Jake

Refs have been fine since halftime. EDIT: I say that as this flagrant stuff is coming up

Mirotic may expose the big coaching f***up by Thibs of not playing him thus far. The only plausible deniability he has is if Mirotic wasn't healthy

Really one-sided officiating thus far.

I haven't looked through the posts for last night's game, but the thing that stuck in my mind the most was that Pau was being lazy as f*** out there. I don't know if it was the one day of rest or too many minutes in the game or what, but he was not the guy who was going off in Game 1. They punked him for innumerable offensive rebounds where he just wasn't trying to get it

I've never been a huge fan of IPAs, I only use sparingly. Just not the sort of taste profile I tend to like, though I say this after having a giant Columbus Brewing Co. IPA at the Clippers-Knights game yesterday. IPAs are intellectually challenging so I have to have my head in the game to appreciate all they have to offer. If I want to just casually have a beer while watching a game or when I get home from work, my go-to for those situations is Dale's Pale. One of my favorite beer styles is the scotch ale, even though there aren't a ton of my breweries making them (too busy making the almighty IPA!). Founders Dirty Bastard, OB Old Chub are good example of this style. The style that made me interested in beer is the hefeweizen. The first I had was from Destihl in Bloomington but there are several great German ones distributed in the USA

Unless you think he should have foreseen Peavy's arm injury, that was a great deal -- the only thing we lost was money. Woe be to us that we lost Clayton Richard and Aaron Poreda!

QUOTE (Feeky Magee @ May 5, 2015 -> 10:33 PM) Rondon 2014 as a RHH: .303/.352/.576 LHH: .220/.297/.242 2015 as a RHH: .389/.389/.667 LHH: .170/.290/.170 That doesn't include tonight's homer which came as a RHH. Time to ditch switch-hitting? If the splits were the reverse, I'd say he ought to stick with it. But you don't see many righties who struggle as much against RHP as he is batting left-handed.

Nobody is allowing for the possibility that Lindsey Graham knew what he was saying and was just using figurative language to explain that he thinks the entire Middle East is bad news (except for Farsi- and Hindi-speaking parts, I suppose)

QUOTE (raBBit @ May 5, 2015 -> 09:53 PM) That is cruel. I feel like you'd end up on the news for that now a days. This. You've been dealing with kids long enough where you know who you can trust. Worst case you're out 5-10 dollars. Worst case is probably more like explosive diarrhea in front of his entire class

How would you fail to notice white out in coffee, of all things

QUOTE (fathom @ May 5, 2015 -> 10:23 PM) When Jeff's throw to first base first came out of his hand, it looked like it was going into the 20th row Agreed, that had a weird trajectory

QUOTE (Feeky Magee @ May 5, 2015 -> 09:57 PM) Nah, high line-drive rates aren't sustainable, their year-to-year correlation is the worst among the most common hitting metrics, and they tend to regress to career average. This is true, though that doesn't mean that a person "lucks" in or out of line drives. It's just that there's 180 degrees, vertically, where a player can hit a ball. The bottom 90 is all in the ground ball bucket. From 20 to 50 (above parallel to the ground) is the fly ball bucket. Above 50 is popups. Liners fall into the 5 to 20 bucket. Even if you assume that the vast majority fit in the the middle 90 degrees of the the 180 possible, you have 50% of possible directions going to GB, 33.3% to FB, 16.7% to LD, and 5.6% to popups. Interestingly, these figures are really close to league averages. So of the three major batted ball outcomes, the only way you wouldn't have much more variation in LD compared to the others is if players were much more consistent in their LD% than any other type of outcome, which clearly isn't true. The soft/medium/hard stats are all relative to the batted ball type. So the exit speed of a "hard" grounder may be a "medium" liner and so on. That his hard% is high indicates that he's not hitting a bunch of flared liners.

The definitive word on Avisail's BABIP Not as inflated as you might think. Line drives aren't luck except to the extent that you get to make your own luck.

