Balta1701

QUOTE(2nd_city_saint787 @ Jan 26, 2008 -> 10:58 AM) What about movin swish to center when Ozunas out there? Clearly that's what you have to do, but that's still a worrisome defensive OF.

QUOTE(shipps @ Jan 26, 2008 -> 01:32 PM) 3 years 27 mil On the FA Market I think he'd get more than that. If he'd sign for that I'd go for it, but I'd expect it would take a down year for him to come into that range. 3/$30 or 4/$40 might be more realistic.

QUOTE(almagest @ Jan 26, 2008 -> 01:59 PM) Moving to the AL from the NL most certainly has an effect on your effectiveness. Moving from a pitcher's park to a hitter's park will as well. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/sports/b...ll/14score.html Have you seen any evidence that shows that switching leagues or moving to a hitters park does not have a negative effect on pitchers? There is also absolutely no guarantee that Cain or Lincecum becomes an ace, or even a solid #2. And if San Franciso was sure they would, I have no idea why they'd trade them. Of course there's no guarantee, and of course moving to a hitters park usually hurts your numbers, as does moving from the NL to the AL. But the fact is...a good pitcher is a good pitcher. The guys are young so of course there's no guarantee they'll be good pitchers for a full career, but whichever league you're in, if you can get your claws on guys of that talent level...you've got yourself something to start with. If you can develop them from that point, then you can have aces.

Excellent News. Out of the 2 options I'd rather have Garcia, but I'd still rather go with and try to develop the guys we have.

QUOTE(sircaffey @ Jan 26, 2008 -> 11:34 AM) Just because they pitch in the NL doesn't mean they'll drop significantly if in the AL. I hate that assumption. The assumption with Lowry is justified as his stuff isn't great, but Cain and Lincecum are nasty. They are 2 of the top young arms in all of baseball. It doesn't matter if they pitch in the NL or AL. They are future aces whether in the NL or AL. (I have little doubt Cain will. Lincecum's health is the only concern.) I'll agree with this one. A pitcher with good stuff is a pitcher with good stuff wherever he goes. And while he doesn't have the mythology of 2005, we still have a very good pitching coach to work with those sorts of young guys. Like many people I'm still not sold on Lincecum's body, but these 2 have the stuff to be dynamic pitchers, it's only a question of whether they can learn to use it and whether they stay healthy.

Paul LoDuca hurt his chemically enhanced knee.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Jan 25, 2008 -> 08:04 PM) The only way he could get eight million is if someone paid him in Peso's. Well, it won't be long before the dollar is low enough to make that the case...

QUOTE(Tony82087 @ Jan 25, 2008 -> 07:47 PM) I really don't think Lowry is anything special, but I think you are severely overrating the back 3. The 5.44 combined ERA last year left a lot to be desired. Very true. On the other hand, I still look at all 3 of them and see some positive signs. Floyd's ERA is dominated by a couple early, inconsistent starts. Danks clearly wore down late in the year. Jose improved down the stretch when given a bit more rest. It's likely one of them will struggle, but I do have some confidence in the guys at AAA being able to step in and give us a few positive starts. If they all blow up, or heck if even one of them blows up, neither Colon, Garcia, nor Lowry is going to save us.

QUOTE(SEALgep @ Jan 25, 2008 -> 07:38 PM) Maybe the Sox pick up Lowry to spin off to an NL team in a separate trade? If it were me, that's precisely what I'd try to do. Either I'd make him a long man and try to deal MMac or I'd try to deal Lowry to another team since I don't think he makes us that much better, but he'd be an ideal fit for the Phillies, Mets, any of the NL Central teams other than the Cubs, etc.

Another thing to keep an eye on, there's a rumor that the President is in his final SOTU address (Man it feels good to say that) this coming Monday is going to endorse a National Association of Realtors proposal for a $5000 tax credit for first time home buyers. If that even gets considered by Congress, keep an eye on it, cause it could save you a chunk also.

BS in Biology from IUN in 2004, according to online resources. From Hobart Indiana, would have come through there a year after I finished up @ portage.

Damn, wonder if I ever ran into that chick somewhere @ IU. If she's finishing up doctoral work, then we were basically there at the same time.

QUOTE(Heads22 @ Jan 25, 2008 -> 05:54 PM) You'd probably bake him some sort of cake as well. And if we use the right ingredients in this cake, the deal just might get done.

Ok...see, small problem. In your 2 previous posts, you said $1.2 billion. $1.2 trillion is a much more believable number.

QUOTE(BureauEmployee171 @ Jan 25, 2008 -> 05:26 PM) And the interest paid was vastly more on the debt. Fully agree. I'm saying the entire amount of the Federal Income received - 1.2 Billion, was spent SOLELY on the mounting credit alone. Could you please elaborate on what that means? Because I can't figure out what you're saying there.

