Balta1701

QUOTE (Paint it Black @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 03:58 PM) So umm...there's this hole in centerfield... If Lillibredge is the guy they're hoping will turn in to a leadoff hitter (Solid sb %age, at least in the past has shown good OBP numbers although last year was a disaster for him), then I could see KW rolling the dice on Anderson in CF again, if he can force Ozzie to actually play him. But, this also clears cash.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 03:34 PM) Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! I've been waiting for something, ha. Anyone have any details on Lillibridge? Some of us are doing the googling of him now. What would you like to know? He was solid in the Pittsburgh organization, traded in the Laroche deal to the Braves, he struggled some with the Braves as they moved him up pretty quick, and last year was pretty rough for him althoguh I'm trying to find out if he was hurt for part of the year.

MLB Trade Rumors

QUOTE (daa84 @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 03:20 PM) more infatuation with speedy grinder type players with below average power and on base abilities though at least i think lillibridge does play some D Below average On base abilities? His walk total dropped some as they pushed him up pretty quick it looks like over the last year, but in 06 he took 87 walks and put up a .420 OBP in their A ball levels. Was he hurt last year? It looks like he only played about 1/2 a season.

QUOTE (sayitaintso @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 03:16 PM) I for one am personally going to miss Boone. Me also...I still think he'll wind up being an excellent LOOGY if he's actually used that way.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 02:50 PM) How much of the coastline is really navigable by small ships that wouldn't be noticed? Now that the ice is pulling back, a huge majority of it. The difficulty isn't getting off of the ships. The difficulty would be getting it from a ship to a road.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 02:39 PM) How do you get it into Canada in the first place? Canada has a moderately enormous shoreline, and it's only growing as the ice pulls back. If I'm complaining about the 1-2 guys that patrol the coast of Oregon for example...imagine that problem in the 2nd largest country in the world.

By my count, there are currently 26 type A free agents out there. 15 were offered arb, 11 were not.

QUOTE (almagest @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 11:46 AM) If they don't sign, we get compensatory picks in next year's draft. Experience doesn't always outweigh potential. Who cares if we can't trade them right away? You don't base a player's worth on whether you can spin him off for someone else or not. Garland is type B, Cabrera type A. We get two picks for Cabrera -- one between the first and second rounds, and either a first round pick after the 15th pick, or a second round pick, depending on who signs Cabrera. I also don't think we'd get a pick lower than the second round, for any reason -- where did you find that? Even if true, I think it's a little much to say that the Cabrera trade was bad because we might get a 3rd round pick in the draft for him if the team that signs him also signs another type A free agent. The one thing that could drive our pick down is if the team signing Cabrera also signed another type A free agent who was more valuable than Cabrera. Then the other team that lost its player would get the top pick from the signing team, and we'd wind up lower down. For example, if the Nationals decided to sign both Teixeira and OC, we'd probably wind up with their 3rd round pick. The number of type A guys not being offered arbitration decreases the chances of that happening by a lot though.

QUOTE (Flash Tizzle @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 10:38 AM) If by some chance a live nuclear warhead is entering this nation it's going to be through that s***hole. Honestly, I disagree. Nuclear weapons are heavy. You need some sort of vehicle to move them, unless you're doing multiple shipments and you have the ability to do the assembly within the U.S. Even then, moving the pieces are heavy (plutonium/uranium have really high densities) and you don't want to risk having something go wrong where you expose the material beforehand because you dropped your backpack. Moving a bomb across that border would probably be harder than you think. you need to use a vehicle, and vehicles go through checkpoints. If I was a foreign terrorist and I wanted to bring a bomb in to the U.S., I'd either try to find a port that didn't have a solid radiation sensor system (I think major upgrades on those were included when the Dems passed the 9/11 commission recommendations about 1.5 years ago), or more simply, I'd charter a boat, park it 20 miles or so offshore of somewhere like Maine or Oregon, someplace where the coastline is pretty luxurious and open but where there is highway access without a lot of security, and I'd bring it ashore in a small boat. I believe the state of Oregon has somewhere between 1 and 2 troopers who's job it is to patrol their coastline. I think that's by far your easiest access point. No sensors of any sort, the only thing that stops you is blind luck, and if you pose as tourists having a campfire from their SUV or someone doing some fishing, there's no real reason for suspicion.

