Balta1701

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Mar 13, 2009 -> 09:42 AM) Figgins would make a lot more sense, because he'll be a FA after this year...and Beckham has at least 50% chance to end up 2B anyway, so Roberts doesn't make AS much sense because it would be better to find someone for center AND leadoff, killing two birds with one (Steve) Stone. Am I the only one who's noticed that Figgins is now 31 years old and hasn't played a full season either of the last 2 years? Or that last year he stole bases at a 72% clip and his success rate is trending downwards fast? (Hey, I have the same birthday as Figgy. Who knew?)

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 13, 2009 -> 09:36 AM) ETA: To answer your last question, I would answer Owens, since their careers show that same trend as with OBP. Owens hits better (for AVG) than Wise does. Ok, to fire back...first of all, I'm just not convinced that Jerry Owens isn't getting worse with the bat right now. His minor league batting average has gone down significantly over the last few years, even in the minor leagues. And if his legs are getting worse, there's plenty of reason to expect that his average could be getting worse. Secondly, if you say that Owens's 2005 season at Birmingham, where he hit .333, was an aberration, his minor league batting average drops to .276. That's half the difference between his BA and Wise's BA right there. And for even more fun, Owens's batting average last year at AAA? .276. I think Owens right now looks like a .250 hitter or worse in the big leagues, and I think Wise, especially if he's facing only RHP, is just likely to do better, based if nothing else on the trend lines.

The language in these will be uncensored and NSFW. .cc_box a:hover .cc_home{background:url('http://www.comedycentral.com/comedycentral/video/assets/syndicated-logo-over.png') !important;}.cc_links a{color:#b9b9b9;text-decoration:none;}.cc_show a{color:#707070;text-decoration:none;}.cc_title a{color:#868686;text-decoration:none;}.cc_links a:hover{color:#67bee2;text-decoration:underline;} The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1 Daily Show Full Episodes Important Things w/ Demetri Martin Political Humor Jim Cramer .cc_box a:hover .cc_home{background:url('http://www.comedycentral.com/comedycentral/video/assets/syndicated-logo-over.png') !important;}.cc_links a{color:#b9b9b9;text-decoration:none;}.cc_show a{color:#707070;text-decoration:none;}.cc_title a{color:#868686;text-decoration:none;}.cc_links a:hover{color:#67bee2;text-decoration:underline;} The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2 Daily Show Full Episodes Important Things w/ Demetri Martin Political Humor Jim Cramer .cc_box a:hover .cc_home{background:url('http://www.comedycentral.com/comedycentral/video/assets/syndicated-logo-over.png') !important;}.cc_links a{color:#b9b9b9;text-decoration:none;}.cc_show a{color:#707070;text-decoration:none;}.cc_title a{color:#868686;text-decoration:none;}.cc_links a:hover{color:#67bee2;text-decoration:underline;} The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3 Daily Show Full Episodes Important Things w/ Demetri Martin Political Humor Jim Cramer Part 3 is the section where he really gets down to how CNBC isn't doing what the American people need them to do...they're doing what wall street needs them to do, which is selling the idea of wall street to America, whether or not it is the truth.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 13, 2009 -> 06:00 AM) Anderson is the best choice of the three, no doubt in my mind. But as for Owens or Wise... Owens will not only give you a higher OBP, but a substantially higher one - probably 50 points or so higher, judging by their career numbers in both the majors and the minors. Also, while Owens has a lousy arm, he's better defensively in the OF than Wise in every other aspect. If I have to have one of those two in the outfield, defensively, I'll take Owens every time. And as was pointed out earlier, Wise's career SB% is similar to Owens'. The only thing Wise has over Owens is the ability to hit 10 or 12 HR, when Owens will hit 2 or 3. Frankly, I'm not totally sure I agree with you that Owens will have a substantially higher OBP. If I go strictly by their minor league numbers, Owens has a .359 minor league OBP and Wise has a .309 OBP. But that's not telling the whole story. Wise has a .259 minor league batting average, while Owens has a .291 batting average. In other words, the difference between their OBP and batting average is .05 in Wise's case and .06 in Owens's case. Their OBP is therefore for both of them highly dependent on their batting average. Owens will give you 1 walk every 10 ab's, for Wise it's about 1/14. Owens is more patient than Wise and will take more pitches. But here's the key...Owens will only put up a higher OBP than Wise if they have identical batting averages. If Owens's batting average is 20 points lower than Wise's, they'd have very similar OBP's. Now the question...as of right now, as of how they're playing right now, which of the 2 do you think will have the higher batting average? I can't answer that by saying Owens.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Mar 13, 2009 -> 09:17 AM) Ok, now why is that, then? And why is it better to have Teddy, Mitch McConnel, Byrd, etc. etc. etc. up there for half their life? Government was never intended to be a career (not as representation, anyway). Frankly yes. Compared to the absolute mess out in this state, I'd rather have Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, prostitute-boy, etc., in our state than the people we currently have. All that term limits have done in California is reduce the possibility of compromises and pushed the state closer to bankruptcy because no one up there knows how to work the system to get anything passed. Everything winds up in gridlock. It is an absolute disaster. Term limits that push out effective legislators as they're learning how to be effecive legislators is a key part (but not the biggest part) of the problem. This doesn't mean that term limits can't be done correctly and put in place such that they can help. But pretending that term limits are a panacea is simply wrong. California's credit rating right now is worse than any other state, because the only thing the state can do to solve its budget problems is borrow money. California's term limits take out people who might have been able to work around that, and push things even faster towards the margins.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 13, 2009 -> 06:24 AM) Anyone get to watch Jon Stewart go up against Jim Cramer last night? I didn't get to see it. I'm curious how it went. The Daily Show's website is overloaded right now for some reason but I'll try to embed the videos here later. It was really as Sullivan described it. Stewart really is at his best when he is shining a light on some of the other folks in the media. Cramer was acting as sort of a stand-in for the financial media last night, and Stewart really hammered home on one key point...that the job of a "Financial news network" should not be to cheerlead for the financial industry, it should be to look with skepticism on the financial industry. Stewart used some video of Cramer describing how easy it is to game the system to make the point that Cramer and the other guys know how it works, know how these guys are gaming everything to walk away rich while everyone else's pension/401k gets battered. Cramer's defense kept coming back to the idea that even CEO's have lied to him, how is he supposed to know, he did his job, who would expect that a CEO would lie to him. This of course set Stewart up for the kill...just like when dealing with the government, if you're in the media, you're supposed to expect the people to lie to you, and its your job to work around that and expose the fact that they're lying, not just raise your hands up and say "How could I have known".