Actually, upon reading it again and again, I am finding more quibbles. For example, the interest paid on the national debt last year was vastly more than $1.2 billion. The general concept though, that its entirely possible that the combination of the Federal Reserve and the government itself will simply run out of stimulus bullets of the sort they've used to drag us repeatedly out of every recession since the big one in the early 80's due to the fact that we never really brought the system back into balance after the last recession. We kept piling on the debt in good times, and so that makes it harder for us to use deficit spending as a method of strengthening the economy in the bad times. And the Fed only has so many points of interest rates left that they can drop - if they dropped it the same amount that they did during the 2001 and after recession, they'd hit 0. Which does make it a shame that they couldn't construct a more effective stimulus package, because the system could well just not have enough in it to avert the coming slump.

You know the amazing thing? Most of that paragraph I think he's completely right about. Save the anti-socialized medicine part.

QUOTE(ptatc @ Jan 25, 2008 -> 02:39 PM) The Sox players did not refuse the tests. They talked about it but bowed to Union pressure. My understanding was...the point was successfully made. They did take them, but made their point.

Al Davis is seemingly trying to force Lane Kiffin to resign without having to fire him. Yeah, this will end well.

QUOTE(Gregory Pratt @ Jan 25, 2008 -> 02:21 PM) Right. I'll bet Frank Thomas checks his teammates' locker rooms for steroids and if he even gets a whiff he lets them know it's unacceptable. I mean, Frank's admirable but he isn't a crimedog. But I'll bet you wouldn't be wanting to have some dude injecting you in the ass if Frank was around.

Is it worth noting that at present, the House version of the deal also includes something like $50 to $70 billion in additional business tax cuts, and so is not just the rebate plan? Are y'all ok with that or are you outraged by that part too?

I'm sure it'll be back up and running within a matter of weeks at the most

I'll try to keep this brief. Please note that every time I say probably or a similar word, it means that this is the most popular current theory, but that things haven't yet been proven. When the solar system formed, it formed as basically a cloud that collapsed towards the center, probably due to the shockwave of a nearby supernova. There's a problem with this process though - angular momentum. Just like a figure skater who slows down by extending arms or speeds up a spin by pulling them inwards, if you try to move mass that is spinning to a central point, it will start spinning faster. If you try to collapse all the mass of a solar system in to a sun, you can't do it, because the momentum would drive the spinning velocities so high that the sun would shear itself apart. What winds up happening is that some of the material in the cloud winds up containing most of the angular momentum, so you wind up with a disk of gas, with a proto star forming at the center with most of the mass, while most of the angular momentum stays outside in the disk. Because there's a star forming at the center, which is very hot, there are temperature and pressure gradients within this disk. These lead directly to differing compositions of material forming at different places in the system. For example, we don't get gas giants near our sun because it's too hot for ice to form there, and water ice winds up forming a significant chunk of the mass of the gas giants. There are probably many important variations in this disk. One hope of this mission was that by sampling a comet that we thought came from the outer solar system, we'd be able to get a glimpse of the material in the outer solar system. We have lots of samples of the inner solar system, because we have chunks of earth, Mars, the Moon, and meteorites/asteroids. We don't have a lot of the outer solar system, and that's interesting to know about for a number of reasons (perhaps most notably, because a good portion of our atmosphere may have been delivered by comets coming back in from the outer solar system). So, they sent this probe through the tail of a comet, hoping to collect some of the dust coming off of it to allow us to actually have samples from the outer solar system. To collect the stuff, they use a material called aerogel, a wonderful material that is basically like a frozen foam made of silicon. Small grains ram in to this stuff, slow down, and are captured. One problem they're noting though is that it seems that the grains that came in may have gotten hotter than they anticipated, maybe hot enough to melt the grains and mix them with melted aerogel. If they're correct in this initial article, instead of getting material from the outer solar system, they think they may have gotten material from the inner solar system. This would be interesting and confusing, because you wouldn't expect comets from beyond Neptune to be made of the same stuff in the asteroid belt from our current theories, so there would have to be some way of explaining how you move a lot of mass from the inner solar system out beyond Neptune and then lock it into a comet. Then again, if the reaction with the aerogel was more than expected, that could possibly have obscured whatever specific grains they were looking for. Or, we could simply be totally wrong about what we think comets are made of, and there could be another source somewhere for the stuff they've sampled from the atmosphere that they think came from comets.

QUOTE(Cknolls @ Jan 25, 2008 -> 01:03 PM) After all the hullabaloo and 75 bps we are only a few points from last friday's close. Seems like wasted Ammo from the Fed. Don't worry, you'll get another .75 or so next week.

QUOTE(Reddy @ Jan 25, 2008 -> 10:15 AM) are we really going to make this argument again? EVERYBODY agrees that the media hasn't covered him fairly - end of story. Yeah, you'd think that finishing 2nd in Iowa would certainly have garnered him more coverage pre-N.H. than what he actually got. That analysis I posted a few pages ago suggests that he was basically at the Ron Paul level of invisibility in the press before NH IIRC.