Balta1701

QUOTE(Reddy @ Jan 19, 2008 -> 02:29 PM) no joke. it's scary. Balta i'm with you on the political dynasty thing - i hate it as well, but at this point i'm worried about now. Forget the past, right NOW a Clinton presidency would be better than a Romney presidency. If Romney, or any GOP wins, i think the future of the Democratic party is at risk. As it stands the GOP has had a stranglehold over this country for much of the last 50 years. The 2 party system's bad enough, but do we really want a 1 party system? Honestly I think the Dems will still have a solid grip on the Congress come next January, probably stronger than this year, which will help a little, even though the Repubs will still filibuster everything in sight. I'm of the opinion that the same people losing another election might well be what it takes to get rid of the damn people who keep losing them. I'm sick of voting for people who voted for the war, I'm sick of voting for people who are stuck into the same bubble by the same advisors, I'm sick of the same moneyed people controlling the party. The same people keep losing elections, and every time it seems we get closer and closer to beating them. Last time we lost it in Iowa, this time we lost it in New Hampshire. We were a couple thousand votes away from potentially beating off the main establishment candidate in this election.

QUOTE(Athomeboy_2000 @ Jan 19, 2008 -> 02:30 PM) Oh i agree. If it came down to Clinton vs any of the republicans, I'd still probably vote for her. I really don't like her personality, but her and Barack and Edwards really are fairly similar in policy as best as I know. Plus, with her in the white house and Barack working the congress, I see POTENTIAL for a lot of change. There's nothing in the Congress going to change at all, IMO. Putting Clinton in the White House would probably just harden the Republicans in the Senate. If we think they're filibustering now, could you imagine how it would be when they get a budget from Hillary? You think the Dems there are ineffective now...eesh. Of course, with all Bush's new powers being handed over to Clinton (See Republicans, THIS IS WHAT WE WARNED YOU ABOUT)...some of the filibustering ones might just disappear...but we'll worry about that when it happens.

QUOTE(Athomeboy_2000 @ Jan 19, 2008 -> 02:19 PM) And I just became a Canadian. If I stayed here during the abject disaster that was the Bush years, which may well have totally ruined the future of this country, I'll tough it out for a few more years of Clinton. Look at the bright side. A person throwing darts at a dartboard as a decision making tool could do a better job of running the country than GW. It is, I'm fairly certain, theoretically impossible for her to be worse.

QUOTE(Athomeboy_2000 @ Jan 19, 2008 -> 02:20 PM) Just wait until Jeb Bush runs in 2012 or 2016 If that ever happens...God I can't express to you how sick to my stomach that would make me. That's the kind of thing that would potentially push me into the Ron Paul type crazy we need to overhaul and destroy the entire system because it's gone completely broken camp.

QUOTE(Reddy @ Jan 19, 2008 -> 02:08 PM) ok, and disliking her is fine, but if you care at all about Obama or Edwards policies you would never vote for Romney over ANY democrat. This is what i mean when i talk about people not voting in their own interest - it's all about feel, gut reaction, emotion, likability, etc. Interesting... The trouble is, I paid enough attention during the Clinton years that right now, I think that there's a solid chance that a corporatist Republican might well be a better policy maker than the Clintons, and the fact that they've surrounded themselves in this campaign with many of the same people from the last election doesn't help matters. Hillary would have an awful lot of work to do to convince me otherwise in the general. I don't think the Clintons did a very good job with the opportunity they had in the 1990's, and right now, I'd lean towards a fresh face over them again. And the fact that I really hate the idea of political dynasties in this country really, really doesn't help.

QUOTE(Reddy @ Jan 19, 2008 -> 02:02 PM) correct me if i'm wrong but you're an Obama supporter correct? I would have happily supported Edwards also, but I'll be putting Obama on my primary ballot. I just have absolutely no stomach right now to vote for Hillary Clinton.

QUOTE(Athomeboy_2000 @ Jan 19, 2008 -> 02:01 PM) Dont call this over just yet. There is still a LOT to go. SC will go Obama. Then Super Tuesday is going to be fun It's over. Obama needed 2 wins to be able to have a shot at closing the polling gap on Super Tuesday. Between the fact that NY is larger than IL and the fact that Hillary is winning in CA, Super Tuesday will wind up going solidly to her. This was 95% over when those few thousand voters in New Hampshire picked her. Today just sealed it. I hope Bloomberg runs.

QUOTE(mr_genius @ Jan 19, 2008 -> 01:40 PM) Romney vs Clinton? yea, that would suck. Let me put that race in some perspective. If the election were held tomorrow and that was the matchup, there's a strong chance I'd be filling in the bubble for Romney.

QUOTE(Reddy @ Jan 19, 2008 -> 11:10 AM) Cap would get blown up in the cell - plus i doubt they'd make the trade anyway. They might if we threw in something else we were considering ridding ourselves of (MMac, for example).

Thanks Nevada. You've officially moved me to an "Undecided" voter in the general.

QUOTE(iamshack @ Jan 18, 2008 -> 08:01 PM) So what else did he say? Seems to me that scientists always do this...they choose the data that best supports their theories and go from there...it's too bad he did the same, but are you really surprised? The difference is not that you choose the data that best supports your theory. Yes, that is appropriate. But you have to be able to explain why you chose the data you did. That's the real key. If he had an explanation for why he thought that was a valid temperature curve to use, I wouldn't have had a problem with him presenting it. But not only did he not have an explanation for it, he didn't even know what it was actually showing. That's basically like me posting this graph and insisting that you should simply accept that this is the number of pirates, and you asking "How did you count the number of pirates today" and me responding with "This is the number of pirates". Aside from that particular issue, he tried to touch on a number of cosmic-ray/climate related correlations, most of which have been highly questioned. For example, they published an oxygen isotope curve for the past 550 million years or so, which they claimed was a proxy for temperature and which correlated with galactic motions, but the problem is that their oxygen isotope curve wasn't corrected for pH, which dramatically alters the correlation...and beyond that, it's heavily smoothed, and they never show the un-smoothed version, etc. He did the same sort of game with more recent times, alleging that there was a problem with the normal 100,000 year cycle but not accepting the fact that it's a 100,000 year cycle moderated by a 40,000 year cycle and a 20,000 year cycle. When someone pointed that out, he just kinda glossed over it. There is plenty of utility in being able to use specific data sets, smooth things, etc., but you better be ready to defend yourself on the decisions you make, otherwise, you're just playing games. It's a presentation that would probably do a fine job of convincing someone who doesn't know a thing about what was being presented, but if you had any of the background, you knew where the weaknesses were and he had no defense for them. If you go before some Senate committee with that presentation, it's going to be effective, but there's a reason why very few people buy into the idea; because in order to find proof for it, you have to ignore all these little issues for which they have no defense.

QUOTE(beck72 @ Jan 18, 2008 -> 07:41 PM) The sox may be no better with Dotel than they would sticking with a young guy. But erring on the side of a proven guy [when healthy] should be the way to go after the debacle of 2007. Of the guys out of options [aardsma, Masset, sisco], Dotel should be able to outperform them. The sox can always have other options in AAA. Out of those, I believe only Masset is actually out of options. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong on Aa, but I'm fairly certain we have Sisco for 1 more year.

