Balta1701

QUOTE(SSH2005 @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 02:44 PM) Nah, just comparing salaries. Clayton is an old fart now. I do think that Neifi is a comparable defender to Wilson at SS (Wilson is still a bit better) but he is getting paid $5 million over the next 2 seasons. $20 million over 3 seasons for Wilson is just flat-out ludicrous. Especially since in 2005, the Pirates total payroll was $38 million. Depending on how much else they've increased salary this offseason with Marte, Kearns, etc., that puts him at making roughly 15-16% of the Pirates total salary in 2006. That's a higher percentage than ARod on the Yankees, Manny Ramirez on the BoSox, Konerko or Thome on the White Sox, etc. I think Chavez on the A's gets into that territory, but there aren't that many more like that.

QUOTE(KipWellsFan @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 02:16 PM) Around 300 people died last week? Seems almost impossible. There's already been something like 55+ people killed today. I think that if the WaPo got a number over 1000 from the Baghdad morgue, and saw the mess of bodies with its own eyes, then it's pretty darn difficult to dispute that number no matter what the government says.

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 01:44 PM) Let me give you an example of something. Last March, I made some decisions and did some things at my current place of employment. All of a sudden, I get subpeoned and I have to remember the DETAILS and I mean EXTREME DETAILS of EXACTLY what I did last year at this time. Do you think I will remember that? Probably not. Or for you college kids - you aced an exam in a mid-level college course last year on March 1, 2005. If I handed you the same exact exam, without cracking a book or notes or lectures or anything to refresh your memory, would you still ace it? Probably not. That's the sort of thing that's going on here. I'm not saying that Scooter is an angel. But at the same time, I'd forget some details of what the hell I was doing in a day to day basis. Edit: DAMN! You keep putting this s*** in this thread to keep 'the other people' from commenting. How cute. See? I already forgot where in the hell I was posting at. Good thing I'm not Scooter. I'll move it all later into it's own thread. I really don't mean to do this. So, let me get this straight...you proved that it's possible to forget things to yourself without the use of a memory expert. Anywho...if Libby actually is going to use the defense "I forgot" to explain how he gave false statements not about 1 act, but about specific acts over the course of at least a month, acts which he was asked about at the time during press appearances and later by the grand jury, he's in real, real trouble. Yes, it's possible to forget an exam. But if you learned something at one point, read and discuss that same topic with your superiors several times within the next few weeks, and a month later are giving that same information to 3 different reporters, "I forgot" isn't going to stand up.

QUOTE(kyyle23 @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 01:40 PM) If i had to choose between these bozos, it would be Brooks just because you know he can stay reasonably healthy, but I would rather not make that choice. Well, think about this, last year the Bears decided they didn't want to spend the money on someone like Warner, and wound up with Orton starting most of their games. So if that's what they're thinking about, then signing one of those guys as a backup does make sense. Especially given that there seems to be a good shot at a lot of availble QB's this year: 3 top 10 draft picks, Brees, Kitna, Brooks, Pennington all are floating around. There's maybe a little glut to the market which could push the price down. That said...if I'm the Bears, I make the gamble on Grossman again and spend my money elsewhere, just because of how the team performed last year without Grossman. You fill in the gaps from last year (Tight End, WR, Secondary) with the couple million you have in cap room and a draft pick or two, and if Grossman stays healthy, maybe you can pull off a 14-15 win season if that defense plays like it did for the first 2/3 of last season, and if he can't stay healthy, then maybe Benson and Orton improve a bit and allow you to win 12, make the playoffs again, and then not put Tillman on Steve Smith.

QUOTE(q\/\/3r+y @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 01:44 PM) He is excellent defensively and at a primary position you look for it. The best thing they ever did and will ever do is lock up bay though. Wouldn't be surprised to see them do the same with duke in a couple years. Still, for the Pirates, that's an awful lot of money when they don't have much to move around. $7 million a year for a defensive guy, when their team was 3rd from the bottom in runs scored last year in the NL, ahead of only San Fran (no Barry) and Washington? The Padres had a better offense than them. Think about this...they're paying him a fair chunk more than we're paying Jermaine Dye to hit 30 home runs for us. Is there any chance that they're back-loading this deal with the expectation that they'll pay like $5 million a year for the first 2 years and then trade him before he becomes a FA? That's the only way this even comes close to making sense to me. He'd have gotten quite a bit less in arbitration had it come to that, and they still would have been able to trade him before he hit the FA market to some team in need of defensive help.

QUOTE(sayitaintso @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 01:55 PM) i wouldn't doubt it. He's not terrible, he's just insane. And he's at least a decent friend of Ozzie's.

