Balta1701

QUOTE (raBBit @ Jun 4, 2016 -> 06:15 PM) I don't even need your name in front of your posts to know their yours. Everyone's doomed. Everyone sucks. The Sox are the worst. Rebuild. Fail. Rinse. Repeat. Save us the scrolling, please. WTF? This makes sense for the Padres. There was no commentary whatsoever about the White Sox and whether or not this was a good deal for them in that post. I come back for one trade and that's the response I get? Please tell me how the Padres are not doomed. If somehow saying the Padres should be rebuilding is a mistake, please tell me how the Padres have a hope at that division this year. I'm sorry for doubting your Padres so much.

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 4, 2016 -> 06:05 PM) Such a talent gap between Tigers lineup and the Sox right now. With Abreu a non-factor this year, it's just a punchless offense. Could you imagine this if "Signing an Upton as a free agent" wasn't the worst decision a baseball team could make (ever)?

QUOTE (StrykerSox @ Jun 4, 2016 -> 05:28 PM) I wonder what Padres fans think of this. Probably loathe it. EJ is garbage. For such a weak farm, it seems like we do a great job of scrounging up trade pieces. Montas, Semien, Thompson (the top three that we've given up, IMO), Erwin, Wendelken, Ravelo, Phegley, Johnson, Johnson and Tatis net Shields, Lawrie, Frazier and Shark. Not bad, even if Shark sucked. The Padres get a guy who has had success in the minors and clear out 1/2 of a terrible contract. This is the kind of move rebuilding teams do - take overpriced things you have, save some money on it, and get yourself some pitchers who do have talent even if they haven't had success. This is the natural result of their 2015 failure and probably speeds up their rebuilding.

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ Jun 4, 2016 -> 04:35 PM) I haven't seen shields pitch in a long time. How is his stuff these days? His fastball this year is averaging 90.2 mph. That's down from 92.5 his last year in KC and most of his career and 91.1 last year.

I don't know what to do with the phrase "Look at my African American over here" but I want to do something with it. Suggestions?

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 3, 2016 -> 11:23 AM) The prop 8 idiots in California tried a similar argument because the judge in their case was gay. Only straight white men have the power of impartiality! That argument literally for laughed out of court though, and that's part of the reason I don't think trumps judge is going to suffer any adverse consequences from being the target of trumps explicit racism. He tripled down on it on CNN this afternoon.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 3, 2016 -> 04:46 PM) The only thing that will truly help politics in Illinois is term limits. Allow no one to accumulate the power he has. For reference - this model may not apply to Illinois for various reasons, but term limits for California did the exact opposite. They removed people who were gaining experience in dealing with issues and instead put every seat up to a primary every 2 cycles, such that the Democrat and Republican conferences basically became completely homogeneous and locked in behind the extreme sides on every vote/budget. Anyone who had any experience at compromising was removed rapidly. That made the state virtually ungovernable until the Democrats pulled off a Supermajority in the state Assembly and finally could pass a budget every year without having to negotiate at all.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 2, 2016 -> 03:08 PM) No I mean what makes some specific chemical or compound go on the banned list in the first place versus being perfectly okay, not necessarily the brand or blend but the components that are okay or not. There's no hard and fast line of "this is a performance enhancing drug and this is not". Caffeine is a performance enhancing drug and this post is possible in part because of it. The actual decision is something of a hodgepodge - vitamins and caffeine are ok, speed isn't. Things that metabolize into hormones such as testosterone in the body have been well agreed to be PEDs, things that enable the body to carry more oxygen are considered PEDs, painkillers sometimes are. Basically the setup winds up being some version of "what does it do in the body" and "does the government consider it legal". This of course always leaves open the gap for someone to figure out a new supplement or chemical that leads to enhanced performance that the law and tests haven't caught up with yet. I think the modern tests are probably extremely reliable in catching recent use of just about any version of anabolic steroids, depending on what the definition of "recent" is. Figuring out what other things do is much more challenging.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 2, 2016 -> 02:24 PM) What's the criteria the MLB uses for determining whether or not a supplement is okay? The leagues have all set up agreements and testing programs with various reputable companies, such that there is a list of "approved supplements that we have tested and guaranteed" for each league. But, as you know the supplement industry is basically totally unregulated due to act of Congress so there are thousands of supplements out there that have zero reputable testing and zero guarantee that they contain what they're supposed to contain with nothing else in it. As a player in these leagues you have ~3 options. First is use supplements that are widely available only because some state-level attorney general will probably test those every now and then. Second, use only items from the approved lists from the league. Third, use items that you test yourself or that you have some reason to trust. The latter obviously still has some risk associated with it. Finally, you could throw caution to the wind and use whatever you want and maybe its clean, maybe its not.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jun 2, 2016 -> 01:58 PM) It feels like the most focal Bernie and Don supporters are new voters. Based on current votes this is untrue - exit polls show that only a small slice (25%) typically vote Republican in general elections but many of them have previously sat out the Republican Primaries. I don't have similar numbers for Sanders (wouldn't be surprised if it skewed higher based on first-time voters, but that's only a guess).

