The Great Dan Steinberg™ had a fab story over the weekend about former employees of Dan Snyder’s ticket office suing the Redskins for overtime pay. The Redskins don’t dispute the claim that the staff worked overtime. The team’s basis for not paying OT, however, is that the ticket sales office is in the “amusement and recreation” realm, and therefore its workers are not covered by federal wage/hour laws.
Not only is this argument a silly one — the overtime exemption covers folks like lifeguards and greenskeepers — but, it’s guaranteed to be a loser, too: As Steinberg reports, it’s already been litigated at the federal level in a case involving employees of an NBA team.
So Snyder’s going to lose here, surely as he lost a wage/hour dispute with his nanny. In that case, Snyder’s legal case seemed to be no more complex than that she wasn’t paid because he didn’t want to.
But even if he weren’t gonna get poleaxed legally in the sales staff case, the question remains: If Snyder’s really got a waiting list of 200,000 people desperate to buy tickets for his football team, which he says often, why would he have even one ticket seller, let alone an entire staff of ticket sellers, working overtime?
In any case, good to see that the move from urbane, aware Petworth to rural, la-dee-dah Silver Spring hasn’t sapped Steinberg of his special powers.
Yet…
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The Washington Post‘s Jason Reid blogs that the Redskins will no longer let anybody but their own employees Twitter from practice anymore.
(AFTER THE JUMP: Will the Twitter ban on non-Redskins employees affect WRC sports staff? How come football Hoyas stink? Lou Dobbs fiddles as the Asian Bias™ in golf comes home to roost? Stephen Strasburg should hold out til tomorrow? The Tom Boswell Curse wasn’t real?)
Reid’s readers aren’t all upset by Snyder’s latest control-the-flow move.
In reaction to the Twitter story, the commenter going by “talent_evaluator” posted: “My own take is that the tweets that have been up here have been pitiful. Chris Larry’s brother was better at it than WaPo. No information at all, and you’re better off watching practice than trying to frame your cutesy tweets. The Redskins are saving you from yourselves.”
While the new rule will take Reid’s thumbs out of action, since those on Snyder’s payroll can still Twitter, the WRC news staff should still get the green light.
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Alex Buzbee, the guy who was going to end Georgetown’s decades-long streak of not putting any players into the NFL, might not be the streak breaker. Buzbee, a defensive tackle, likely would have made the Redskins last year were it not for a knee injury during training camp.
This year, Buzbee’s chances of sticking aren’t so swell. As of the Ravens’ exhibition, Buzbee was listed on the Redskins’ official depth chart as the fourth-team defensive tackle. And among those he’s behind is Jeremy Jarmon, a rookie who is guaranteed to make the team so as not to make Vinny Cerrato look bad for using next year’s third-round pick to grab him in the NFL’s odd supplemental draft.
As of now, the last Hoya to play in the big leagues was Jim Ricca, a lineman who signed with the Redskins in 1951.
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Cheap Seats Daily hyped the crap out of the Asian Bias™ in golf, even during that long lunch while everybody else was celebrating Post-Racial America™.
But for all our hate-mongering, nobody got incited. Even Lou Dobbs sat on his hands.
And so it’s come to this: Two Asians, Woods and Yang, leave the rest of the world behind in the PGA Championship.
I hope you’re happy, America!
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Pay-up-or-shut-up day in the Stephen Strasburg soap opera. I can’t help but side with labor in these squabbles, despite the silly sums involved. The way I see it, the rationale for why the team should play hardball with draft picks — because chances are they won’t make it — is the exact same reason why the draftees should hold out for the last dollar. If history holds, Strasburg will never have this sorta bargaining clout again. So why not milk it til it bleeds?
‘Course, if he doesn’t end up taking the Nats final offer, he’s a dumbass. Everybody knows that.
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Update on the The Tom Boswell Curse: It’s considerably weakened, at best.
Nats’ record with Boswell on vacation: 14-6. Nats’ record since Boswell returned from vacation: 3-3.
The “What?” we know: The Nats win three of four in Cincinnati, so the Boswell Curse that looked so sturdy last week while the Nationals went into a losing skein the day the Post columnist came back from vacation is on life support.
The “Why?” will require further study.
Good thing it’s football season, to give us time to look into the matter!
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