QUOTE(kyyle23 @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 01:28 PM) I am still wondering why people believe the source from realGM who says he has media credentials and is at the combine. How often do people like that show up on this site and get shooed away? We all know Steff has some inside knowledge, but she doesnt blurt it out on this messageboard unless she is correcting someone who is spreading false info about a particular player or game. I hate to say it, but it's probably because there's at least a logical reason to be very concernend about Grossman's ability to stay healthy. He's shown no ability to do so thus far in his career. I believe each of the last 2 years, the Bears have gambled on Grossman staying healthy without a solid, proven backup, and each year, they have lost that bet. Orton is at least serviceable in that he didn't immediately lose every game he played, but at least at this point in his career, he can't be counted on to win games. If the Bears have any doubts at all about whether or not Grossman can stay healthy, they have reason to consider other options. Which means, when people start saying those things, they're believed.

The Royals don't expect Greinke to be with them to start the season.

The Nats signed Pedro Astacio to a 1 year deal, contingent on Astacio passing an MRI exam, which they're now supposedly going to start doing now that they feel like they got screwed in acquiring Lawrence. This should, if it goes through, remove the immediate need to trade for Arroyo, IMO.

According to This SI piece the Bears are likely to have less than $10 million in cap room available this year, depending on if anyone gets cut or not. Given their needs at other positions and how close they wound up last year, this just doesn't seem like the time to waste cap room on a QB. You're just not going to find one who's going to be worth not filling gaps at other positions (Or did you enjoy Tillman on Steve Smith?).

Please, let us just make an intelligent choice if options like that are available.

Unless those couple of people were named Ozzie Guillen, I don't buy it at all. If he gets out of jail with a not guilty verdict and doesn't get picked up by someone else, he'll be in our camp the next spring.

Yet another way for Borchard to get $100 off of A.J....

"Nowhere man".

Well, this poll appears to have been conducted using a different method: face to face sampling in Iraq. They certainly appear to have had no connection to being found over a computer. Which is probably why "Le Moyne college" was involved. Probably gave him manpower and access to the bases that he might not have had if it were just 1 person doing the sampling.

From the Truth is stranger than fiction file: Scooter Libby's defense? I forgot. And here's the guys who prove it's possible to forget. Yowza.

QUOTE(samclemens @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 11:13 AM) i believe that zogby polls were discounted on this site for having "suspect methods" by posters on both sides of the eisle here at soxtalk. i dont remember what thread it was, but i think i remember bigsqwert going into a bit more detail about zogby. (correct me if i'm wrong, i dont have the time or effort to go back through old posts and find it) Zogby and Gallup are 2 opposite ends of a spectrum in the general elections. In the General, Zogby assumes that the party registration of whatever sample he gets may be biased, and he takes the step of normalizing his results by the party affiliation of the previous election. In other words, if his sample records 33% Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, but the last election was 40-30-30, he'll assume he missed some Republicans and recalculate. Gallup doesn't do that...Gallup assumes that Party ID is a variable...that people can leave and enter parties depending on how they feel at the time. While this is true, it leaves the possibility that Gallup's sample may be biased by something like having a larger portion of Democratic voters either at work when Gallup calls or using only cell phones, which cannot be polled. Which method works? Well, in the last election, Gallup was closer to correct; there was a shift towards the Republicans due to additional votes for Bush among the elderly and among those who are in the top 10% of wage earners. Zogby missed this, because he assumed that party affiliation was holding constant. However, it's also possible that next election, Gallup could easily be the one who is off, because they could miss some bias in their sample due to things like people not being home or choosing to not respond when called (If more Republicans choose not to answer the poll than Democrats, suddenly they have a biased sample.) In this poll, it looks like none of that is any concern at all. This Zogby poll appears to have taken several steps to appear random, they have demographic information which can be cross-checked and compared to army statistics (which I don't have but i'm betting others do), and there's no adjustment based on any standard as far as I can tell. So in this case, the only reason to disbelieve Zogby's method is if he didn't get a representative sample...which as I said above, could be checked by comparing his demographic information to the makeup of the army as a whole.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 11:33 AM) And that really bears out when you read the section about what the percentages were by branch. The everyday people had much hirer levels than did the weekend warriors. Keep in mind that since you're talking about select branches...you're talking about a subset of the poll, and therefore, you're talking about groups with much higher margins of error. Probably on the order of plus or minus ten to fifteen percent over each group.

