Jake

I'm always happy to give Gordon a chance, but I'm not so happy to pay him 4-5 million to do it anymore

I'm now 3-3 in the heroes league. Second in points, trailing by just 8. My points against would be good for third most points scored in the league, most points against. In my other league, I'm now 5-1 with those most points. 3rd most points against, though. I need to quit drawing these tough matchups

I'm fb friends with 3 of you guys, I think. Maybe a couple more. Never met anyone in person

Cubs got their guy! Oh, wait...Girardi went back to NYY

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 12:48 PM) Haven't managed to meet anyone from here yet, but I did sell a Zune to Lostfan, and have conversations with him outside of Soxtalk on occasion. Tough sell

I like how Vick had half a point for about an hour yesterday before they took it back. Not sure what that was about

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 03:24 PM) The death of the RB is really killing fantasy for me this year. I said the same thing last year, but this year is worse. Yeah, I have MJD in one of my leagues and Chris Johnson in another (both are RB2). The commentary on these two players is that they suck, are hardly playable anymore. They are a f***-ton better than any of the FA options out there as well as some of the guys I had picked up as potential backups throughout the season (Michael Bush, Shonn Greene, Ben Tate, Shane Vereen). Trading for Giovani Bernard has given me some depth in one league, but he has hardly outproduced them. I think it is just a shallow position. Might have to re-evaluate what a RB2 looks like.

Nobody is here to argue that ADA may be the worst baserunner of all that are roughly his speed and level of aggressiveness. We're just saying that speed and aggressiveness makes his value as a baserunner a net positive compared to the average baserunner in MLB. That doesn't mean ADA shouldn't be correcting his easily correctable mistakes and that making those mistakes may be bad for clubhouse culture and a general winning atmosphere. It does mean that he isn't the worst baserunner ever. Just, perhaps, the dumbest.

QUOTE (GoodAsGould @ Oct 12, 2013 -> 04:15 PM) Do you know how few people are actually found insane?? You literally have to be bat s*** crazy and still the chances are you won't be found insane in court. There is no doubt she is going to prison and there is also no doubt she will be in prison while waiting for a trial don't see what your issue with the legal system is.... only thing that won't happen is the death penalty. And, by the way, being institutionalized is no fun thing. In many/most cases, a sane person would be much better off in prison than in a mental health facility. Faking it will offer limited benefit.

My dad made a good point about this -- he says he knew the GOP was full of s*** when they decided to pay the back pay owed to the federal workers during the shutdown. If they wanted to shut down the government as a means of fiscal belt-tightening like they claim to be doing, why promise all those workers their pay? They like to treat the federal budget like a house budget, so why don't they put their money where their mouth is? If you "shut down" your home budget to the essential services to save money, you don't go spend the saved money once it is all over. Also, the money used on research in the federal budget is practically inconsequential (to the budget). We're talking about 2% of the budget. No reason to hammer this part of the budget.

QUOTE (Vance Law @ Oct 13, 2013 -> 09:42 PM) I would say, more accurately, that he made a number of errors both in the field and on the base paths and that fact seems to have a disproportionate emotional impact on many fans. He was not one of the worst baserunners in baseball. Fangraphs has him as our 3rd best baserunner after Rios and Ramirez. Fangraphs has him as the 25th most valuable baserunner in MLB for 2013. Fans don't get actively angry at Adam Dunn or Paul Konerko for being terribly slow since they can't help it. They can't help it, but it does make Paul Konerko the worst baserunner in baseball, and Adam Dunn the 16th worst. He did have a bad year defensively- made a lot of errors. Players have good and bad years defensively. All of that plus his offense adds up to 2.2 WAR- 3rd best on the team- and all for the bargain basement price of about $2 million. I agree with your general sentiment, but I wouldn't give us so much credit as to think we didn't resent Dunn and Konerko for being slow, lol QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 06:55 AM) Unfortunately no one has an outs on bases stat that is sortable. BR has it for individual players. De Aza had 19 outs on the bases this year (OOB+CS) vs the 20 SBs he had. 11 of those were baserunning mistakes that were not deemed as CS's. For contrast Ramirez in his 30 steals, had 15 outs on the bases this year, 6 of which weren't CS's. Alex Rios had 5 OOB this year that weren't CS's. Yes De Aza had as many outs on the bases (not including CS's) as two of the biggest idiots in baseball combined in Rios and Ramirez. Again, any baserunning stat that tells me De Aza was a good baserunner has problems. The truth is that he is fast and, while often losing bases by being stupid, also often picked up bases by being fast and aggressive. I'm not going to say he's an amazing baserunner, but just being fast and aggressive in today's game will make you a good baserunner. The stat he is citing is based on the amount of bases you get compared to what is expected on a given play -- so it docked him for the bad plays and credited him when he did well

