Chisoxfn

QUOTE(Randar68 @ Mar 3, 2006 -> 02:39 PM) I'm not sure in that first picture. Guy in the background looks so familiar to me but I just can't pull the name right now. THINK it's Michael Swaim in the foreground. Second picture is of Lucas Harrell (99% sure) and Jose de los Santos in the background. Ya, right when I saw the picture I immediately recognized the player in the background but I can't think of who the hell it is.

QUOTE(ZoomSlowik @ Mar 3, 2006 -> 02:07 PM) That must have been an ugly game to watch too. The final was 45-42. :headshake NC State shot 34%, Iowa shot 29.8%. They also combined for 41 turnovers. :puke It was defense. Both teams were playing very very tremendous defense. It was actually a really exciting game to watch. I remember tons of shot blocks and a lot of full court pressing. You also need to remember that both State and Iowa rank among the best in the country defensively. I loved it too cause Iowa was able to beat one of the better teams in the ACC.

I think Liotta was scheduled to pitch. It could very well have been him.

QUOTE(Palehosefan @ Mar 3, 2006 -> 01:03 PM) Ok, I'll break it down even further. NC State only plays Duke once this year, while UNC gets them twice. UNC's opponents all year long are 430-290 60%, while State's are 418-333 55%. Out of UNC's 26 games this year, only 5 teams have a losing record, compared to 11 teams on State's schedule. Lets not forget that one of State's losses came to Iowa. Just had to throw Iowa in amongst all this ACC talk

QUOTE(ZoomSlowik @ Mar 3, 2006 -> 11:12 AM) They're going to have to beat a #1 or a #2 seed to make it to the Elite 8. I don't see that happening. Their offensive production is just so inconsistent, I have a hard time believing that they'll beat someone good. They really are almost a clone of the Illini. Both are two of the best defensive teams in the country. Illini are a little more athletic and more fast break oriented. While Iowa tends to run slower paced offensive sets. Iowa has a better scorer down low though in Brunner but at the same time Illini have a few more offensive weapons. Very very similar teams though.

QUOTE(Steff @ Mar 3, 2006 -> 01:23 PM) 13 year olds are allowed at Tufano's/ I didn't say Connie's was a shack. I asked if cost was an issue... he has yet to respond. Pardon me... Tufano's was really good. IIRC its priced pretty fair too for some good italian cuisine.

QUOTE(Wong & Owens @ Mar 3, 2006 -> 12:59 PM) First thing that popped into my head was Connie's on Archer. It's defintely Chicago, it's close to the park, it's family friendly, and pretty darned good eats. Thats where I watched game 1 of the series. Solid food, good atmosphere. Usually a decent number of Sox fans there before the game as well.

Dire Straits absolutely rock. I have a couple of there CD's and they are good from start to finish. Knoppler is the man. The rank very high up on my list of best bands.

QUOTE(Heads22 @ Mar 3, 2006 -> 09:26 AM) I've liked the idea of keeping 2 batters, 2 pitchers, and one pitcher or batter of your choice. Me too.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Mar 3, 2006 -> 08:38 AM) Contreras is basically a non-person in Cuba because he defected. The players on the Cuban team cannot even talk about him, from what I understand from comments made by Jose. He won't be playing with Cuba. Oh well in that case I'll shutup. I was thinking we only had two pitchers but than I just assumed Count was on the Cuban team. Thanks for straightening that out Yas.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Mar 3, 2006 -> 08:00 AM) Contreras isn't at the WBC. He's persona-non-grata with Cuba. What exactly is that? I'm lost cause I swear I saw a him on the front page of ESPN.com about a week ago and the point was that Cuba would only be as good as Contreras and how he would be the guy that needed to carry them.

QUOTE(Jimbo's Drinker @ Mar 2, 2006 -> 11:55 PM) Chinese Taipei...but the geniuses at ESPN flashed the score of the game, while it was taking place...there goest the element of surprise. I didn't see that, but I eventually fell asleep too. I hate it when they ruin stuff like that. You'd think they'd be smarter.

