Balta1701

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 06:54 PM) Not much to go by before this year. Only had 217 1/3 IP before this year. Appears to be one of those late bloomers. And he's been better than "decent" this year: K/9 8.78, BB/9 2.91, HR/9 0.94, FIP 3.55, xFIP 3.93. Here's a good Colby Lewis read from a couple years ago. Yeah, he could be a fluke, but fluke guys can keep a run going for a full season.

QUOTE (hitlesswonder @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 05:34 PM) I think that's exactly right. The Sox don't have any combination of players that could be packaged for a guy like Stanton. Really, the only things the Sox have to trade that have any significant value are Floyd, Danks, Sale, Santos, and Alexei. And none of those guys is all that valuable. The truth is that the Sox don't have much talent and what talent they do have is either well-paid (Rios) or about to cost a bunch of money (Danks). If Sale goes down to AAA and dominates next year...he'd be a legit top 10 MLB prospect.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 06:01 PM) Yeah, I want to know where they rank in the MLB in regards to payroll. Opening day payroll was #7 in baseball (with the note that the Dodgers were paying enough of Pierre's salary that in an honest sense we were #8). Only 2 of the top 8 teams in MLB payroll made the playoffs.

Some frighteningly surprising results today. Arizona beating up the Saints? The Lions murdering someone?

QUOTE (flippedoutpunk @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 04:59 PM) i think thats the plan all along.. find any excuse to fire Spoelstra to get Pat Riley in that Head Coach's position. I think we called that back on July 8th.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 04:10 PM) I don't know when its a specific number, its not even a prediction I'd try to make. 2016? That's an awfully long way out. Let me be a little more vague...I think it'll be a lot closer to 2016 than to 2012. Probably a bit too specific there. I think we have that far to go...and I think that right now, worrying about interest rates going up due to government spending is tantamount to saying that we are not losing government jobs fast enough...and we're losing government jobs right now faster than the private sector can create them.

Well, looks like Lee and Price for the series.

QUOTE (South Side Fireworks Man @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 03:14 PM) Nope. Cubs give ridiculous contracts to lousy players. They also tend to bid against themselves. I don't think signing Crawford, Werth and Dunn along with Konerko and AJ to market-value contracts is the same as signing losers like Soraino, Bradley, etc. to exhorbitant contracts that no other team is even coming close to offering. Really, you expect none of Crawford, Werth, and Dunn will wind up being a bad deal 2-3 years into it if they're signed for market value?

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 03:20 PM) No, they're really not. Well, considering we're going to try your method and actually worry about inflation rather than mine, do you want to put a number on how long you think unemployment will remain above 8%? I'm going to say 2016. Similarly, when will the Federal Reserve have raised rates above 4%?

QUOTE (South Side Fireworks Man @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 12:51 PM) Do it right for once. Re-sign AJ and Paulie. Sign Crawford for LF. Sign Werth for RF. Sign Dunn for DH. Don't sit there mumblin', talking trash - If you wanna have a ball you gotta spend some cash! C'mon JR, KW and Ozzie. Stop slobbering all over the Twins way and start doing it the Yankee way! Christ, that's a $160 million team next year.

QUOTE (T R U @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 03:37 AM) Miami will win 73 games and the title And the only reason they win 73 is that once they're to 73 they start resting people.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 9, 2010 -> 03:45 PM) No, they're not. That is not who I am talking about. I'm talking about the people who've been right, not the ones who've been wrong. And they're the ones who have been saying that worrying about inflation when you're in a huge hole is the recipe for a Japan-style lost decade.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 9, 2010 -> 10:06 AM) All of that sounds great, if this were actually true in anything but a theoretical sense then why is the President on TV complaining about a lack of lending? I know you have latched on to the idled output as some soft of mecca of problems, but at the end of the day, you need to have banks lending. That is the start of economic activity in this country, because there is no such thing as savings. What on earth would having the President complain about a lack of lending do?

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Oct 9, 2010 -> 04:15 PM) someone is selling foreclosed houses at 'full value' bubble prices'? I need to find this salesperson and hire them. they can obviously sell anything. Simple math here. You're a bank, holding the mortgage on a house that is going into foreclosure. That loan has paid 10-15% on it. Bare minimum, basically anything other than an interest-only mortgage. The house has lost 20% of it's value. You have 2 options...you can either have the inhabitants stop paying entirely, or you keep them on the hook with a "modification" where they keep paying for another 12-16 months. You have no intention of actually redoing the loan, but you extract another 12-16 months of payments from that family, foreclose on them anyway, and now you own the house and you have every dollar that they've paid into that mortgage. It's not always a win, but compared to the write-offs they were taking on those, a 2-3% loss thanks to the government telling the family to keep paying is a pretty big win.

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 9, 2010 -> 01:20 PM) This was coming from his chair of the council economic advisors, and was the starting point. It became apparent in the senate that people did not want more than 800 billion and so that's what happened. Krugman was fighting for significantly more than 1.2 trillion. As I said, there were a few people saying that, but the people who actually were making the decisions were following the Larry Summers view.

