Jake

QUOTE (CaliSoxFanViaSWside @ Dec 1, 2013 -> 12:14 PM) Alejandro De Aza named 37th best CF in baseball out of 40 http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1755728...center-fielders It isn't that it came from B/R, it's that it's based on nothing. They claim to consult various statistics, but the actual point values they assign are based on their gut feeling (that is informed by stats, but who knows to what extent). That's dumb.

My WRs combined for 5 points and I still win

QUOTE (Brian @ Dec 1, 2013 -> 06:00 PM) Cliff just got his 2nd technical booted from game vs St Rita. Can't play Friday at this shoot out in Kentucky on Fri but will be at Chicago Elite Classic Sat. The ref reportedly reached for a common foul before going for the T

QUOTE (TheFutureIsNear @ Nov 30, 2013 -> 11:18 PM) Good to see the Twins spending $ to make sure they can compete with us and the Royals for 3rd place in the ALC I have no clue why you'd assume Cleveland is on some higher level than the rest of us. Very flawed club

QUOTE (Baron @ Nov 30, 2013 -> 08:15 PM) Yeah his name is Josh Phegley AKA, MLB's worst offensive player in 2013

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Nov 30, 2013 -> 05:20 PM) Zapata has to be at the very least 4 years away. 5-6 is probably realistic, and still really agressive. I took that to mean that he would be popular on this board in a few years

You don't realize how f***ing big Bynum is until you see him absolutely dwarf Joakim Noah QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Nov 30, 2013 -> 04:08 PM) This is random as all hell. But is this the worst single-season roster in nba history? http://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/VAN/1996.html I know this was their first year of existence. But jesus f***ing christ of almighty praise be to allah and the prophets and angels. My eyes are bleeding. How did they win 15 games? They didn't even play in good college programs for Christ's sake

If "everything falls his way" Hector Santiago is an ace

It won't blow my mind if Abreu posts a sub-.800 OPS, but that is by no means my expectation. Even if it does happen, I would expect that it be weighed down by a very slow start that he rallies back from

QUOTE (Jose Abreu @ Nov 30, 2013 -> 10:53 AM) Didn't Michael Bourn sign with Cleveland in March? I hope Granderson doesn't wait that long. Wouldn't shock me, since they are both the type of guy that you don't mind giving some money to, but don't really want to give up a draft pick to get.

My first reaction to the "close losses" stat is that it has no context. I have no clue if that is more than normal or what. Our pythagorean W-L had us with 67 wins (versus 63), which says that we did have an unlucky distribution of runs. If we had been pretty damn lucky in our distribution of runs, we're just getting into the mid-70s of wins. For reference, we won 85 games in 2012 and our pythagorean W-L was 88 wins, so we were actually "unlucky" last year. I put unlucky in quotes because luck isn't the only thing that affects the distribution of runs. Obviously, good teams may "pick their spots" so to speak better. For instance, a good team will surrender a larger portion of runs in games that they're winning big than a bad team.

Did NYC say that this "confiscation" would not happen when they passed whatever ordinance that made it possible? Also, who the hell owns shotguns that can hold 5 shells? There are about 25-30 firearms in my house and none of them would be affected by this law. Obviously, the handguns would be no bueno in NYC