That makes no sense. He wouldn't be reporting to AAA Charlotte that quickly. I was thinking Nomo was coming in to soleley give the club some starter innings during spring training. My thoughts were that maybe the Sox didn't have enough guys to make starts when Vaz, Count and Freddy are at the WBC? Especially if there are some split squad games as well. Obviously Mac, Buehrle, Garland can start and Redding good see some action there. But aside from that the Sox don't have any guys near major league ready that can start. They could give Broadway a shot but he'd get hammered and so would most of the younger minor leaguers they could run out. Plus I would think at one point they'd start making sure Mac was coming in during situations where there were runners on base just so he could get used to it. Same with Redding. Thats just a guess on my part for why Nomo was brought it. He's probably happy to give the club those innings cause it will give him a shot to sign on somewhere else.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Mar 3, 2006 -> 01:02 AM) I was under the impression that $17M figured was based on the assumption of a $10M cap boost, that can no longer be assumed. This falls in line with the figures from Clayton. From what I heard if the cap is raised there salary will actually be more in the 25 million range. That would be pretty ridiculous.

He hit .216 in his major league career. Was originally a very highly touted prospect in the Yankees organization who was eventually traded to the Padres in exchange for the legendary Hideki Irabu. To say the least neither guys lived up to there greatness. Rivera also had an incident in spring training where he took someone's mitt (I think it was Arod's or Jeters) and tried to sell it. I think that was Rivera. Obviously camp fodder. Rivera is 32.

Sox looking for their first win of the spring.

QUOTE(nitetrain8601 @ Mar 3, 2006 -> 06:30 AM) Like fathom said, Kirk is great in helping bring the team back, but he completely chokes in the clutch. He misses FT's, layups, or does something that screams choke. I also think Duhon runs the offense much better than Kirk. That's the only reason he gets PT. Kirk is good at getting his own shots, but he still can't make a post entry feed(hasn't been good at that since high school) and the offense is a stalemate for the most part when he's on the floor moreso than it is for Duhon. If Duhon was so much better at running the offense, why isn't he the starting PG. I'm not going to say anything else though. Obviously we differ on opinon way too much. You dislike Kirk and dont' think he's any good. I don't.

s*** I didn't even realize the games started already. I just turned on my tv and one of the asian games is on. Korea vs someone.

LOL...Im tired, finally finished up with school for the day.

The prior note was kind of stuck in a glitch thread so I just want people to know that the reason you couldn't access Soxtalk for a large portion of the day on Thursday was due to an error in the program the runs all the PHP. Because of that the front page and forum (which are both PHP based) were basically acting as if they couldn't recognize the code. We had not seen the issue before, but we have been doing some other server stuff on the back end and by mid day we had isolated and solved the problem. Everything should be set and I wouldn't expect any sort of significant outage (not that we ever do) but every once in a while an error will happen and being that we are amateurs sometimes it takes us a bit. I appreciate everyone's patience and apologize for the downtime. We are always trying to do things to ensure that the downtime will decrease and I'd like to think that ever year we've improved on that and we'll be doing what we can to prepare the site for the new season and more site growth so that there won't be many slowdowns. We are also working on some alternatives to getting the search function working again (but in a different way). Just wanted to keep everyone in the loop and thanks so much for making Soxtalk what it is today. The site is only as good as the community and I personally think you, the members, are amazing.

Just want to post it here. For those that couldn't get in, it was an issue on our end dealing with the PHP. The issue has been solved and everything should be golden now. We still have an upgrade in the works for before April 1, but aside from that we should be good to go.

