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At this point, would not be shocked if Alshon is put on IR today. 3 weeks of "day to day".

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 1, 2015 -> 02:01 PM) There is a large difference in logic and motivation here. With steroids, it was all about guys trying to win. With gambling, the chances is there that someone is trying to lose. That makes a very big difference to me in terms of punishment. Someone who is purposefully trying to lose should never be allowed to play professional baseball again, period. With steroids you have players honestly motivated and trying to compete, in the other, you have the absence of competition. Not unfairness within competition, but the absence of it. That's a huge deal.

There is no complaint too petty against the SEC.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 1, 2015 -> 01:59 PM) Technically they were always banned, they just weren't tested for. Alright, sure, but stuff like this was going on that is banned now: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/27/opinion/...-pep-pills.html

That is such bull. Would anyone watch baseball if there was serious doubt over whether the games were fixed? Would you watch baseball again if it turned out the White Sox lost in the world series because the umpires were paid off? People certainly answered whether they would watch baseball if there were players on performance enhancers. The difference on the real "integrity of the game" is so gigantic it's not even debatable.

Steroids were not even banned during Thomas's time. ANd frankly, even if they were, to pretty much everyone not making cheap points, purposely throwing a game is a completely different level than taking performance enhancers. There is a huge difference when you are changing the game so that the result is fixed.

Amazed that after all this it's basically just a handful of judges that have been an issue. Again, amazing the progress in 10 years.

As he should have. We are talking about the validity of a sport being overturned, if this happened in modern day, I'd expect banning from the sport to be the least of the concern. If baseball didn't come down hard on this, who knows if it's popularity would have continued in the modern eras. Could have ended up like horseracing.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 1, 2015 -> 09:07 AM) As the years go by, you are going to see the teams who have been loading up on signings (thinking of LAD and HOU in particular) start to have those guys hitting their 40 man roster restrictions, meaning that guys are going to get let go who should be protected. The Sox have made a living in those margins. I sure wish we were the ones in the position of not being able to keep our abundance of talent than relying on skimming the margins.

Honestly I find this stuff kind of tired.

reading lanny davis and sid blumenthal emails takes me back to why I did not want the Clintons in office in 08.

with Sacramento's moves I'd like to see if we could make it more favorable to bulls. I don't want to be the first team with a fair trade with them.

if you have a lot of stuff to do for work it would be a pain to get there and back on metra at night where less trains run, plus they are taking you to the loop which isn't really a bastion of nightlife on its own.

I think the point is it's a pretty easy thing to fact check on a case you know will be scrutinized, silly to miss a detail like that which is so obvious to fact check.

Drew Lock (true frosh) is the #2 qb on missouri's depth chart. Going to be an interesting year as he has been the real deal in scrimmages (high completion %, TDs, 1 int all fall) vs. the #1 defense whereas Mauk was Mauk (50% completion percentage with long bombs thrown in)

Well this was fun.

This is a really good interview of Gary Pinkel http://www.rockmnation.com/mizzou-football...otball#comments He's now been at missouri for about 15 years, and is their winningest coach in an otherwise pretty crappy program outside dan devine's run in the 60s. It's an interesting perspective on how you grow as a coach. Edit, here was one of my favorite parts: BC: And once you have proof that you will rebound doing things a certain way, it probably gets easier, too. So, one more question about 2012. You said coaching could have gotten you one more game … how important was it to not make a bowl that year? That reality check? Because that’s what the narrative became — I think it was maybe Max Copeland talking about how everybody doubled their efforts because the bowl streak had ended and they knew they had to buckle down. Is that real, or would the same type of improvement have probably happened the next year if you go 6-6 and go to a minor bowl? GP: I wish we had gone 6-6 and gone to a minor bowl! I don’t necessarily agree that missing that provided us with the motivation to make that extra move. We didn’t make drastic changes. We didn’t change anything — I told the team we weren’t changing anything and that what we do works, we just had to do it better. It wasn’t a popular statement at the time. But I think it was really neat to see … when you have adversity like that, it was neat to see the players and hear their feelings. I talk to those guys all the time. But they were asking me, "What can we do to make this better? What do you need from me?" You’d like to say we made all these changes, but if there’s anything we did, we were very concerned with the number of injures we had, so we went back and did an analysis for all our last seven years of practices. Did we start adding things? Were we practicing more? We found out that over the years, we had basically added another practice period. You add up all the hits that happen in August and in Tuesday-Wednesday practices, the physical parts … we went back and pulled those out. We examined our conditioning, and the feedback we got from our players was that they were fatigued heading into September. So we felt we were over-conditioning, and we backed off. We started taking shoulder pads off on Wednesdays. We only had full pads on Tuesdays. We made a lot of little changes. It’s not like you can’t get injured, but most injuries are happening when players are fatigued. As a staff, working with Pat Ivey and Rex Sharp, we got together, and I think that really helped us.

If we told avi not to swing at anything for 2 weeks I wonder what his OBP would be.

For instance, I don't think we'll lose by 40-0 at halftime 3 games in a row as we did this year.

I know people will want to see improvement, but I think they will. They just have a talent deficiency which was quite apparent in April but for some reason we started getting fooled when pads started. Team has no depth on Oline, so any injuries will be brutal. It has no secondary depth, which we are used to. But, even as bad as saturday was, I was still pleased to see players swarming tackles and playing hard, they just aren't identifying plays well yet, or are just not that good and are getting blocked.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Aug 28, 2015 -> 03:50 PM) Yay, TFT. For real. Trayce Thompson is still more likely to be a bust than a productive ML player. It's just reality, though I hope he proves everyone wrong. That said, I don't think people here really understand how bad Avisail Garcia has been. We're not talking about a so-so Major Leaguer who just hasn't realized his upside -- we're talking about almost 1000 PA of SUBSTANTIALLY below replacement level. A league-average player is two wins ABOVE replacement level per season. Avi has literally played worse than what could be expected from a random AAA scrub in each of the four seasons he's touched the majors. The bat is about one standard deviation below league average, and the glove is about one standard deviation step from legendarily bad. Yes, he's got upside, and it certainly could all click one day. But he's got a LONG way to climb before he's even an average player, let alone any kind of star. I don't know about bust, at this point he's reached the show which is something that seemed unlikely except in emergencies as recently as last year. He, at the very least, is an ideal 4th outfielder as he hits LHP very well (and can thus spell and PH), plays defense well, and runs. That appears to be the baseline. Now, the flipside is we could have finally gotten very lucky and something clicked with a position player. It seems this happens in other organizations, so I am holding out hope here.

Hopefully some good tackles in this draft. Will be an interesting cut day Tuesday. I'd bet we pick up some WR as mariani has been only one who has proven st and competent WR.

Drew Lock is going to be really good.

this has just been a very depressing summer.

I have been pleased with Saladino but surprised people have him pegged as the future. Saladino should be considered a "holdover" 3rd base. He's younger and we can feel good about his defense and decent power stroke (compared to the zero I expected), but the guy is hitting .239/.269/.600...that is something we can upgrade over. I'd feel fine with trying Sanchez at SS and hope he is our eduardo escobar twins-era, micah at 2nd base and saladino as hopefully our utility player.