QUOTE (bmags @ May 5, 2015 -> 10:39 AM) Did anyone read Woj's article? All I want to see is some coherent explanation for this riff. All we get is "Thibs is a great coach and the crazy front office hates him." We saw what happened with Ron Adams, but that was never well explained. It was either that Adams was insubordinate or Adams was fired just to spite Thibs. Otherwise, most of what we hear is that there is an irreparable problem and nobody mentions anything that Thibs has done wrong. Maybe this is mainly the fault of the FO, but I'd like to get an explanation better than "Gar doesn't get along with Thibs." That doesn't sound right to me. QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ May 5, 2015 -> 12:19 PM) Describe "run into the ground". Do you mean, Noah was hurt, had surgery, didn't have a full off-season and as a result has not been the same (cause he certainly hadn't played a lot of minutes this year). And with Taj, do you mean, his ankles, which are a consistent problem, are hurt and he even said himself won't get better this year. Minutes haven't been an issue for the team this year and people still make this comment. If anything, us not playing minutes has been an issue, lol. PS: Taj has been pretty good this post-season, imo. That wasn't supposed to be a Thibs criticism, just that the years have clearly taken their toll on those guys. They've been handled really carefully this season and for good reason. They both just have flawed bodies at this point and I'm not super optimistic for their long term future because of it. QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ May 5, 2015 -> 12:33 PM) Pau's rebounding in the playoffs has been very good, imo. He's brought his energy up a notch. Loved Pau's performance yesterday (especially in that dominant 3rd). When the Cavs were making their run, I was busy yelling, get Pau the darn ball. He is a huge x-factor in this series and will need to be because LBJ > Butler and Kyrie > Rose. He has definitely had much less of the lackadaisical play that he sometimes had in the regular season. It's nice to see he has it in him. QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ May 5, 2015 -> 12:43 PM) By the way....f*** yeah D Rose! Loved how you have responded and how you have grown this post-season. Keep it up my good man. I know this feels good, but this is just the start!!! I don't know if he reads Soxtalk. QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ May 5, 2015 -> 04:48 PM) This actually worries me There's no amount of jumpshots Derrick can make that will make me feel like it's a good thing that he hits them. I mean, yes I want him to make all his shots, but I feel like for every deep two or three he hits now, there are some terrible ones put in a trust fund for a future date.

I will say that I left my post as resident optimist over the offseason because I didn't like trading Semien for Shark and I wasn't a fan of the Melky signing

QUOTE (oldsox @ May 4, 2015 -> 08:37 PM) I was reading an article on the Rockies yesterday, and it mentioned that they had the second worst base running stats in MLB. Second to the White Sox, of course. I don't know what goes into that stat, however. Assuming it's UBR where the Sox rank last by a large margin, every baserunning event is assigned a run value. If you steal second base, the chance of scoring a run goes up by X amount, so that goes towards your baserunning value. If you don't take third on a single when others would, your chances of scoring go down by Y amount, so that will knock down your running tally.

On the bright side, it looks like it is still in the right place

Derrick has played really well tonight. Even on the plays where he isn't scoring or obviously making the big play, he's doing the right stuff.

Pau has that all day long. I hope they start to adjust because there will be a great counterpunch available.

I guess that's technically a charge, but you can't have a guy who makes first contact right as he lands get whistled for a charge

Looking vulnerable. Need to play better offensively, we've not been playing the brand of ball that got us a huge portion of our baskets from assists

It stinks that we get Derrick healthy for a playoff run but Taj and Noah have been run into the ground. All year they both have looked like they just don't have the athleticism they used to.

Got robbed on the no-goaltend call

Gotta weather the storm when Kyrie is going that well. Need to get Rose out of foul trouble, though. Also have to make sure to take advantage of his piss-poor defense, which we have been doing a bit.

Disregarding the (usually bad) results, Rose's three point shot is so inconsistent. The arc has a semblance of consistency, I guess, in that it is usually incredibly flat. The most glaring thing is that he frequently releases at different points of his jump. He also tends to have his feet and weight going in different directions.