QUOTE(chitownsportsfan @ Mar 2, 2006 -> 08:46 PM) That pretty much sums up the difference in browers. Firefox is the better browser, I'm sure you IE people are hard headed, hell I was too before switching. Firefox and tabs and it's mundo pop-up blocker will have you hooked in 3 days--give it 3 days I swear you'll love it. Admins: Any chance of getting the page views broken down by broswer? I hope Firefox and Opera are up into the 30% range as a whole. IE is such a POS, IMO at least--and I used IE forever. Actually in terms of the front page...I think in general Soxtalk favors Mozilla. Its right at 50% or so. Its too early to tell though since the front page is so new.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Mar 1, 2006 -> 06:41 PM) ESPN says the Bears are under by $7.8 million (John Clayton with a list.) Clayton is dead wrong. Its minimum 17 million and you can take that to the bank. There is a good chance (depending on the new CBA) that it will be even higher.

QUOTE(fathom @ Mar 2, 2006 -> 10:15 PM) BTW, the single most ridiculous thing I've seen by the Bulls all year is that they won't give the ball to Gordon at the end of the game. He's the only guy on the team who can create a shot whenever he wants. They could have anywhere from 3-10 more wins if they were able to make that clutch shot at the end. I would agree with that. I don't like that play going to Noc, but it looked as if the play was drawn up for Gordon to curl around and Noc to give him the ball, but for some reason Gordon started coming to Noc and than curled the other way, leaving Noc on his own. He was kind of stunned. I still think Hinrich is far more clutch than anyone gives him credit for. People look at a last second shot, but he's often the guy who all of a sudden starts whooping ass in the 3rd and 4th quarter while bringing the Bulls back into the game. What ticked me off was there was a stretch of a few minutes in the 4th where Kirk was just handing it to the Cavs, whether it was driving in and stopping and popping a jumper or driving and kicking it to Songalia or someone else. But than Skiles brings in Duhon and that f*** holds the ball. I just don't like the way Duhon runs the offense when compared to Kirk. Duh does a solid job running offenses, but Kirk is one of the best pg's in the biz when it comes to that standpoint and when he's just been whooping ass they should be milking it and going with it. Duhon can't work pick and rolls cause he can't shoot for s*** so why when the pick and roll is working so well do you take the ball out of Hinrich's hand and put it in Duh's while moving Hinrich to the oft guard spot. That I'll never know. I love Skiles, but I just dont' like how he takes the ball out of Kirk's hands.

QUOTE(Jordan4life_2006 @ Mar 2, 2006 -> 09:57 PM) Good post. I agree with most of it. As far as getting into the playoffs, learning, ect, I agree with that. I don't agree with AD being the diffrence in this team winning so many close games last year and losing all the close ones this year. Maybe calling them dumb was going a little overboard. But they make A LOT of bad decisions in close games. They've been doing this all year. I believe you shold get better in that area as the season goes on. They're making the same mistakes now that they were in November and December. What makes it really frustrating is that they've regressed in that department since last year. But like you said, they're still young. I expect major improvements in that area next year. Or they'll just be a bunch of talented players who have no idea how to win close games. The big reason I mention AD is because I know from talking to a few people and they all had the same consensus view in terms of the leadership Davis provided on the court in the final minutes. Veterans players know how to finish games and they can constantly harp (basically as a floor general) on the guys. I realize the coach does that stuff, but to have that type of guy on the floor is a big difference. Luckily these young guys got to go through with that but there has been a definate let down now that they are on their own (Harrington is a leader as well but he typically isn't out there in the final minute or two). With the fact this is the guys first time without that true leader, your going to see leaders develop certain days but mistakes come up other times. I think we'll see them really start closing games off well down the stretch and next year we'll really see it pay dividends. I agree they make mistakes at crucial times but thats a part of growing up. The good thing is the team has found itself in the position to make those mistakes (ie in quite a few close games) and that type of experience, with proper coaching as well as proper personel (ie guys that are intelligent and talented enough and I Think we have that, especially when we find another big or two) will lead to us closing out games and holding on to leads much better.