Jake

So...will we mention that Robin has made two straight good decisions - letting Axe finish the inning, unleashing PK on 3-0?

Paulie!

QUOTE (fathom @ Apr 16, 2013 -> 07:47 PM) Keppinger and Viciedo combining for 0 walks in 100 at bats...that's impressive Our team has been horrendous at working walks. 0% for Kep and Viciedo is crazy at this point; I know neither are prolifically patient, but they do take walks. 4% rate from Dunn? That's asinine.

Eventually you've gotta give the guy the chance to get through 6 innings. Too many short outings from our starters lately.

You earn everything you hit over there.

I think it's obvious that Axe is a major league ballplayer. He should be able to always find a place as a 5th starter or perhaps 4th on an NL team. The idea of him being our 5th starter isn't crazy in and of itself, it only seems so bad when it is obvious he is at best our 6th best starter.

Our approach is pretty troubling, especially given that a lot of the players are not playing like themselves. This team was never going to be really high on base, but guys like Dunn that ALWAYS take walks aren't even doing that. Players like Keppinger that NEVER strike out are striking out. I have to think that will settle down a bit.

I'm mystified with Kep's strikeouts, even after he's recovered a bit at the plate.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Apr 16, 2013 -> 05:22 PM) I wonder at what age school teachers address the issue? I'd say second grade. Problem is if a school teacher addressed the issue, he/she might have to delve into personal opinion about good/evil; God/man and that wouldn't work. Seriously, how do teachers address this? Cause ultimately you'd have to probably address the issue of evil or evil people. I remember my teacher on 9/11 immediately speculated that it was "suicide sickos" after the first tower was hit. She then led us in prayer. At my public school.

Have we given up?

Saw a film called Stoker this weekend. No relation to Bram Stoker, lol. Couple of famous folks in there, Matthew Goode in a leading role and Nicole Kidman in a supporting role. Very strange movie, excellent visual play, and in general it could aptly be described as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock. Worth seeing I'd say, but not amazing. Don't know how widely it will be distributed, I saw it at a hole in the wall theater and had heard nothing of it previously.

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Apr 16, 2013 -> 07:55 AM) When you have multiple problems with the rotation perhaps it's best to have Santiago in the pen so he can be used twice a week. I doubt that he stays there the entire year. While I probably would still make Santiago a starter, it is not uncommon in certain settings (like college baseball) where one of your best pitchers will be a multi-inning reliever. You can do like we did with Hector last night, bring him in early in a game with the bases loaded and get out of that jam AND get valuable innings to save the rest of the pen.

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Apr 16, 2013 -> 08:07 AM) This. Anytime a life is lost early it is horribly tragic. For me, I think Boston hit me hard because I am a runner. The beauty of the larger races is how open they are. You run down the street and thousands of people are out spectating, high fiving runners. And Boston is like the Super Bowl of marathoning. There are two ways to run that race. Either as one of a limited number of charity runners, or by running a marathon within the previous couple years (2 or 3?) within a certain qualifying time. It's an event that has no political agenda. It's an event that welcomes runners from all over the world. It's an event that has people running for causes. And it's an open event that is impossible to police. A number of people compared an event like this to a football or baseball game, and they are comparable in that a sport was targeted. But in a contained area like a Sox game at the Cell, they can check every person that comes in with ramped up security. They can't do that at a race. I'm running a half marathon in Champaign in two weekends. Even though it doesn't hold the international significance of Boston, what happened yesterday will absolutely be in the back of my mind as I interact with spectators on the course. And that, to me, is tragic. I feel exactly the same way. I'm training for a marathon and that 4:09 mark is eerily close to the pace that I'm training for.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Apr 16, 2013 -> 09:05 AM) 2. 4.5 and 3 years old. both girls. and we have a female cat.... my life sucks. I'm sorry, man. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life because I'm sure you know how to address this -- but I certainly hope there is a way things can work out. A bad marriage sucks, a divorce sucks. I hope there is still some chance you can salvage a good marriage.

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Apr 15, 2013 -> 11:18 PM) I'm no terrorist, but wouldn't Al-Qaeda WANT to claim any event like this as their own? Isn't a perfect scenario for them one in which they can credit for an American attack, become feared and perceived as powerful and still relevant, and yet they didn't have to do anything at all? It just seems to me that we can't believe them if they claim they were responsible for this. They may have hesitated to claim past events like 9/11 at first because they didn't want plans in the immediate future to be sniffed out by the intelligence. As a terrorist group, you can only get the desired effects by eventually having credit, but you may want to control as much information as you can to keep your operations secure. This is basically the source of the problems with the Benghazi scandal, where the CIA wouldn't let the full story go out right away because it would have given away their wiretaps on those responsible. They had to wait until there was plausible deniability that they had obtained the full story by other means/no longer needed those wiretaps for intelligence gathering.

