Balta1701

QUOTE (DBAH0 @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 11:16 AM) Well I mean, do you think the Sox would HAVE to add or offer 1 of Floyd or Danks to that deal? I'd be impartial maybe to including Gavin, but then you've only got 4 starting pitchers in the rotation. This is where it would be nice to have a good farm system. But Swisher and Fields would be 2 potential building blocks for the M's (although Swisher's value is low, but he is rebounding at the plate), and Broadway would be an upgrade as a 5th starter for them right now. The issue is that while Swisher and Fields would be "Potential building blocks", they're not the kind of pieces a team like Seattle would be looking for in order to trade their most popular player who brings in a lot of income as it is. They'd correctly be looking for a young, cheap, budding star. You start talking about Quentin + Danks and you might have a shot, because of the numbers Q put up this year. If they don't get it, then they have Ichiro signed for 5 years anyway.

QUOTE (north side chi sox fan @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 12:31 PM) Anyone think Gavin can pitch the 6th? 94 pitches through 5, with the 8 and 9 hitters coming up. He can go out, but you better have the bullpen ready the moment anyone gets on base.

Italy fires out an oil company windfall tax.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 11:26 AM) actually they are immune from all those things if said on the floor. But he's said a lot more than things on the floor, he's done them on 60 minutes, press conferences, etc. There's quite a video trail of evidence...the issue is going to be proving whether he went beyond the facts maliciously.

QUOTE (DBAH0 @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 12:03 PM) If you could re-sign Crede right now to a 3-4 year deal (if he fires Bora$$, which has been rumored), I would deal Fields in a Ichiro package. I'd offer Swisher + Fields + Broadway and / or Poreda for Ichiro, and that'd be it, I'd want to hang onto Floyd and Danks. But of course, the M's have Beltre at 3rd, but they could always use Fields at 1B for a season or 2. The Yankees have Damon, so I don't really see them after a leadoff hitter. They need Sabathia more than they need Ichiro. The Red Sox on the other hand, I could certainly see that happening, especially considering they have Buckholz in AAA. The M's would never take that offer.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 10:55 AM) Or closer, it means that this is an inexact science, and all of these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. They just don't know with a real degree of certianty what the reality is when it comes to the supply of energy miles under the earth. However...the fact is, there are more than a few estimates out there, each with its own basis. I'm sure you've all seen the "Hurricane track prediction maps" where different models produce different results about where exactly a hurricane is going to hit, there's always one or two outliers that have Katrina hitting South Carolina or something like that...right now, we have more than enough data and estimates to play the same game with oil peak estimates. Here's what the December one looked like. The EIA curve is the blue one that shoots off the chart away from everything else. One particular problem with the EIA/IEA numbers is that they assume that the numbers countries give for their reserves, like what Saudi Arabia says their reserves consist of, are honest. I can give easy data that would suggest that is wrong... Despite the fact that over the last few years oil prices have gone up by a factor of 5 or 6, world oil production has been at essentially a bumpy plateau for years. If you believe the EIA numbers, that plateau should have ended years ago as the price spiked.

Jesus christ, just got back in, Gavin gives up 6 runs, and his ERA goes down because 0 of them were earned?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 09:35 AM) when I was in early elementary school my science textbook said that we would be out of oil by the year 2000. Clearly, this means that no scientist should ever be trusted when making an estimate of oil production curves.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 10:09 AM) Then we are still cutting those losses some because of the drilling. We're still increasing supply. People have been shouting "OMG! NO OIL IN A DECADE!" since the early 1900's. The EIA predicts a peak in about 30 years, not 4. http://www.reason.com/news/show/36645.html http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petrole...upply/index.htm And that same EIA says that the likely impact of doing a hell of a lot of drilling off the coasts of the U.S. would be "Insignificant" in several ways through 2030 in a 2007 report.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 06:52 AM) http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/pos...zFkYTVmNjQzM2I= Here's some of the actual methodology of that poll. When you read the questions, it basically is acting like a quasi-push poll, it focuses people in on their energy costs and then asks the question in a way that focuses on the energy cost issue. It's worded in a way that's bound to get that result. Note the things they did here to get that result. 1. They started off with the energy cost question to get people focusing on the costs of that. 2. They asked the question in a way that only focused on lowering energy costs. 3. They asserted in the question that it would lower gas costs, without saying how much it would lower energy costs by (this is a key point...you never know how much people are thinking that the drilling will lower the cost of gas. Some fraction of the people answering yes likely thought that drilling there would be enough to drive gas prices back down to $1 a gallon. If you ask the question and say that it will drop the price of gas by $.25, or $.50, you're going to get different answers. 4. They didn't attempt at all to include anything about the potential environmental costs, which could easily have pushed the poll the other way and would have been a worthy question to ask. "Would you support drilling offshore in Florida, California, and in other areas if it increased the risk of oil spills fouling beaches and other natural environments in this area"? It's also worth noting that the NRO bit you cite seems to ignore the one environmental question they did ask...and it's equally overwhelming result: Overall, this is a shoddy poll, but Rass isn't going to care because they're getting press and therefore money out of it.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 09:01 AM) It isn't "outdated" if its still powering an overwhelming majority of the world's transportation industry. You can't just get off of oil over night. It will take decades. So what happens if we drill everything in sight and in 2012 the amount of oil the world is able to pump out of the ground starts declining precipitously because we've crossed over the global production peak and there's no where left to go but down?