Congrats Shippster.

QUOTE (Chet Kincaid @ Oct 9, 2010 -> 08:36 PM) Why is Cliff Lee warming up?? They don't have a lot of lefties and yesterday was probably his throwing day if he's on schedule for Tuesday. That said...the Rangers need to figure out how to win today if they want to set up for the Yankees starting Friday. Lee on Extra rest in game 1 if they finish today. Lee has to wait a couple days if they go to game 5.

QUOTE (kitekrazy @ Oct 9, 2010 -> 11:47 PM) That's why Johann Santana wanted out. He wanted out because he was going to be the highest paid pitcher in baseball the moment he got out. Everything else was trying to maintain the positive image.

The Twins were 0/13 with RISP last time I checked. Every single comparison between Yankees-Twins and Twins-Sox works.

QUOTE (JorgeFabregas @ Oct 9, 2010 -> 03:13 PM) The Phils also bring up their best young players slowly. They are very careful about the arbitration clock and get cheap years out of guys in their prime. Gavin Floyd was almost raced to the majors, he made his debut at 21, and there is plenty of reason to think that the rapid promotions figured into his struggles when he arrived. Cole Hamels made his debut at 22. Victorino made his debut at 22, Howard much later...but both of them had someone quite good blocking them (Aaron "Career year" Rowand and Jim Thome).

QUOTE (justBLAZE @ Oct 9, 2010 -> 06:27 PM) My feelings exactly, they are pretty much chockers, can't even get a hit off Colby freaking Lewis, GMAB. Just because you don't know his name doesn't mean he wouldn't have been better than everyone in our rotation except D1. 116 ERA+ on the season, 7th in the AL in strikeouts, 3.72 ERA despite pitching in Texas.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Oct 9, 2010 -> 09:20 AM) I made a comment about that, wondering if the insurance company would deny any claim because he failed to get insurance and what the bank would do if their was a mortgage on the property. It does seem odd. I have to imagine that the insurance company had no idea this situation was even possible.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Oct 8, 2010 -> 12:38 PM) With regard to Ozzie, I don't think he's ever been on the hot seat. I feel like Ozzie put himself on the hot seat this year...he's only back by a narrow margin and the approval of the owner this year...and I think he's on notice next year. I can actually offer evidence for that, in the sense that he doesn't have a new contract despite agitating for one.

QUOTE (whitesoxfan99 @ Oct 9, 2010 -> 01:25 AM) Braves come back and win. Nice, we have a series. Really? I'd never have guessed that was going to happen. Damn MLB schedule.

I have a bit more time this morning, so let me spell out why inflation can't be a concern at all until we're nearly out of the output gap. Inflation is at the most basic level caused by demand for products outpacing supply. You can't make enough to keep up with demand, prices have to rise to slow down demand. Normally, when we start seeing general inflation in the economy, that is a sign that the economy is overheating; that is, people want to buy more things than can be produced. Expanding capacity is not cheap in a working economy; the supplies it takes to expand by building new factories or opening new shops are more expensive because everyone wants them, workers are hard to get because low unemployment means that most people who want jobs actually have jobs. Thus, if you want to expand capacity, you have to pay more for workers, for labor, for facilities, everything. In that case, typically what we see is the federal reserve bank raising interest rates...so that it becomes more expensive for people to buy things on credit, and demand is suppressed. Now, let's look at the case we have now. We have a gigantic output gap; we have huge amounts of idled capacity. Factories, raw materials, and workers are all sitting there idle, with the workers especially wanting to work. If I produce a product that suddenly becomes in high demand...how hard is it for me to expand? Compared with the supply-constrained case, it's easy. I can increase capacity easily; workers are easy to find, even highly skilled workers, and they're cheap because they have no other job offers. I can get raw materials somewhat easily as long as I don't need gold, and I can get facilities easily by taking over someone else's idled factory. We are in a demand-side crisis right now. None of the forces that could drive inflation exist, because we have the capacity to produce over a trillion dollars more stuff than we actually are producing. Businesses that have funds they would invest in expansion have zero reason to do so; even if they have good products, they already have more capacity to produce stuff than they need. Bringing extra production capacity online would be easy. This problem is why doing things like business tax breaks right now will have zero impact; businesses are already sitting on the cash and the capacity they need to hire people, but they have no customers to buy stuff. Until we're close enough to out of the output gap that labor starts to become constrained and the idled capacity is working again...there just is no reason for inflation to happen. We're still, in reality, stuck in the area where limited deflation is possible, despite all the money we've shoveled out, and the thing preventing that right now is price-stickiness; the fact that people don't like to lower the prices of their product even if they can't sell the stuff they're currently producing. The only thing that really could push inflation right now is a spike in raw materials prices, such as oil or precious metals. I'll grant...that's at least slightly possible, since we're in a world where energy and raw materials supplies are genuinely constrained...but right now, even energy prices aren't acting as a constriction.