One has to wonder if he's being "guarded" because he in fact needs protection from people who might accuse the Arab man near the scene of being responsible.

QUOTE (fathom @ Apr 15, 2013 -> 06:48 PM) Wait, he's trying not to swing at anything at the knees? Sounds like a stupid approach for someone who's notorious for being a low ball hitter. I've never found him to be a good low ball hitter. Outside and low sure, but he's worthless low and in where most lefties are. He hits belt high pitches best, which is why he's a mistake hitter.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 15, 2013 -> 12:24 PM) But all of those things take effort and cost money. Making those kind of evaluations takes people time and money, and so you get to choose which thing you want...do you want effective evaluations, do you want money in the classroom, or do you want higher taxes? The reason why people want to do this with just standardized tests is that it's easy. You put a pile of documents into a grading machine, plug the data into Excel, and 5 minutes later you know who to fire. Certainly, there is a convenience factor. Being cost effective can be a plus, of course, if you're using the tests wisely. I'm happy to have more money going into education, whether that involves higher taxes or maybe just taking some money from the Defense Department.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Apr 15, 2013 -> 10:09 AM) Well you need to separate out what your testing and measuring: individual students, individual schools or individual teachers. Standardized tests are fine for diagnostic measurements of students, but I don't know that there's much evidence or support behind them being at all useful for evaluating schools or teachers. You don't need to have a replacement data-gathering method to abandon one that you know doesn't actually give you meaningful results. I think you can potentially evaluate all of those things -- but what is unavoidable of course, is confusing cause and effect. This is why you have other measures. We might see a teacher with a poorer performing class than others at his/her grade level, but before the conclusion is made that the teacher performed poorly, internal observations would need to confirm that. Was the teacher assigned students equitably? Is the teacher evaluated well in observation? Was the teacher qualified in the first place? etc.

I don't love standardized testing, but I absolutely desire some uniform measures to evaluate schools. We can't decide whether a school is in need of reform, attention, whatever, when we're just going by feel or extremely subjective and variable grades. I'm always sympathetic to the idea that we could end or reduce the power given to standardized testing, but I've never heard of a good alternative with which we can evaluate schools. EDIT: SS's quoted post seems fairly reasonable.

I'm not going to get caught up in sample sizes.

Feels dirty.

I lol'd at that quote, but he definitely has that killer instinct. I don't doubt for a second that he's pre-emptively pissed off about people questioning his eventual comeback.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Apr 13, 2013 -> 06:12 AM) Do you work in law somehow? That was an excellent breakdown. Sure don't. I could only dream of being like my heroes Badger and jenks

I think many arguing on Q's behalf are peeved by the fact that the media have tried to paint this as a "this is totally Carlos Quentin's fault" situation. First of all, intent is not the only factor here. You shouldn't be hitting batters, whether you can control yourself or not. Injuries have cost CQ countless millions and he has a right to be pissed off when people hit him with a pitch, whether he's good at getting out of the way or not. Hitting people with pitched balls, intentional or no, isn't a guiltless offense. Q starts walking toward Greinke -- this is where most interpret that he is to blame. This was certainly a step in escalation, after the hit batsman situation was the first. When Q walked toward the mound, it should have been over. This is when Greinke says something -- an "expletive," something bad -- and Q can no longer contain himself. His plans change at this moment, deciding to attack Greinke. This is not great thinking by CQ, but also represents an escalation on the part of Greinke. Greinke doesn't back off, try to take a glancing blow, but instead lowers his shoulder in an apparent attempt to go tit for tat in the upcoming collision. This is where Greinke is totally stupid. He actually would have been better off to receive the collision fully than resist. The "smart" thing was putting his left side forward, but that also earned him a broken collarbone. Despite CQ's rage, Greinke could have done things to diffuse the situation or at least minimize his own risk. It still seems flukey that he breaks the collarbone though, even though collarbone breaks always seem flukey since they are so easy to have happen. This is just two guys that lost their tempers and got into a fight. I don't know if Greinke lost it before or after the pitch that hit CQ, but I don't really care. It isn't fair that CQ has been completely villified as the only belligerent in the situation. Pay grade and body mass are the main considerations in these arguments. QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Apr 12, 2013 -> 09:28 PM) Ahhh, the curse of my fantasy team begins! Poor Jose, he looked poised for an awesome season in TOR. I avoided him like the plague because of his injury history. One of the bittersweet moments of being right, since someone has to suffer when you accurately predict something gloomy. It's too bad, because he is really an excellent player.