Balta1701

QUOTE (3E8 @ Sep 19, 2009 -> 12:41 PM) Carlos Lee Except Lee was never just as powerful as Viciedo can be. Viciedo should be hitting 500 foot home runs when he's 27. I'm thinking perhaps Prince Fielder, if everything goes well.

QUOTE (qwerty @ Sep 18, 2009 -> 01:32 PM) With 0 outs and a man on first there is a 38% chance that man will come around to score. With 1 out and a man on second there is a 41% chance that man will come around to score. But...the odds of scoring 2 go down in the 2nd case. So you better genuinely be playing for 1.

QUOTE (SouthsideDon48 @ Sep 18, 2009 -> 11:33 AM) It would actually be pretty cool if all this space junk someday forms a ring around Earth. As for cleaning that stuff up, I can't help but think they'll need to make a special spaceship with a fortified metal "scooper" that opens up, collects the junk, and closes when it fills up. As for disposing of the junk... no freaking clue. Actually, there's other options available. The fact that you're in space actually helps you; it gives you both a disposal method (Burn up on re-entry) and it makes the mechanics somewhat simple. If you can target a small piece of trash with something that can change its momentum (a laser could genuinely do this) you can change its orbital parameters enough that it would drop in to the atmosphere.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Sep 18, 2009 -> 10:42 AM) I'm big on the season Mark and Danks has had. Educate me on Floyd. Has he been just as nasty? I know his record is something like 12-12. The games I've watched he hasn't been as good as Mark/Danks. Floyd has alternated between really, really, ridiculously nasty and not so good. He was terrible in April and for the better part of May. Just hammered every time out. Then June rolled around and suddenly he was on a roll, and he had an ERA around 1 for about a month and a half. He's struggled a bit on the road, notably, especially these last couple weeks. But there have been some magnificent performances from Floyd this year. If you could knock off that April/May, his name would legitimately be up there in the top 5 in the Cy Young voting.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Sep 18, 2009 -> 11:42 AM) Here's a question related... who on the current team is actually good at bunting? I remember Ozzie used to say that Thome was, but I only saw him try once (and I fervently believe that Jim Thome should try bunting once, and just once, every season). Off hand, the ones that seem like they've done it well are Getz and Wise. Anyone else? Anyone who gets overshifted should, IMO, bunt down the 3rd base line at least 3-4 times a season. Esp. if there's a lefty you know you struggle against on the mound.

QUOTE (bmags @ Sep 18, 2009 -> 10:21 AM) seems pretty easy to rope balta into doing something he says he doesn't want to do, Especially before I've finished my tea. I wrote 2.5 pages (single spaced) yesterday, what more do you want from me! ARGH!

Jenks though is the guy in the images from those last few seconds of jumping up and down and somehow lifting up AJ.

Didn't Peavy also stay in to pitch after he was hit? He didn't stop pitching until his elbow tightened up afterwards. And trying to pitch through a tight elbow is a bad idea. Tommy John bad.

QUOTE (Tex @ Sep 18, 2009 -> 09:27 AM) Early mortality seems awfully inexact to measure. The working definition would be the key. Something as simple as "how early" would be problematic. And this may be one of my top three concerns in this debate. I want decisions to be made on accurate information, not slogans and biased figures. I want both parties to rigorously debate this. Ok, here's a summary of how they did the statistics. They probably did it as well as can be done. They filtered a group down to about 9000 people for which they had complete data, starting from a group of 33000. 17000 were from the ages that were not Medicare-eligible. They then excluded people covered by Medicaid and the VA. Then they knocked off a few thousand more because of incomplete data. That's troublesome...but it could easily be troublesome in the "things are actually worse" direction because the ones most likely to be under-reported are the ones without insurance. that left them with a large group still of 9000+ respondents with full data. They calculated correlations between death rate and a number of behavioral variables to see which were strongly correlated with the death rate. Things get tricky here, because behavioral variables are going to be correlated with uninsurance. Alcohol use, unemployment, being male, being a minority, tobacco use, being poor, and failure to visit a physician regularly all correlated with uninsurance. But, if you can calculate these correlations, there are statistical methods that can allow you to isolate more specifically the effect of one variable above the others. The key thing they did is try to be conservative...they tried to say that if the maximum effect was due to the correlation with say, alcohol or tobacco use, what is left over for uninsurance. Once they factored those out using multiple regression, they calculated the correlation with insurance alone, and that's where the number comes from. It's certainly possible that they are underestimating the actual number, given the way they did their data processing. Here's the final paragraph, and it contains an interesting note; they also asked "why are you uninsured" to the people without insurance. Since a few here have made a big deal of the personal choice aspect I think it's instructive.

