Balta1701

Lilnk

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Oct 29, 2010 -> 08:46 AM) If there are empty seats, they aren't priced right. You also lose parking, souvenir and concession revenues. Disagree. A couple hundred empty seats is nothing. If your stadium is sold out, that means your tickets weren't priced right. If you have a few thousand empty seats, that means your tickets weren't priced right. The ideal number is to get an exact sellout every time with no one wanting a ticket but being unable to get one, but honestly that's not going to happen.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 29, 2010 -> 08:32 AM) Space elevator is the way to go, IMO. As soon as I complete the Guillen/Stanton deal I'll get right on that.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 06:54 PM) He obviously didn't learn anything from General Sherman about how to march through places effectively. Just because Sherman got his army through southern cornfields doesn't mean that Stillwell had an easy time marching through the Southeast Asian jungles.

QUOTE (zenryan @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 11:30 PM) I guess no one wants to pay $180 a ticket for upper deck behind the basket. That is flat out ridiculous to be charging that much for tickets that are in the upper deck behind the back basket. Why Not? If you can sell 17,500 tickets at $200/piece, and 18,000 at $100 a piece, why wouldn't you try to maximize revenue?

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Oct 29, 2010 -> 08:00 AM) I think someone needs to drug test him. Maybe he's back on the stuff??? Seems like it with some of these moves he has made, You can give him a little bit of criticism for things like not having Feliz warm when the game started to get out of hand...but Washington can't make the pitches, and he can't make his batters hit Matt Cain. I can't look at either of these games and say "Ron Washington has cost them this game".

QUOTE (gatnom @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 09:03 PM) Without even thinking about whether or not the Padres want to trade him, what do we have that they (or the Brewers for that matter) would want in a trade? The only players with value we have are expensive, so it doesn't really make sense for us to acquire either Gonzalez or Fielder because the sole reason they wish to trade them is that they won't be able to afford them for much longer. It's also worth noting that we probably don't have the bullets to get Gonzalez after the Hudson trade either. We can't deal Sale even as a PTBNL until December (and they're probably not going to want him to stay in our org for 6 months after a deal). The only pieces we'd really have to move in the minors are Viciedo and Morel...everyone else is down at lower levels or failing (Flowers). Viciedo, Morel, Flowers, and a throw in pitcher or two...I wouldn't take that if I were the Padres, I'd call up the Red Sox and make them an offer.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Oct 29, 2010 -> 12:18 AM) I don't really remember Mackowiak being that much of a whipping boy, per se. I remember people being mad that he was playing in CF (and f***ing up b/c he was set up to fail), but he could handle a bat so people never really got that mad at him. I remember the next year people being mad at Erstad starting in CF though. Yuck. There's 2 different types of "whipping boys" here that we ought to distinguish. The first kind of whipping boy is the guy who is failing entirely because of himself. The guy who has the talent to be significantly better than what they are, and they're squandering that talent. That class includes guys like Swisher, Vazquez, Anderson, Joe Crede for much of his career, etc. Juan Uribe is in that category. He was a ridiculous bat for the first half of 04, but he never found that groove again and wound up never learning how to make adjustments to pitches when he was with us, so he'd be hitting in the low .200's and swinging for the fences all the time. The 2nd type of whipping boy is the type that we're more pissed at the Sox for how they're using them. Sometimes we get so sick of their use that it erupts onto the person, but the real problem is how they're used. Rob Mackowiak, Darin Erstad, Mark Kotsay, a lot of Ozzie's "LOOGY"s come to mind there.

Well, there's a dozen lawsuits.

QUOTE (Buehrlesque @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 05:50 PM) I see your point, and maybe if you replayed the season over in 2010 again the Sox would be better. But if you replay the season in 2011, I don't think they improve enough. Konerko is a year older and due for a regression, as mentioned. And I don't expect anything much out of Jake Peavy post-injury. You can't "replay" the season with pre-injury Peavy- that will affect all future expectations for the guy and mine are relatively low. I hope he surprises me and looks like Padres Peavy, but I'm not counting on it. If Jake Peavy can't come back and be a very good pitcher...with the salary we have committed to him, I don't see how we can be a winning team without miracle performances from some of the young guys like Flowers and Morel, in 2011 or in the following years.

I really doubt Thome's getting $5 million. Limited to just being a part time DH, can't play the field, big injury risk, doesn't want to play outside the midwest.

QUOTE (kwill @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 05:07 PM) Also, we need to get rid of Greg Walker. Was this a deliberate "Carthago delenda est" or an accidental one?

QUOTE (FlaSoxxJim @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 04:39 PM) French Indochina of the 19th and early 20th century included Cambodia as well as large portions of Vietnam. General Stillwell didn't finish his march towards Indochina in the latter part of WWII, otherwise that area's history might have been totally different.

