Jake

I had posted this elsewhere, but every review of Gordon's shortstop defense from college all the way through the minors said he had everything you need to be a shortstop -- plenty of range, plenty of arm, athleticism, etc. Their only question was his hands and I think we can see at 2B that he actually has exceptional hands

There is no debate that Peavy and Rios are better players with better contracts than Garza and Soriano

Gordon is your shortstop if Alexei leaves. He'll do fine there. Let's not f***ing panic people

QUOTE (Knackattack @ Jul 23, 2013 -> 10:59 PM) Need a PTBNL with that PTBNL is Greg Norton

I'm highly skeptical of Garin Cecchini. Reeks of Ryan Sweeney to me.

QUOTE (bucket-of-suck @ Jul 23, 2013 -> 10:14 PM) That deal is not happening. crying

QUOTE (bucket-of-suck @ Jul 23, 2013 -> 10:12 PM) Closer it gets the less I can say. Any clue if this St.L business is true? Thanks for sharing. We're all pretty much just checking here all day to see when you post

QUOTE (hi8is @ Jul 23, 2013 -> 09:33 PM) Oh... I don't know.... Maybe it has to do with being the 79th highest rated prospect in all of baseball. Could be the advanced baseball IQ that's far beyond his years... Might be that the kid has put up solid numbers in every level in the minors... Year Age Tm Lg Lev Aff G PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS TB GDP HBP SH SF IBB 2011 20 Quad Cities MIDW A STL 47 222 194 39 65 15 2 5 25 9 5 21 24 .335 .401 .510 .911 99 4 3 0 4 1 2012 21 Springfield TL AA STL 126 579 523 79 150 23 6 9 52 21 11 44 74 .287 .348 .405 .754 212 6 7 2 3 2 2013 22 Memphis PCL AAA STL 86 375 336 55 101 18 8 7 30 13 1 29 49 .301 .359 .464 .824 156 6 4 2 4 1 3 Seasons 259 1176 1053 173 316 56 16 21 107 43 17 94 147 .300 .362 .443 .805 467 16 14 4 11 4 The spacing makes this unreadable

QUOTE (fathom @ Jul 23, 2013 -> 09:28 PM) Of course, but they'll just keep Keppinger there Kepp would look great in NY

I'd still be pretty damn happy with Freese, Adams, Kelly. If it seems that the Cards are more keen to hold on to Freese than Wong...you take a hardline position - you want Freese. Then, hopefully, one of two things happens: A. Cards ask us to consider Wong instead B. We "give in" and ask for Wong. Then we get Wong, the guy we wanted all along.

You just get as many potentially good big league hitters as you can and figure out the rest later. Wong is that guy. We can make room for him. Make it happen.

Urban doctored that footage

QUOTE (fathom @ Jul 23, 2013 -> 09:22 PM) 1-2, 2 BB for Semien If Gordon goes to DL, don't tell me you're not a little tempted to see Semien play in the bigs

QUOTE (fathom @ Jul 23, 2013 -> 09:23 PM) Yep, and hopefully they keep him in LF. I'm not a fan of the idea of putting him at 1B. I agree with that too. I would not make him a 1B until I'm sure his bat is going to stick. If we had guys like Wilkins and Terdoslavich on next year's team, I wouldn't mind playing Dayan in RF...because why not? Magglio played there for years.

I'm happy for Dayan to get at least one more full season to work things out. He's still young and he's still super talented. No reason for this team to not continue making every effort to have him pan out.

I'm not all that mad at Dayan

For the love of god, make some trades

Phegley sucks

Dan Hayes is good people

They shouldn't be buying a Honda, that's unamerican!

I remember when that screwball was legitimately good. And then we put him in the bullpen, one of my least favorite things to do to a young starting pitcher. Also, that was a horrible error on Rios. Horrible in the sense that it is terrible that Phegley didn't stop it.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jul 23, 2013 -> 08:28 PM) I didn't know we had prominent scouts LOL this was the exact same thing I just said

He was safe

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 23, 2013 -> 07:38 PM) “@MDGonzales: Darling left a nasty voicemail message for me in 2000. I confronted him about it in 2004, he backed down.” lol wtf?

I feel like we have opposite understandings of each other's posts. I was astonished because I interpreted your post to mean "all of the violence is from gangs and you just can't fix that" and I thought that was a horrible way to look at it. Now you're accusing me of saying that, which I don't mean to say. A good strategy to dealing with gangs (obviously, we don't have a magic solution for this) would be a tremendous way to reduce violent crimes. I would love to focus on the gang problem, because its root causes are likely less varied than the rest of the population that is violent. However, we're still dealing with a huge portion of violent crime that is not gang related. I do think that one of the most efficient things we can do is something about our horrible income inequality - see here -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality. The countries that are safer than us almost always have less income inequality than us, though as you would point out, there are other predictors. You cannot oppressively achieve more equality and you don't necessarily want perfect equality; you just want it to be MORE equal. Strong social programs and progressive taxation can achieve this. Not systematically disadvantaging certain races of people could help us catch up in this regard too. For some perspective, we have more "intentional homicides" than pretty much any first world country and a lot of places we would consider s***holes. Take the UK, Canada, Germany, and Spain. They are different enough places so if you hate one thing about one, you might not find that weakness in another. Spain, for instance, has a very decentralized government. Their UNODC murder rates - Spain (.8), Germany (.8), UK (1.2), Canada (1.6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_count...l_homicide_rate USA? 4.8. We're worse than double the murder rate of these countries. Suppose half the murders are caused by gangs in our country and none are caused by gangs in any other country. If we magically eliminate these gang murders, we are looking at 2.4/2.5. We're still significantly above these other countries and we're still in some shifty company with that 2.4/2.5 rating -- Libya, Iran, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, etc. So not only are we facing a very violent gang problem, the non-gang population murders beyond a first-world rate, too. The countries who are doing better than us aren't the 1984 dystopias that you say I like. We have a murder problem and more specifically, we have a gun problem. The gun problem is made worse by our poverty problems. And our poverty problems are made worse by our often regressive tax system and our race problem. These aren't the costs of freedom. It's the cost of bad, lazy, and selfish governance.