Darpa rules.

So who else besides torres and Hudson can we give a start to? Egbert, Harrell, Marquez, Whisler are already on the 40 man. Could any of them give us a start or two? Is Marquez still DL'd?

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Sep 18, 2009 -> 09:01 AM) I dont know, maybe because he has another year to pitch on that current contract Thought it was 2 years.

QUOTE (Tex @ Sep 18, 2009 -> 09:11 AM) And just my guess, that number is dwarfed by the number of Americans who die early (and isn't that what is really being measured) from life style choices? Depends on how you define lifestyle choices. Driving can be defined as a lifestyle choice. It'd be worth really looking in to the methodology to understand what exactly they're counting, but I don't have the time right now. I think that at worst they're probably at the right order of magnitude even if you just count random things; like people getting cancer, or diabetes, or infections, or the flu, and then being unable to afford treatment.

That's more than 2x the last estimate.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 08:41 PM) Who is he going to bench if he said the guys have quit on him and changes are coming?? I dunno, but I'm sure it means more playing time for Wise.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 09:05 PM) I don't know how many pitches he's thrown, but in the old days he'd have gotten the shutout. As you know, nowadays it's automatic to give it to the closer. Danks threw 97 pitches.

Could have been worse.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 07:49 PM) Not trying to argue with you. I just am not convinced. Pods, AJ and Paulie ... can they continue this excellence as they continue to age? Dye, Rios? Bobby, Liney? Bullpen questions. Not a lot of speed. Hope Oz can push the right buttons next year. As an Oz lover, I fear for his job if we have a disappointing season again. This team has more speed already than many teams in the AL. Not even counting Pods...Ramirez, Getz, Rios all have very good speed. Beckham isn't bad. Quentin hasn't been healthy all year but he can certainly score from 1st on a double. We have 3 slow guys in our lineup right now; dye, konerko, AJ. And I'd bet that, although those 3 are really slow...just about every decent team in the AL probably has a similar setup. You don't exactly think of guys like Navarro, Posada, Ortiz, Pena, Matsui, Varitek/Martinez, Lowell, Drew, Guerrero, Morales, Cabrera, Guillen, Ordonez, Mauer, Morneau, as speed burners do you?

QUOTE (GreatScott82 @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 07:47 PM) shut buerhle and floyd down. let Hudson and Torres get a few cracks out at it before seasons end. give Flowers some ABs. Flowers should get more at bats, but Hudson's right up where his innings should have been anyway, so you need to be careful with him. Floyd, yeah that should worry us right nwo since he left yesterdays game.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 07:46 PM) I don't know about that Balta. Another way to look at it is it's a very weak division and we have never even come close to excaping the .500ism. I guess we can chalk it up to a bad year and start anew in the spring. The hope is we'll magically be a .600, not a .500 team. This is a much better team right now than its record says. And it will be even better soon.

QUOTE (scotty22hotty @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 07:43 PM) Looks like the Twins will easily take the division now... Like I've said before, this loss is on Ozzie. Sending out your 3rd best bullpen arm in the 9th isn't what winning teams do. Easily?

QUOTE (The Ginger Kid @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 07:40 PM) Reinsdorf needs to take control of this situation - top to bottom re-evaluation. Call in Eddie and really take a sobering look. Really, I'm not sure this makes sense at all. We've won the division 2 of the last 5 years, have a W.S., have another 90 win team, have a metric ton of young talent some of which is already producing, have more than a few guys on really good contracts, and we've had a handful of people have crap years or get hurt. It happens. This is just silly. A guy or two pops out of their slump and we'd be in first and everyone knows it.

Well, at least that's over.

Oh Bully here we go.

QUOTE (Leonard Zelig @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 06:32 PM) Any chance Rios gets traded this offseason? No.