QUOTE (Thunderbolt @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 11:33 AM) Hmmm.. i like Chris Getz a lot, but i'm not sure he's in the fave 5 Not with D2: the Mighty Danks in that system.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 10:32 AM) I'm not necessarily saying that, I'm just saying why even comment. Maybe he is saying the truth, maybe he isn't, but I don't see any value regardless. He could just say that we currently have no interest. Why cry poor..its not an argument fans like hearing, regardless of whether its true or not. I'd say the answer to that is that if KW actually is interested in one of them, then maybe some of the other GM's are thinking he's taken himself out of a race that he's actually still in.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 10:28 AM) If they really like them, than why can't they consider it. Honestly that frustrates the hell out of me. Don't comment on it if thats the case. It's one thing if we are talking about Arod, its another when we are talking about these guys. So...you're taking KW's word at 100% face value?

A person in a cabinet position has discretionary spending authority that no Senator has. That IMO is the key. As a Senator, you can't allocate funds or change policy directly, you need to pass something through the Congress. A cabinet post has the ability to do that.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 08:30 AM) What, if anything, do you think can be done to minimize the risk? The key on the nuclear issue has to be to control the old Soviet fissile material stockpiles, something that Obama has already been highly active on, working on the old Nunn/Lugar program. No matter what people say about Iran, North Korea, Libya, etc., it is nearly impossible to produce the material needed for a weapon on your own without having access to huge facilities, an awful lot of time, some darn good scientists, and a lot of money. Barring nuclear reactors suddenly becoming vastly cheaper, the already-processed material, mainly from the Soviets, are your main threat. In terms of bio-weapons...same deal. For them to be effective, they have to be something worse than the common cold. You could conduct a 2001 anthrax attack level assault without significant skill, but to do anything more than that, the best way to pull it off is to get access to some of the material that the Soviets weaponized and mass produced late in the cold war. They made some really, really nasty stuff. The 2001 Anthrax attacks were, lets say, annoying, but they didn't have the ability to spread themselves like a true bioweapon, where each person you infect becomes a carrier who can infect others. The Soviet stockpiles can do that. It's also probably worth stockpiling the smallpox vaccine, because frankly, if I wanted to pick a bio weapon to use to truly harm a country, some variant of that would be my choice.

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Dec 2, 2008 -> 09:30 AM) 1) Intelligence and surveillance of possible terrorist groups is key. I have a feeling Obama will continue surveillance programs. 2) It would end up being a one and done for Obama if it happens. 1. No one has disputed the given right of the President to wiretap anyone overseas that he so desires. Of course he'll continue surveillance directed at actual national security threats. 2. It wasn't for Bush.

QUOTE (whitesoxfan101 @ Dec 1, 2008 -> 06:56 PM) Wow the Cubs REALLY didn't want him back, or they are on some very tight budget restraints. I'm surprised they didn't even offer him arbitration. It has to be budget constraints. If he were to for some reason accept arbitration, what do you think they could get for him in the trade market, esp. if they tossed in a couple million of his deal?

The Cubs dump enormous sums of money on guys like Soriano, Dempster, etc., and when the time comes to wind up with 2 additional draft picks, they don't have the money to gamble any more. That my friends is how you dismantle a franchise.