So, one of my department's seminars yesterday hosted a guy who is currently visiting Caltech who is a noted climate change skeptic, he's one of the folks who thinks that climate variations are controlled almost entirely by solar variations expressed through varying fluxes of cosmic rays which, by some unknown mechanism, leads to climate change. Don't want to go into the substance of the talk too much, I can provide a bunch of realclimate links if you want more details and responses, but I do want to illustrate one thing about this debate. At one point in his talk, the speaker presented a graph which he claimed to show that over the past 100 years, the Earth's climate correlates with several proxies for solar activity including an isotope trend. The problem was, well, there were a few problems, but the one he was specifically called on by some of the climate people in the audience was his temperature curve. Usually, when you're using data from someone else, if you're doing the job the right way, you should know what the data you're citing actually shows. If I'm stealing a data curve from someone, I want to know a few things, I want to know who made it, when they made it, what they did to make it, exactly what it shows, and what the response to it was. If someone had produced a more modern curve, I better have a reason for using the older one. Or, if I'm using a data set that is not generally accepted as the right one, I better not only have a good reason for using it, I better be able to walk through for everyone why I chose the data I'm using, and for God's sake it better not be "this set makes my data look better". So, the guy posts this curve showing how his temperature curve matches in peaks and valleys the other curve for solar activity that he was presenting. At which point one of the atmosphere guys in the audience (brilliant guy btw, frighteningly smart) raises his hand and asks what exactly the curve labeled temperature was showing. The speaker's reply was basically: that's temperature. The climate guy asked for more details, and basically was met with "that's temperature". At this point his question is just being ignored, so he starts actively disagreeing, saying, "no it's not", one of the other faculty guys in the audience asks if maybe it's another proxy for temperature, like the Northern hemisphere curve or something like that, and each time the answer was no. If you watched, the game the speaker was playing was one that wasn't slipping by anyone in that room, but it's a game that certainly can slip past anyone who isn't careful. He's insisting that his curve, the one obviously chosen because it matches well with his data, was the only curve that mattered. But he couldn't tell you a thing about it. He had no idea where it came from, what paper he grabbed it from, or why he chose to use it. To him, all that mattered was "That's temperature" and everyone else was supposed to buy it right away. The problem of course is that if you use a different curve, like the Northern Hemisphere curve, or the IPCC global curve, or even a curve that extended past 1992 (his didn't) his correlation is not there. That, in a nutshell, struck me as a perfect example of how the game is played. You insist that you have an alternate interpretation. You go around telling people about your alternate interpretation. But if you're in any place where a questioner doesn't recognize "that's not the curve that everyone else uses", then the presentation sounds 100x more convincing. But when you actually have the ability to challenge them on a few details, like their T curve, or like the mechanism for the effect they're proposing, or why they choose to use a piece of data in a certain way, the answer isn't there, because either the person doing so wasn't careful, or because they're deliberately trying to muddy the water. For reference, after some googling today, I found out that the T-Curve the guy was using was from a paper in 2001 where the author said "these data have been "recalibrated to obtain estimates of April-September mean temperatures from all land regions north of 20N"." So, it was neither a full earth T estimate, a full hemisphere T estimate, or even an annual mean. Now, it's possible that if you knew more about the climate system, you could convince me that the curve you were using was more useful than the global average temperature curves...but if you don't even know where yours comes from, and you can't be troubled to defend at all why you're choosing that curve...why should I buy the story at all?

QUOTE(jasonxctf @ Jan 18, 2008 -> 04:34 PM) while its nice to have a little extra $ in the pocket, just like the '01 "rebate" (even though it was really a tax refund advance) will have little to no effect on things. you can only delay the inevitable so long... it sucks, but we're going to have to take our lumps before it gets better. no vodoo-economic tricks will fix this. at the same time, its time for corporate america to pick up its slack. this economy has been running "luke warm" on consumer spending alone for at least 5 years. corporate spending has remained pretty flat while profits have been rising. (up until this past qtr) Not an economist myself but happy to defer to analysis by those who are. Thoughts?

QUOTE(Dick Allen @ Jan 18, 2008 -> 01:37 PM) The bullpen was horrible with all the names you mentioned minus Linebrink. The White Sox still need more pitching or some of their guys to suddenly find some magic potion that will allow them to throw strikes. Simply stating that the bullpen was horrible with those guys ignores the reality of last year's bullpen. It was horrible to start the year with Sisco and Masset performing poorly while at the same time Thornton and MMac blew up or got hurt. Logan performed very well last year in his role, unless you have a problem with lefties putting up a .584 OPS against him, and if you do, then I'm sure you'll be angry with the .430 OPS that righties put up against Wasserman. Logan and Wasserman IIRC didn't even start the year in that bullpen. And the role that Linebrink is now supposed to fill didn't really have anyone in it except for the whole Prinz/Bukvich disaster once MMac got hurt. Just saying that the Sox bullpen was horrible last year ignores the fact that it did improve as the year went by, and it ignores the fact that some of the guys in it (MMac, Thornton) have performed before. You can disagree with specific issues or simply say that I'm wrong to think that last year will be the bottom for Thornton and MacDougal, but the simple fact that last year's bullpen stank proves virtually nothing about how a bullpen where 1/2 the guys weren't there to start last season will perform.

Former linemen Dana Stubblefield just went down in the Balco case, pleading guilty to perjury. Almost was considering putting this in one of the MLB threads, because it certainly plays into some other person charged with perjury in that case.