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 08:17 AM) Two weeks ago I was up 40 going into the Monday night game. He had Sproles and Colston. I lost. Last week, I went up against Tony Romo, who threw for 500 yards and 5 TDs. I lost. This week, I went up against Jamaal Charles, Brandon Marshall, and Vernon Davis. I lost. This season blows Did you go up against me? I have all those players...but it says my opponent is knightni

And pretty much any other in-progress experiment that was running on federal grants had to shut down as well, nationwide. Most of these can't exactly be paused

QUOTE (scs787 @ Oct 13, 2013 -> 07:11 PM) I'd prefer the BoSox as well, just because of Peavy, but...Idk how much money this Illitch(Tigers owner) fellow has but is it possible if the Tigers don't win it this year he opens the wallet even wider next year? I'd imagine that happens either way -- and that's a good thing because it will further f*** them in the medium-term

Pats aren't that good, but Saints are seriously overrated. And Brady is awesome

QUOTE (flavum @ Oct 12, 2013 -> 06:19 PM) Well, the 2006 World Series was terrible, so hopefully a Tigers-Cardinals series this year would be better. Anybody but the Red Sox. I'd much prefer the BoSox to the Tigers. The Tigers just need to blow it one or two more times before their window is pretty much closed

Unfortunately, we still have the best schools - so STEM folks have to choose between institutional quality and the possibility of receiving federal grants.

I hope NU falls out

QUOTE (Tex @ Oct 12, 2013 -> 06:13 PM) Too bad academics aren't able to adapt to the present conditions. I guess I thought more highly of them. They have by making part-time lecturers into 40% of the labor force while eliminating tenure lines, all while public schools are essentially operating as private institutions because they have lost so much public funding. This is, of course, why losing valuable research is so devastating. It is so hard to find a tenure-track job that losing one chance may very well be your only chance at getting one. Once you are out of grad school and not in tenure positions, you may never get the resources to build your research portfolio again

QUOTE (Tex @ Oct 12, 2013 -> 06:13 PM) Too bad academics aren't able to adapt to the present conditions. I guess I thought more highly of them. huh?

When that person comes up for review, they'll remember and consider that they lost this project in progress. Unfortunately, that doesn't take the place of the publications they need to prove their competence. Publishing is hard, especially in the sciences where you need funding to do much research, so there just may not be such a good opportunity again. It's so hard to land a tenure track that it could feasibly set back this person's career permanently. Likewise, as Balta mentioned, the time it takes to get stuff researched and then published is very relevant. Like the grad students who need publications before graduating, this researcher has to have publications before tenure review comes. Sometimes it can't be made up later, because later never comes.

I feel like we were just talking about how there was too little info to judge whether he was a negligent father

AP is clearly in a weird position since he probably had little knowledge of this child beyond a rumored recent paternity test. Doubly weird since pictures of his other son are being passed around as if that child is the one who was killed. I'm not going to judge too harshly at this point. I'm sure this is pretty disturbing for him, but also feels a little bit different than losing a son that you had been raising yourself. Maybe he should have been raising this child, I don't know, but there's no way to make that judgment given the available info. The way we report news like this has exposed the weirdness of this, since a bunch of people released their collective breaths when they found it was "just" his illegitimate son. Many had internalized the way we determine if something is newsworthy as the way to decide if it was worth public grief rather than whether the thing that had happened was a tragedy

....and there's two goals for NY

QUOTE (chw42 @ Oct 11, 2013 -> 04:25 PM) No, unless you save them. Do you have any large games (GTA, any Gameloft or EA games, etc.) on your phone? No, not really. All pretty uninvolved, non-graphics heavy games. Someone has suggested that it could be texts - do you think that's it?