This is probably about as much of a partisan callout article as you'll get from the AP. So, to summarize....the changes were out there, proposed, that could at the very least have softened the sharpest parts of the bubble. The Executive Branch could have added those regulations without Congressional approval. Congress probably could have jumped in and added them if they thought they were important enough. A bunch of banks said no, we can't do that. Those banks are now all dead.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Dec 1, 2008 -> 01:29 PM) Not really. After 5 days straight of technical rallying, this was bound to happen. A fascinating tidbit I learned pre-election from a Daily Show guest was that prior to October, 5 of the 10 largest percentage gains in wall street history happened during the Great Depression. The problem is not that the market doesn't go up significantly during these sorts of times. The problem is that it becomes a roller coaster. I believe you can probably make graphs that show market volatility going up significantly during economic down times, and we're facing some severe down times over the next year or two.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Dec 1, 2008 -> 05:00 PM) I have no problem with Obama dividing up the room into Cubs and Sox. It's all in good fun. But are we so damn politically correct and worried about peoples feelings that we HAVE to apologize because a reporter was "miffed" that he DARED be put in the "other" area? Come on. Seriously. Dude, I'd have been furious.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Dec 1, 2008 -> 11:04 AM) Interesting...the Sox never send cash in a deal but if they did I would expect to receive something else in return. Do the Reds have anyone of interest with a few mill contract that could be included? Maybe a backup catcher. The Reds just signed Ben Davis to a minor league deal.... Anyway, right now the Reds are probably actually looking for a catcher of their own, but they have a right handed hitting C (Ryan Hanigan) and a Switch hitting C (Wilkin Castillo) both of whom are probably backup-level C's.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Nov 29, 2008 -> 01:10 PM) http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/stats/battin...ull&minpa=0 According to the theories of some people here on the board, using OBP as the holy grail and only measure, we should get either Gregor Blanco or Mike Cameron. Cody Ross, McLouth and Matt Kemp are going to be prohibitively expensive to acquire. Go to that page and tell me what players the White Sox realistically have a shot at??? Taveras was at least better than Carlos Gomez at getting on base and wouldn't cost us very much at all. Maybe he's Option C or D, but he has to be on the radar screen. As much as we're complaining about him, I can't imagine the complaints after KW trades away the farm system again for Brian Roberts. Otherwise, we are going to have to target someone like Dickerson without much of an established track record...who may or may not be better than Jerry Owens as a leadoff hitter and CFer. Mike Cameron and his .331 OBP? You're saying that somehow I'm supposed to find that to be good? Well, maybe compared to what Taveras did last year, but still...

QUOTE (maggsmaggs @ Nov 29, 2008 -> 12:54 PM) Well, the point of Taveras being speedy is that he gets on base with, then can steal second and/or third. So he really only needs one hit to score, which really isn't stringing hits together. Our second hitter and Quentin would be able to hopefully get one hit to knock him in. The point of speed is you only need one hit after the speed player to score, sometimes none because their speed causes wild pitches, errors on pickoffs and such. The problem with that concept is that it assumes one thing...that the guy is able to get on base at a high pace in the first place. Typically, when I look at the stats from a leadoff type hitter, I think that a .350 OBP is somewhere between average and below average. It's adequate, if the guy makes up for the fact that he doesn't get on base a lot by moving in to scoring position. Every point above that is better, every point below that is costing you a lot of runs. The midpoint for #1 hitters last year in baseball was a .350 OBP, between both leagues. The Sox averaged .339, and there wasn't ever really a leadoff hitter for this team we were totally happy with, because between Swisher and Cabrera, both of them struggled to get on base too much for us. Willy Taveras has a career .331 OBP. His OBP is also dominated by his batting average, because he doesn't walk much and doesn't work a pitcher much (Another plus for a leadoff hitter that we're not noting much). The only time in his career he had an OBP over .350 was when he hit .320 in a 1/2 season 2 years ago. Otherwise, he's been at .333, .325, and .308 last year. I don't care how fast you are. If you're getting on base at a .325 clip, even if you're stealing 75 bases and being thrown out one time, you're costing your team runs compared to a person who gets on base at a 50% clip. Over a 600 ab season, the difference in OBP there is basically the same as being thrown out 15 more times.