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 18, 2008 -> 01:15 PM) That. If Colon or Contreras falter, you can always call up Danks, Broadway or Egbert. I'll disagree, and take the position that unless this team has soured on Danks for reasons they know more about than me (they're convinced he won't grow into working more innings, they're convinced something else is wrong with him, they don't like his attitude, etc.), I would rather go with Contreras, Floyd, Danks, than Contreras, Colon, Floyd to start next year.

QUOTE(joeynach @ Jan 18, 2008 -> 12:59 PM) A strong bullpen is crucial this year. We are going to need to to bail out our 3,4,5 pitchers who could all post 5+ ERA's. With a seemingly weak rotation after Buehrle and Vazquez this is huge. IF this is KW way of allowing Danks and Flloyd to develop at the big league level then he sure is weird. Anyway, not a bad signing, a bit risky, but a good bullpen is crucial. No matter what, we're starting from a good place in that we have right now one of the best closer's in baseball. That helps. Beyond that...we have what looks to be a pair of very young, potentially very effective LOOGY/ROOGY's in Loogyn and Wasserman. And we've got the veteran thrown in as Linebrink, who, even if he has a bad season, should still hopefully be decent. The wild card right now appears to be Thornton and MMac. If those 2 have decent seasons, then regardless of what happens in teh 7th spot then we have a very good bullpen. If those 2 struggle as they did in 07, then we'd have to really strike gold with Linebrink or with the 7th man for us to have a very good bullpen.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Jan 18, 2008 -> 12:45 PM) Well him, and all of the people voting for Ron Paul... Except Ron Paul himself.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Jan 18, 2008 -> 12:39 PM) Considering we know what Colon is capable of when healthy, we just might catch lightning in a bottle. As far as Danks and Floyd are concerned we just have to hope they are decent. And it's impossible that we could catch lightning in a bottle with either Floyd or Danks?

Tigers avoid Arbitration with Cabrera, sign him to a 1 year, $11.3 million deal.

QUOTE(knightni @ Jan 18, 2008 -> 12:14 PM) I doubt that they keep 7 RPs. Despite Ozzie's total lack of bullpen use in the past 3 years, there have been several times that they've employed a 7 man bullpen, and it's been especially useful with Ozzie's focus on the L/L/R/R matchup game. With Gavin Floyd, John Danks, and Jose Contreras in the rotation, there is a strong argument for keeping a 7 man bullpen, especially if you could consider one of those pitchers to be a long relief man.

One thing that hasn't been pointed out yet that I wouldn't be surprised KW has thought about...right now, if we carry a 12 man pitching staff, the obvious candidate to take that last relief spot is one Nick Masset, simply because he's out of options and I doubt Kenny would have much interest in losing him for nothing. Picking up 1 more pitcher essentially removes the last slot Masset could fill as far as I can tell. I'm sure Kenny has at least thought of that fact.

QUOTE(WHITESOXRANDY @ Jan 18, 2008 -> 10:51 AM) What would we want from the Phillies ? They have no outfield depth anymore or starting pitching depth. Minor leaguers Carlos Carrasco RHP and Jason Donald SS ? That sounds pretty good to me. You guys are missing the point of the thread. I'm asking for your hopes of what specific players the Sox could get for him should be prove healthy with good play not what it would take to get Matt Cain. The specific types of players we could get for Crede in ST if he were completely healthy? I think we might get something similar to what we got for Mack and Iguchi last year. Some A level relief pitcher with a 1/50 shot at making the big leagues. Because even if we're convinced Joe is completely healthy, he's still owed $5 million, he's still a FA at the end of the year which means he's a 1 year stop gap at best, and he's coming off a surgery where no one knows how long his back will actually hold up. As far as any other team is concerned, he might well play ST, play the first game of the year, throw his back out again, and have his career be over. We might, if we were lucky, be able to get something similar to what we did with Borchard...find a team that's about to lose a guy who's out of options and trade for that guy.

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 18, 2008 -> 09:35 AM) I think a lot of those connections have backed off a bit, and I further think that they are more interested in beating the Dems than they are trying to support a candidate like Huckabee who would get destroyed in a national election. The money guys aren't going to go to Huckabee, but if it comes down to Romney/McCain, which it may well if Romney wins Nevada and McCain winds up in a dogfight in SoCar...