advantages the under-inflated balls gave them.