QUOTE (Buehrlesque @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 03:26 PM) This team has to improve somewhere, and basically you are taking $12 million that could be used for improvements and spending it on a player that is likely to regress a little- forcing elsewhere improvements to be even more important and come from less money. Of course, at the same time, you could just as easily say losing your Likely-Top-5-MVP player is the surest way to make the team worse. That Konerko decision is going to a tough one for KW. I'm going to be in the minority here, but I think that if you replay the 2010 season, the Sox would be better than what they were 8 of 10 times. The real thing that hurt the Sox is that their pitching didn't perform the way it was supposed to. By far the biggest bullseye there is Jake Peavy. We were supposed to have an ace at the top, and instead he was a bottom of the rotation pitcher and he missed 2/3 of the year. If you replay this season and Peavy doesn't deal with tightness in his shoulder in April and May and then blow his shoulder out in June, this is a different season. On top of that, even though I can pick out 2 guys who had really good seasons with the bats, I can pick out a number of guys who didn't, and in particular, who started off ridiculously slow. AJ, Beckham, Alexei, Carlos Quentin all had down years, and that was on top of going into the season weak at 3b and pretending that DH didn't exist. I don't know what all that means for next year, but its going to mean something. If Peavy doesn't come back and perform, we're in trouble next year and the couple years after that just because of the magnitude of the investment in him. If Peavy comes back, and we solve the obvious, blatantly stupid decision making regarding one particular position...that is a different team.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 03:15 PM) I heard Grobstein jump all over a guy on his show for dismissing the NL and since then I've paid more attention to it and I wish that argument frankly would go away forever, that's all. Giants may win the WS. Like it or not, that is not an argument that is going to go away. Even if the leagues were 100% balanced in talent, there are still significant differences between the AL and NL. On average, if you take a pitcher from the AL and move him to the NL, his ERA drops somewhere between 0.5 and 1.0 runs, entirely because of the fact that he's in the NL. Some guys buck this trend, but there's enough player movement that the average is meaningful. That's what comes from not having to face a DH and getting the free out that is the pitcher's spot every 9th hitter. And while you're at it...a team winning the WS out of the NL doesn't mean a thing. In football, the AFC was thought to be better than the NFC for years, but that didn't stop teams from the NFC from winning the Super Bowl. In the NBA, the Western Conference has been stronger than the East basically since Jordan retired, but there have been plenty of championship caliber teams in the East. What you're missing there is that you can have a handful of championship-caliber teams, but on the whole still have a weaker league. Great example; Cincinatti ran away with the NL Central...and they did so without having a winning record against any team in MLB that was .500 or better. They won the NL Central entirely by having winning records against losing teams.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 02:34 PM) Secret arms in the "I can lie about Republican opponents with out saying which union is doing the spending" If the prison guards union spent heavily to pass a bill like this, would you oppose the bill? (if this type of bill were proposed in CA, that's exactly what would happen; that union there is ridiculous).

QUOTE (greg775 @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 03:02 PM) I meant Fielder as DH I have 1 big reason why I don't want Fielder as a DH...I don't want to spend the kind of money it would take to keep him and only have him at DH...and I don't want to give up the cost it would take to trade for him and only have him at DH.

QUOTE (Jerksticks @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 02:35 PM) Not really. He hit .217/.335/.427/.762 with RISP this year, and a paltry .169/.344/.366/.710 with RISP and 2 out- add to that a total of almost 100 strikeouts in those 2 situations. Those are the stats that count to me. He's not a horrible offensive player, he just isn't great. His defense IS horrible. I'd take PK any day of the week over that dude. And in 2009 he hit .283 with a 1.019 OPS with RISP. Did you stop to think that you might be looking at a sample size issue there? I'm not saying I wouldn't take PK14 at 1b over him, you never said that. You said his 40 HR are useless, garbage time HR.

Awesome, someone other than me finally made a minor mistake in this thread!

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 02:33 PM) Why does anyone care about Lithuania anyway? Xenophobia creeping in again.

QUOTE (Jerksticks @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 02:19 PM) Ok, so where is the BIG offensive upgrade though? We need more than Nick Johnson. It seems we have RF 1B DH and C to address, so where do Quentin, PK, Viciedo fit in next year if we add Johnson? The same team plus Johnson is not good enough and I hate that we don't have a spot for Viciedo's bat. Let's ask it this way...what positions have we probably downgraded at? If we've lost Konerko, that's 1. Losing AJ could be a downgrade from last year but honestly, he was awful for most of the season. His run production from last year is replaceable. 3b, we might consider a downgrade since Vizquel was decent, but that's not a huge downgrade. DH...whatever you put there is not a downgrade. Pierre and Rios aren't significant downgrades from Pierre and Rios. The 2 positions we have to replace to make up for last year's offensive output are; Paul Konerko and what we got from backup OF Andruw Jones. The rest of the guys...really didn't have good seasons. Plus a little since Castro isn't likely to repeat his last year. If Beckham puts togehter a solid season, Ramirez ever has a good start, Quentin finds some of his 08 form, or (at least as it stands now) Morel or Flowers have good starts to their careers, that makes up a chunk of the offense lost. If you went into last season with the same offense...but had a closer who performed well and solidified that bullpen, and had Jake Peavy not get hurt, that team would have had a shot. I still expect a KW overhaul though.

QUOTE (FlaSoxxJim @ Oct 28, 2010 -> 02:14 PM) Smetona, Antanas, was the first, fifth, and last president of Lithuania. Unless Wikipedia is lying to me, Dalia Grybauskaitė is the president of Lithuania now.

Right, just wait until they see your message board work. That'll change quickly.

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