Jews made up less than 1% of the German population. They were a longstanding, well-assimilated group -- for the most part, people didn't go around noticing which people were Jews and which weren't. Most folks did not ever interact with Jewish people because they were so few in number. This made it easier to get people to go along with anti-Jewish policies being put into place. If there is nobody near you to disprove the things you've been hearing, then you might start to believe them. Of course, Hitler/Nazis innovated very little when it comes to anti-Jewish policy and propaganda. A great deal of the Nazi anti-Jewish policy can be traced back to the policy suggestions of Martin Luther, who became quite the anti-Semite later in life. The Third Reich was not the first to oppress the Jews, but they were perhaps the first to do in great numbers after the widespread acceptance of scientific racism like Gobineau's "Inequality of the Races" -- this means that Germans saw Jews as Semites rather than Jews. Semites refers to a racial and therefore racial identity, meaning Nazi-era beliefs were that Jews could not convert their way out of being Jewish. Due to the fact that German speakers had been spread across different state boundaries for quite a while, there had long been a yearning among the people to unite in a Pan-German state. This was an appeal used to great effect by Hitler, himself an Austrian that yearned to be German. The early rise of Hitler had little to do with Jews. We think about Jews now, because they bore the brunt of the pain later on. People didn't elect Hitler and submit to Nazi rule because of Jews. His message wasn't "the Jews ruined everything and that's all we should bother thinking about." He promoted a message of Pan-Germanism, extolling the greatness of Germans and how the geopolitical situation had been holding them down. Of course, promoting Germans as a genetically superior people does indeed imply an exclusion of others. People are much easier to motivate by self-love than fear, though. Anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism was not a motivating factor so much as pro-Germanism was. Excessive nationalism -- and by nationalism, I mean "nation" in the racial/ethnic sense -- came first, at which point people became more agreeable to things like anti-Jewish policies. With that said, anti-Jewish policy was enacted in a very calculated way. Law after law after law after law after decree after decree were enacted, stripping them of rights bit by bit. With the gift of hindsight, we always notice these things. We know what it means when you tell people they aren't allowed to run a business or live in a certain place or go to a school. At that point, though, those were each minor offenses against a people that few Germans knew personally and had long heard were evil and/or inferior. Many of these policies would have hardly been uncommon in their features and would have seemed relatively tame in the United States where awful anti-black laws were common. On the whole, guns had pretty much next to nothing to do with it. The vast majority of Hitler's agenda was enacted with unbelievable public support because the "enemy" was distant and unfamiliar. Jews in Germany were so few in number and so concentrated and impoverished by the time they knew what was up that there were no legitimate means of resistance. History had told Jews that a little bit of compliance goes a long way, as they are a people that have been oppressed pretty much regardless of where they go. This was Germany, too. People thought very highly of German culture (including Germans obviously) and the thought that they'd do anything barbarous was preposterous. Many Russian Jews died at the hands of German invaders because they didn't believe the Russian press when it warned that Germans were killing Jews -- indeed, Russian Jews thought much more highly of Germans than Russians, at least until the Germans came to Russia. A lot of Germans were willfully ignorant of what was going on. You can pretty much sum up (West) German culture from 1947-1990 as a big denial of guilt over their own role in the Holocaust. In the later years of that period, Germany on the whole embraced their role quite completely. However, that came from the youth that didn't live through it. The people that were adults during the Third Reich were never quite willing to live up to their own compliance. This includes normal, well-meaning people that were simply so self-involved with their daily lives that they failed to act as well as the many former Nazis that ended up running the government without the public knowing their former roles. There was not a lack of guns, but a lack of resistance at fault. A prominent historian once called German resistance to Hitler as "resistance without people." That's what it was. The pockets of resistance were small, isolated, and never gained support. Hitler was no dummy and got rid of political opponents, but this process occurred so early in the process that it could have been snuffed out if anyone had bothered to care. Unfortunately, Germans didn't mind communists, "asocials," and intellectuals going to "labor camps" because they had been told that those people weren't pro-Germany and had led the country into the last World War. The few folks that could have added some people to the resistance were killed off with consent of the rest of the people. I would say it is more likely that a proliferation of guns is more likely to induce the conditions that would allow for people to acquiesce to such a dubious ideology (chaos) than it is to save a tiny minority that is facing a united ideological front against them.

Refs were not great and definitely had more that hurt IPFW down the stretch. Both team's FT shooting was horribad, I don't know how that happens. Jury is out on the 2013-14 Illini

Yes, illegally buying guns is the answer and not the problem

You can sign him or not sign him, but I wouldn't sign him for two years. That's the worst amount of time to sign him. He's either a long-term piece or he's not a piece. He's not a guy you trade a lot of money and a draft pick for and only keep for two years

I've been trying unsuccessfully of a way to word the rule that can allow that to be a touchdown but not encourage dangerous hits to an uncovered head

Purchased a Lenovo A720 AIO desktop. i5 Ivy Bridge dual core 2.5GHz, 1 GB NVIDIA GPU, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB 5400 RPM HDD, Blu-Ray, HDMI in/out, beautiful design, nice 27" 1920x1080 multi-touch monitor with sweet adjustability. The main issue with it was that the specs weren't good enough to justify the price, but I got it for $700. Usually that is getting you Pentium processors.

I was able to meet Waddle and Silvy a while back and they're both real cool guys and pretty much the only ones I'd specifically tune into 1000 for. With that said, 670 turns into pure bulls*** regardless of who is on the air if there is any contentious story going on

One of my teams started the Jordy Nelson-Nate Burleson tandem of death today

If I'm picking one, I'm going Salty in this scenario. I'm happier to potentially be wasting money on Salty than to spend precious talent on Wieters

I didn't mean for that to necessarily be a comprehensive list and I tried to go with guys with the most track record to avoid argument. I wasn't necessarily trying to make a point beyond it clearly being a really good thing to be picking in the top 5 if at all possible

FWIW, Melky was always s***ty until that season. Peralta has had a smattering of decent seasons before last year, so if they think he only used last season then they might think that it at least isn't an impossibility that he has had good offensive seasons drug-free before.

I blame the black guy in the photo for bringing up race

Under what cirucmstances are you guys listening to so much sports radio? At work? On the way there/home? Just for funzies?