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 09:20 AM) You're so going to disappear under an Obama presidency...

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 09:46 AM) Depends on how far you want to push that arguement. The entire transportation structure of the United States depends on this energy. You just can't quit fossil fuels cold turkey and expect the country to be OK, especially for things that we don't know will necesarily work in mass production and on a national scale. NONE of this is proven. We are already seeing the results of the shortsightedness in our energy policies of the last 20-30 years, by the supply problems we are having now. There is no guarentee that in another 10 years, even with significant investments in everything under the sun, that any of this will actually work. Then where is the country at? Quite frankly, whether we drill everything under the sun or not, we're basically in the same boat. The fact is the U.S. is trying to use 25% of the world's oil and it has only 4% or less of the world's supplies if you count up everything regardless of how much it costs to drill it. That's the simplest level at which the math fails for us. Drill all you want, and it maybe buys you another year once Saudi Arabia's decline sets in come a few years from now. If you drilled everything, you might be pulling in 2-3 million additional barrels of oil per day 20 years from now. The odds are, frankly, that the total U.S. and world production from other wells will have declined by more than that. Drilling everything is a play for time, and it's not a play for very much time at that.

Go get em Gavin.

QUOTE (north side chi sox fan @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 08:45 AM) DO NOT SHOW THIS TO BORAS Like it or not, just the fact that he's already sitting on what, 15 dingers this year has probably assured him that someone will offer him 5/$60 this offseason.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 07:07 AM) Florida Rasmussen: McCain 47; Obama 39 Nate Silver with a discussion of why Rassmussen is diverging so far from PPP, Quinnipac, and Survey USA.

QUOTE (Al Lopez's Ghost @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 04:02 AM) what I'd like to know is has anyone ever seen Crede's stats for say, the first 4 or 5 innings of games versus the last 4 or 5? It's gotta be way different. Career splits from baseball reference. AB R H HR RBI SO BA OBP SLG OPS tOPS+ Innings 1-3 791 95 196 31 128 127 0.248 0.288 0.431 0.719 88 Innings 4-6 1006 130 259 53 151 128 0.257 0.299 0.464 0.763 99 Innings 7-9 824 111 228 36 120 127 0.277 0.341 0.46 0.801 112 Innings 10+ 41 6 11 3 12 7 0.268 0.304 0.512 0.817 111 Clearly gets better as the game goes on, OPS, OPS+ etc all go up by a fairly large amount.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 05:04 AM) It's not really been his fault though, as far as I know. It's not as if he's just personally bombed whenever his teams have made the playoffs. Take this year for example, Yao Ming is lost for the season again. wtf. Even with that...look what Lebron has done the last 2 years with a crappier supporting cast than TMac's.

QUOTE (WilliamTell @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 08:06 AM) That is NOT true, Owens has 1 career home run so he has hit the ball out of the infield, haha. But yeah, I think it took about 100 at bats for Owens to finally get his first RBI. I don't have the confidence in Owens being the leadoff hitter on this team. Well...to be fair...last year, who was hitting at the bottom of the order that would be on base to actually give Owens the chance at an RBI? Uribe? Gonzalez? Terrero? Hall? Richar (who took a month to learn how to hit big leaguers at all)

QUOTE (robinventura23 @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 06:29 AM) Interesting that Manuel's Mets faces Jon Garland last night. I wonder if they said Hi to each other. Lol. Garland got through 6.

QUOTE (DBAH0 @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 07:58 AM) I wonder if the M's would be interested in Swisher actually. They need a 1B/CF with Johjima and Reed there currently, and LHH's do well at Safeco. Swisher + Poreda + Broadway + something else for Ichiro maybe? For a talent like Ichiro, most teams would move heaven and earth to get him. Think the Yankees would suddenly be willing to part with Hughes and Kennedy? Or the Red Sox with Ellsbury and Lester? In other words, you're not getting a guy like Ichiro with a piecemeal package. Floyd + Danks + Swisher might pull it off, or Floyd + Danks + Fields, or maybe something centered around Quentin. But right now there isn't anything in our minor leagues nearly strong enough to outbid what other teams would put up if Ichiro were seriously on the market.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 09:09 AM) LMAO! What? Stopped at a gas station on the way through Iowa, they were giving away free ice cream sandwiches.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 08:13 AM) But according to the libs, they're not doing that. Damn liberal heads of the RNC...

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jun 19, 2008 -> 08:14 AM) http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/007569.html Doesn't that actually endorse and extend to private actors the Nixonian view that if the president says it's legal, it's legal, regardless of what the law says and the Constitution says? Wouldn't that set an awful precedent that an administration could get private actors to do whatever they wanted including breaking the law? That's the short definition of the disaster that this administration has perpetrated on our laws. You know, half of me hopes that President Obama flip flops and decides to be ridiculously corrupt. Because with the power that the Bush administration has grabbed for the President (with the willing help of the Congress), he could decide to become a corrupt near dictator and the law wouldn't be able to stop him.

In congressional testimony yesterday, Colin Powell's former chief of staff testified under oath that the number of detainees who had died in U.S. custody was over 100, and 25 of those were flat out murders, most of which haven't been punished.