QUOTE(juddling @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 11:03 AM) Sample size: 944 Troop level: 140,000 (about that) percentage of soilders asked : .006 i guess that 680 soliders in the sample size speaks for the rest. Yet another worthless poll. Yes, it actually does give you valuable information about the opinions/attitudes over there. Because once you get to a certain sample size, if you've truly done random sampling, then it's almost impossible for the overall survey results to be off by a significant percentage. In this case, how you should read this poll is thus: "If I were to take all 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, break them into groups of 944 at random, and ask each of these groups the same question, 95% of those groups would have responses within plus or minus 3.3% of the overall result of this poll." That does, however, assume that you have gotten a truly random sample. That's sometimes the one problem. For example, the CBS poll we saw last night has a major problem in that they don't have enough Republicans being sampled for whatever reason, so they're normalizing their poll results by assuming that a higher portion of the population are Republicans than they're actually seeing. Interestingly, unlike the CBS poll, this poll actually has data which can be used to check whether or not their sample is truly random. From the poll: Because this poll took demographic information, it actually has something you can compare it to. If those numbers are plus or minus about 3% away from the actual numbers that the DOD has in Iraq, then it strongly suggests that they did manage to get a random sample. If, on the other hand, like 60% of the soldiers in Iraq were actually over 30, or 50% were female or something like that, and the sample set was made up as described, then the sample would almost certainly not be random. Unless those numbers are inaccurate, there's no reason to believe that this poll is not representative of the entire army in Iraq within a couple of percentage points.

QUOTE(mr_genius @ Feb 27, 2006 -> 10:33 PM) i must be reading that wrong. it looks like you're saying CBS is skewing polls to favor a Republican president. That wasn't my intention. I'm saying that CBS is somehow polling a sample that contains more Democrats than it should if it was a totally random sample (their raw numbers seemed to confirm this to my eyes). This just means that for whatever reason, they're calling more Democrats than Republicans. Maybe it's a state thing, maybe it's a race thing, who knows, but for some reason the're calling more Democrats than they should. So what they wind up having to do is come up with a rational estimate of how biased their sample is, and then normalize those responses to that estimate. This is a trick that is used in a lot of polls...you try to come up with an estimate of how wrong you are in order to correct in a rational way. But the other feature is that in any statistical operation, there is going to be random variation. That's why polls are usually given as plus or minus 3 percent...if you did the poll 100 times with a truly random sample, and the true approval rating was 40%, 95 times it would come up as somewhere between 37-43 just entirely based on random variation. The other 5 would be even farhter away. Now, the other thing to note is that as your sample size gets smaller, the chance for errors increases. So, if we suddenly start talking about "all republicans" instead of all respondents, we have a much smaller group with a much higher margin of error. Say 10%. So if Bush's approval among Republicans was 70%, then 95 times out of 100 in a truly random sample of Republicans, it would come out between 60% and 80% entirely by random chance. Now, the last thing is the bias adjustment. So we have a sample which is already varying on a much larger range than the overall sample...now we're multiplying that by some factor in order to make up for the projected defiency in Republicans in our total sample. So what that winds up doing is causing much more variation in the poll than their should be...we've taken a random variation across 20% and multiplied it by something like 1.5, so suddenly we've got a range of 30% in what number the polled Republicans are giving him. So, the net result of this is that the poll swings quite wildly based on the fact that the sample of Republicans is too small, and small variations in either the sample set of Republicans polled or in Bush's approval among Republicans are magnified in the final poll, causing the poll to skew much more wildly than it should. Bottom line, I think that the poll in January showing a 42% approval from this same group was probably a little too high, and this one is probably a little bit too low. Their sample sizes back that conclusion up, and a consequence of it is Bush's numbers swinging by 8% in a month. He's probably dropped a little bit this month, but until I see 3-4 different polls all saying he dropped by 8%, this one should be treated as an outlier.

Did Frank actually have a second surgery on his foot? I was under the impression they didn't operate the 2nd time (mainly because they couldn't.)

QUOTE(Jordan4life_2006 @ Feb 27, 2006 -> 09:51 PM) Knicks lose by 30 tonight. Make that 15-41? With the Raptors and Hawks playing a little better of late, it seems only the Bobcats could possibly have a worse record. Even if they do wind up with a worse record...I think it's ok if their draft ball comes up ahead of ours. Just looking at their lineup, I'm not sure they have a place for Aldridge. They would be much better fit with that guy from Uconn. And then of course, there's the fact that it's actually fairly rare that the worst team comes up at the top. Hopefully one of ours will wind up top 2.

QUOTE(KipWellsFan @ Feb 27, 2006 -> 09:17 PM) Isn't the deficit supposed to shrink? They've actually found a statistical trick to make that happen (Hi Addisonst!). Instead of using any actual deficit that they ran, they've lately been talking in terms of the predicted deficit as a percentage of GDP in 2004 (the election year). Bush said that he would cut the deficit in half by 09. Their plan to do that is to use that number, which is higher than any other deficit we ran, and because of the fact that the total deficit could remain constant at the same time as the percentage deficit decreases if the economy grows.

Already threw this one into the Dems only thread. It's a CBS news poll. Here's the link to someone other than Drudge. Here are my comments:

Well this should be a fun night, I'm about to bike out in this: