Balta1701

QUOTE (shysocks @ Aug 21, 2014 -> 02:41 PM) Thanks for breaking down the paywall. As far as I can tell, the A's already have Jaso as the lefty half of a DH platoon. I don't see it but I could be overlooking something. He's put up a .589 OPS as a DH and an .850 OPS while catching. 140+ PA's in both, so it's becoming a real trend.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Aug 21, 2014 -> 02:30 PM) I don't think it's a hole that needs to be filled, personally, but I think it's an area where they'll look around to see if an upgrade is available. I'd say a lot of people have remained frustrated with Tyler this year and think that aside from a few lucky drops early in the season it has mostly remained a hole. After this season I could be ok there with Tyler for another year, but Tyler isn't going to be more than a bottom of the order hitter ever, and we can only have so many of those in the lineup.

Thank you Bowden for reading my comments from 3 weeks ago.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 21, 2014 -> 01:55 PM) I'm not saying they weren't justified, but this one is more arguable given that they SEEM to have shot a little too quickly when other options may have been available to them. He's holding a weapon that's not long range, they're both behind their doors, he's 10-15 feet away (can't really tell) and he's walking slowly towards them. Certainly I'd argue the Brown shooting, if what the officer says is true, is more justifiable at the time the shots were fired. Had the knife guy walked another few feet there's no question. But at the time they shot? I dunno, seems a bit soon. And obviously we're talking mere seconds here. It's tough to criticize them for split second decisions. I just know very little about the 2nd shooting beyond it seemingly being a police suicide, so I found it interesting to see you openly question it.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 21, 2014 -> 01:42 PM) 21 feet seems a little far to be in "imminent" danger though. These guys also have their guns out and basically shoot immediately. Wait, so you're actually questioning if that one was excessive?

QUOTE (CaliSoxFanViaSWside @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 10:05 PM) Who else can play infield and outfield without needing Minor league AB's for development ? Otherwise you might conclude PK being on the roster is why Leury is also. But I can't recall you ever weighing in on PK's presence. Leury has talent but belongs in AA based on his level of development.

QUOTE (Feeky Magee @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 09:37 PM) Question for the veteran fans here - what's the worst offensive season by a Sox player you can remember? I wanna compare some of the worst statistically to Leury Garcia 2014. I immediately think of Andy Gonzalez in 2007.

Garret Richards just went down, bad looking, while covering first. One of his legs twisted. several minutes later and still on his back. Carting off. Cannot get up at all. Lifted up on a stretcher after >>5 minutes on the ground. Yeah, we'll hope to see him in 2015. Maybe.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 06:08 PM) See above. And it's not about "wishing" to use it. You've got a word that no longer means what it used to mean. It has an entirely different interpretation now. Really no it doesn't. I mean, literally just read the word. "Red skins". This isn't like "Antidisestablishmentarianism" changing definitions subtly, it literally spells out for you what it means.

Rick Hahn also noted that next year, a group of college and high-school aged players will be made available to the White Sox through a process he described as a draft. However, he cautioned that those players might not be ready for big league level competition and thus might be sent to other teams filled with young and non-big-league-quality baseball players to practice and improve at the game prior to arrival on the White Sox.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 05:47 PM) When the basis of changing the name is how offensive it is, and the people claiming it's offensive happen to be mostly white people in need of a cause, I think it puts the issue in proper perspective. It's another rush to be outraged and change something that really doesn't need to be changed and won't cause a bit of difference in how the world operates. Neither will changing it to something that isn't a racial slur. "It doesn't need to be changed" is not a defense when there are people who clearly believe it should be.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 05:41 PM) It's not really a defense, it's a criticism of white people full of guilt who latched onto the story this summer when they hadn't thought twice about it before. I'm sure you yourself were championing this cause back in the 90's and 00's and have refused to utter the word since, right? This doesn't make it ok.

QUOTE (fathom @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 05:31 PM) Agreed, but IIRC, some thought he was a ticking time bomb due to all the sliders he was throwing. If Jake Peavy was the only ticking time bomb we acquired that blew up, then we'd be in good shape. We wound up with a lot that exploded simultaneously.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 05:31 PM) What we need to do is get out of the region for good. They want to continue living like it's 1200 BC, go for it. See ya later. When we're using U.S. made aircraft to blow up U.S. made weapons and sending U.S. made weapons to fight those U.S. made weapons on the ground...I have trouble arguing against you here. It does make me feel better when I bike home.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 05:00 PM) I agree that the GM should be evaluated based on the players under performance. However, I disagree that it's a reasonable conclusion that injuries should be held against them, if there is no injury history. That is an impossibility to predict. Especially, when the deals were team favorable at the time. the only deal that was really a calculated risk that failed was Rios. when doing evaluations you are really assigning praise for good things and fault for the bad things. If you say bad things happened but did not assign them the fault, then it isn't their fault and the evaluation of the GM would have to be positive. You cannot possibly tell me that Jake Peavy had no injury history prior to the Sox acquiring him.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 05:00 PM) Serious question, do you have a link to this supposed percentage? I hear people saying that all the time, but nobody ever provides evidence. You have the same dozen or so groups that speak out about it, so of course you hear them. I know I have read stories where some Indian leaders have said pretty much that they don't give a s*** about the name one way or the other, but can't remember where I saw them. I will try and look for them. You're also right, there are people who don't give a s***. What you need to find instead is the strong supporters who aren't white males. Something tells me those will be more rare.

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 04:58 PM) Does anyone else get the feeling that ISIS is slowly biting off more than they can chew before they just get annihilated, be it by the US or someone else? No. I have trouble buying that they'll be 'annihilated". If you tried to go in and truly beat them, conquer them and break them apart, how does that set up a situation any different from the one the U.S. spent 8 years and several trillion dollars trying to build in Iraq? They're a Sunni group mostly in control of Sunni territory and the people in that territory prefer them to Assad or the Baghdad government's rule. That's why they were able to storm through that territory so easily. There is a basic ethnic split in those areas and the reason it has not cropped up previously is the presence of the Baath regimes that used foreign-supplied militaries to crush dissent for decades. That genie is now out of the bottle.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 04:46 PM) How can fault a GM for weird injuries in pitchers without a history of arm injuries? Neither deal was one of the crazy 7 year deals. They were considered good deals at the time. The post I replied to did not assign fault, it simply noted that Dunn and Danks were the 2 biggest problems in the last 4 years. I felt Rios's failure and Peavy's injury have to be on that list as they sabotaged the "all-in" season as well. And of course, its worth noting that "deals which seem good at the time" isn't a standard by which a successful GM will be evaluated, but instead it's going to be whether in the long term those deals were correct. If your team spends $100 million per year and half that money is spent on people who get injured or massively underperform their expectation, then a reasonable conclusion is that your GM isn't doing a very good job of making player decisions even if they appear solid at the time.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 04:44 PM) I'm not really following your 2nd point. I don't see how the ongoing resistance to changing the name has any impact on native Americans improving their lives. If you are suggesting, that a bunch of native americans are sitting around saying, we won't better ourselves until you take away the name, well then shame on the native americans for not taking things into their own power and well shame on you for making such a foolish statement. I won't get into any depth on fixing the problem as I don't pretend to know all the in's and out's of the problem, other then the various videos I watched back in high school when my school was thinking about changing its name (which it didn't and to my knowledge still hasn't). We had multiple native americans come speak about it to our classes as well. Although focus was on some that thought the name was inappropriate and others who thought it wasn't. The name of our school was Warriors. Note: And maybe the krux of the problem is everyone has been educated on the Redskin being a derogatory term instead of focusing on how to help native americans overcome the poverty and problems that those who live on the reservations face. No one is bringing up their economic or personal conditions with regard to changing the name other than 2k5 who somehow thinks that doing so is an impediment the free fix for their lives that would materialize if we weren't having this discussion.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 04:42 PM) Gonzalez is really the only one maybe Young to a lesser extent. Masset was ok. Hudson only pitched 50 or so after the Sox and Escobar has played in only about 180 with an OPS of 668. That really isn't much compared to all the moves. Eduardo Escobar has turned himself into a solid defensive shortstop and has already put up 2 WAR on this season. He's effectively been a $10 million+ player this year. His OPS this year is also >700, which isn't bad from the shortstop spot.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 04:35 PM) Everyone is targeted by slurs. Some society has given power to and those are bad, most are cute and funny, and are perfectly acceptable in both common usage and in most other forms. Those we didn't give this mystical power to. Doesn't matter if someone dresses up as one of those stereotypes. So you reject the notion that anyone should find a slur offensive, and yet for some reason I haven't seen you use them yourself. Why do you censor yourself? By your own standard you're weak and giving it that mystical power if you don't use the N-word in the next post of yours.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 04:16 PM) The biggest problem has clearly been the fact that the Dunn and Danks deals blew up, so it's pretty much been the excuse for the last four years or so for not doing anything. That said, they did go out on a limb with Jose Abreu. If we could apply our track record with Cubans (2 out of 3 or 67%) to everything else we do with the June draft and FA/international signings, this team would be sitting pretty right now. Peavy's injury and 2011 Rios fit on that list also along with the other 2 deals blowing up.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 04:21 PM) In other words...shouldn't we first try to fix the Native American situation vs. focus on the name of the football team. Or at least that is my interpretation of what you are saying. Like I said, he's giving a spectacular argument for very large reparations to that community. Serious education and health care benefits provided at state expense, along with a jobs program, etc, to make up for the damage done by decades of racist policies. Of course, that would still leave the problem that we have an NFL team where referees refuse to work their games because their name is a racial slur. It's a much smaller problem than that of health care, education, job access amongst those communities, but it would be a problem even if we took major steps to make amends as a society.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 04:05 PM) Those same people in the Middle East are probably watching Al-jazeera news...asking, "Is this really the way they STILL treat non-white people in the US? Didn't they learn anything from Hurricane Katrina?" That America is a REALLY scary place. Everyone has a gun. Every month or so, some random person will go into a school and try to blow it up or kill as many students and teachers as possible. All the kids are fat and addicted to McDonald's and playing computer games. Egypt and Iran have both released statements criticizing the violent repression taking place in the U.S. over the past couple days that are similar to statements the U.S. releases about them.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Aug 20, 2014 -> 03:56 PM) But don't mention Islam or Muslims or else you will probably be called a racist. (Even though it isn't a race.) GMAFB.