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Mar 13, 2009 -> 09:13 AM) Put in term limits. Then you would actually see people doing the right thing a lot more often because it wouldn't become about their JOB staying in Washington forever so they can pull s*** like this. The worst-run state in the country with perhaps the strongest term limits in the country says hi.

Wow, did this thread get nasty during the night.

QUOTE (BearSox @ Mar 12, 2009 -> 06:52 PM) At least he ain't Owens, but still.... WHY HAS THERE BEEN NO MENTION OF KROEGER IN CF!?!?!? Just put him out there for a couple of games and see how he does! He had a rough game today at 1b.

Comments on throwing session today

This oughta get a lot of people riled up.

Hmmm, it appears tonight another of the economists who seem to be getting things right, Simon Johnson from MIT, will be following an appearance before the House Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade with an appearance on the Colbert Report.

Anyway...some actual comments... 1. Yes, no one cares. It's stupid. There's no reason why Congress should simply give the executive branch piles of money and say "This is for this department but it's up to you to decide how to spend it." Congress holds the purse strings, and Congress ought to have some right to decide exactly how that money is spent. 2. Yes, it's 2% of the omnibus bill and well under 1% of the budget. We know. There's about 200 congressmen and 40 senators who don't seem to get that. 3. Some of them sound funny. 4. Ok, the real rub...there is genuine need for earmark reform on a couple levels. First and foremost, they're the best invitation to corruption within the Congress. If you're Duke Cunningham or Jack Murtha, and you want to make sure that the company that is bribing you gets the contract you want them to get, you don't rely on the executive branch's contracting process, you put in an earmark to direct the funds to that particular company. There is a simple solution to this...ban earmarks with private companies unless they go through a standard open-bid contracting process. The President has proposed such a fix. Second, the level of earmarking is broken...specifically, a handful of Congressmen and Senators wield too much power. Either they've been around for a long time and have a lot of seniority or they're on the appropriations committees. I don't have a specific rules change there that is as easy as the other one, but that's another issue with the current system. Alaska shouldn't get a ton of earmarks just because its congresspeople have been there forever. Third...fund the NSF and the NIH and the USDA and the FDA and so on better. A lot of these earmarks wind up being things that should be funded by normal regulatory, research, or development agencies, and the only reason they're done through earmarks is because we like cutting back on those agencies to give tax cuts. Especially in the sciences, no one wants to go through their congressperson to get an earmark to fund their research. We'd rather go through the NSF or other actual scientific funding agencies. That way we don't have Senator McCain complaining about how funny monitoring bear DNA sounds, we don't have to lobby Congress to get our programs funded, we don't decide which science is best to do based on which state we're working in. 5. John McCain is a cranky old man.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Mar 12, 2009 -> 04:32 PM) And bad, at the same time. Depends on which category you fall in to: 1. the bankers, 2. the President and his administration, or 3. everyone else.

But it's so delicious...I actually had a dream involving shopping for bacon last night...

I have no problems on Firefox.

QUOTE (MurcieOne @ Mar 12, 2009 -> 03:23 PM) The Chicago Bears Presented By The American Taxpayer Fixed that for you

QUOTE (santo=dorf @ Mar 12, 2009 -> 03:49 PM) Jerry Owens sucks. I hope the Sox don't make the mistake of carrying him just because he's out of options. With the way he's hitting right now and the fact that he seemingly can't run, I have difficulty thinking anyone else would grab him on waivers to put him on their big league roster.

A statement that probably slips by most readers of this piece that basically says dropping M2M accounting can be a way of using the treasury to allow the banking industry to totally rape the American taxpayers while the Obama administration gets good press for getting a great deal on those assets that are returning $.05 on the dollar.

Link

Wooo! Hi everyone listening on the radio!

Leadoff double off the wall against Nunez 3 run homer for Lubanski off of Nunez. First runs he's given up this spring I believe.

Restovich grounds out on first pitch.

Costa flies out to Anderson. Someone flies out. Pop out to Getz. Inning.

QUOTE (jphat007 @ Mar 12, 2009 -> 02:56 PM) Has Wise had any patience in any of his stops before playing with us last year? His highest career OBP (outside of 2007 where he had 5 ab's) in the big leagues is .293, with the White Sox last year. His career minor league OBP is .309 (with a .259 BA). Basically, if we want a .340 OBP out of him, he needs to be hitting in the .290+ range.