Jake

Really irritating to hear people b**** about how it is unfair to assume the Big Hurt didn't use steroids when we are just assuming about everyone else. Get your head out of your ass and do some research. This guy spent much of his career talking about PED use and even tried to game the system to force testing to start happening. There is literally nobody that would surprise me more to find out that he used steroids than Frank Thomas, including my boyhood hero Ken Griffey Jr.

QUOTE (scs787 @ Jan 8, 2014 -> 12:49 PM) I'm not sure if we can discount having his brother on the team. It won't be a HUGE discount, but I can see him taking less money to play with Martellus, who has already talked about "recruiting" him. That would mean a 6M cap hit each year? If so I think I'd pass. Last 2 years he's been extremely inconsistent. He'll have games where he still goes off, but he's been a non factor more often than not. He really went off in the nasty Baltimore game, and against Minnesota, in those 2 games he had 19 tackles and 4.5 sacks...In his other 14 games?? 28 and 3....That's scary low for a guy who plays a lot of snaps. Jake, you might have this info available on PFF or might know where to find it, how often were teams running away from Peppers? Is it clear he was making an impact in that regard? It would mean $10M each year if he is kept or $10 million this year and $6 million next year if he is cut. The real question (for this season) is do you want to pay $2 million to have Julius on the team? You're paying him $8 million to go away regardless.

"Breaking news today in baseball, a pair of Braves are voted into the Hall of Fame with their manager, Bobby Cox. Among the others voted in was the slugger Frank Thomas."

QUOTE (flavum @ Jan 8, 2014 -> 01:27 PM) Epic fail on Whitesox.com not having Frank there already. KW's final revenge!

I've heard almost no discussion of Thomas on ESPN

If Peppers would agree to restructure his deal to 2/$20M but with a $6M guarantee in each season, would you do it?

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Jan 7, 2014 -> 04:35 PM) Wow. I sold my wife's s***ty year-old Kindle Fire HD 8.9 and was able to get the new model Nexus 7 for her for not much more. People are dumb. Why would anyone drop $190 on a year-old Kindle Fire HD. The f***ing thing is $229 brand new. eBay buyers have to be some of the most stupid people ever. I frequently see things going for more than their retail price.

Bynum had a pretty great opportunity here and blew it. I'm not sure that a team like the Heat is going to want a guy like him to rock the boat. I could be wrong, but why bring a total cancer to the absolute, odds-on favorite to win the title? Seems like the risk is way too high for the potential payoff of...winning again.

Could just be a case of finding out if his price is really that high. You also never know how far a good impression can go. Maybe we can have Shingo and Iguchi stop by. Maybe we want to enter a bidding war, too. I'd be surprised, though.

Grandal is a huge question mark to me. Are his previous successes from the juice? Can he still catch after injury? Would he have been a good major leaguer anyway? Makes little sense to give anything up for him and even less for San Diego to trade him for anything less than top dollar.

There is some point at which Mirotic will no longer be Bulls property if he is not signed, FWIW

Safety is by far the most pressing need. By the end of the season, our DL was the second best position on the D after the corners. Now, most of our interior DL (the part that was playing borderline adequate) is not under contract. But if we can bring some of them back, I'd certainly pay more attention to safety if all else is equal. With that said, I'll take the best players I can get at any defensive position.

What I really don't get is why the pick would get protected from 56-60

ss2k5 said it best -- if they think Castro is going to be great but see some flukiness in Quintana, they'll deal. If they feel really strongly in just one of those directions, they'll try to swing a deal. If they think both are going to be 4 WAR players for the foreseeable future, they probably won't do it.

If you don't want to vote for anyone, that's great -- in some ways, it's better than speculating on who did what. But don't vote for anybody then!

You are probably underestimating the productive capabilities of Android by quite a bit. Either way, tablets are very useful as consumption devices as well. I do most of my reading and posting on Soxtalk from my Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet, for instance. The active digitizer (aka, the S Pen technology) makes it much more useful for productivity for me, since I can take handwritten notes on it. I also wrote this entire post via handwriting recognition. Curious why you don't trust Asus, as they are held in extremely high esteem throughout the tech community and have pioneered Android in the tablet format. They made the first mainstream convertible. To each his own of course, but I wouldn't want you to miss out on a good product for you at some point.

I honestly love having as many physical/capacitive buttons as possible. For some reason I feel like I "trust" them more and I've never been fond of the black bar on-screen for that kind of thing. It may just be that I am so used to it, though my One lacks a physical button (there are two capacitive buttons). What Samsung has done here IMO is the worst way to do things, which is to keep the button but change the function. If I had one, I'd hit it to get to my home screen all the god damned time.

good find Zoom. Also, I don't blame Deng one second for trying to find his way to the open market. This is the NBA. GMs are f***ing dumb. Someone will pay him a bunch.

QUOTE (Jenksy Cat @ Jan 7, 2014 -> 12:27 AM) Love it...but what the s*** is Cleveland thinking? Vaults them into the 8th seed for no reason? You get sick of being a s***ty team after a while. It's not like the high draft picks have been doing them a ton of good, anyway

As we are learning with the Charlotte pick, even a terrible franchise tends to get a pick outside the top 10 over the course of several years

Bulls twitter: Bulls convey contract of Luol Deng to Cavs for multiple draft picks & contract of Andrew Bynum http://bit.ly/1fa6OW9 pic.twitter.com/xe9vIdbllG I'd say we're going to release him since the Bulls aren't even willing to admit that we not only received his contract, but the player himself as well

So...can we all take back the ridicule towards the FO for not making a deal? There was a lot of premature criticism up in here and the Bulls did a great job of not revealing their plan and not making a deal without getting what they were looking for, which is talent over savings. In the end, we got both. Great. All that for a freaking expiring contract.