QUOTE (Hatchetman @ May 31, 2016 -> 03:10 PM) That's not exactly what we're after though. That tells us the odds given what has already happened. Melky' sac was successful. What if it wasn't? What is chance of that -- 20%? Based on his career numbers 25% and I'm thrilled that B-R now reports this.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 31, 2016 -> 12:53 AM) Clinton may be a flawed candidate in numerous ways, but not when it comes to a debate and especially not when it's against a thin-skinned man-child. She ought to absolutely own that format. It shouldn't even be fair. Especially considering that people are going to be saying how terrible she will do the entire runup.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 31, 2016 -> 01:13 PM) It is absolutely a numbers game. The attempt is to take the action that gives you the best chance of succeeding. More than just FireRobin, I am curious what the actual numbers have to say about this specific situation. OMFG some fraction of this stat exists now. For his career, Cabrera coming up with runners on 2nd and 0 outs advances the runner 59% of the time. Since he magically became a different hitter in 2012 that percentage is actually higher, he advances runners on his own 66% of the time. His career sacrifice bunt success rate is 75%. In other words, they drop the chances of him scoring someone from 2nd to 0 in exchange for a 9% increase of his odds of moving the player to 3rd. For his career, Todd Frazier scores a runner from 3rd with less than 2 outs 49% of the time. Unfortunately I cannot easily find Frazier's "score from 2nd" numbers, but he only has a .701 OPS this season with runners in scoring position. He also only GIDPs 6% of the time this year, so moving the guy to 3b did eliminate that small chance.

Our big name minor leaguers struggled a fair amount during April and May last year, which might not be all that surprising with a franchise whose motto is "aggressive promotion to challenge people". You put people at a level that challenges them and you expect them to struggle early in the year, some guys (Anderson) figured out how to succeed later in the year last year. There may be more struggles this year than last year but early season struggles make sense given organizational philosophy.

They're not this bad. They're not "the best bullpen in the big leagues by a long shot" but they're also not this bad. They will snap back to decent. Robertson had a couple unbelievable losses last year but he's still a solid closer even if he's not worth his money. Jones will have a bad stretch but he's also a strong pitcher. Putnam was waiting for a bad streak and the way baseball always works is "everyone's brain goes bad at once" so they're all having bad streaks at once. Albers might be this bad, he hasn't convinced me yet. Their middle relief and lefties are Meh. They're not a "Great bullpen" and they looked like that in April but they're also not "worst bullpen in human history" like they have been the last few days.

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ May 29, 2016 -> 05:31 PM) This x1,000,000. Glad you have risen from the grave Balta join us in this trying time. Half unbelievably busy and moving, half couldn't stand this team and just didn't want to waste my energy focusing on them. It's a holiday weekend so I'm sitting around drinking on a Sunday night so why not come by.

QUOTE (greg775 @ May 29, 2016 -> 04:19 PM) Bill O'Reilly says Clinton had a "bad week" last week in the email thing. He said if the FBI calls for indictment "it's over." Rudy Guliani says she is guilty, case closed. Intersting. I see Greg is still wasting posts in my thread.

QUOTE (Jake @ May 29, 2016 -> 05:26 PM) Baffling that you can look at this and think the manager is the problem. s***'s going bad and it is a clearly a very multi-faceted problem One thing you do ask for your manager to do is handle personalities well enough that "When they get into a funk, and everyone is screwing up and failing, it doesn't expand to the whole team or they snap out of it quickly". That's where a "good manager for the people on the team" earns his money.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ May 29, 2016 -> 05:25 PM) This team will self destruct 10 days ago. Call me a pessimist, but I've watched baseball long enough to know when a team is done. And with its current makeup, under its current management, this team is doneski. This team isn't this bad. They're playing "Braves level" right now, they're not nearly that bad. Teams are never as bad as they look when they're playing their worst. (But the converse should have been remembered in April).

QUOTE (greg775 @ May 28, 2016 -> 04:48 PM) Lotta negative headlines on Hillary and the email thing this week. Are we getting closer to people caring about the emails? No. Nothing new in there whatsoever, just another investigation that found "the state department's email protocals are weak and we classify way too much junk".

QUOTE (greg775 @ May 28, 2016 -> 04:48 PM) Lotta negative headlines on Hillary and the email thing this week. Are we getting closer to people caring about the emails? No. Nothing new in there whatsoever, just another investigation that found "the state department's email protocals are weak and we classify way too much junk".

Jesus Christ. Even I didn't think they could blow a 6 run lead that late.

QUOTE (lostfan @ May 3, 2016 -> 11:27 AM) I'm having a very very very hard time with people who quite obviously haven't cared or been paying attention showing up these past few months who think they know everything and want to lecture everyone else about how things work... since they will disappear again before 2018 like they always do I don't care how little attention people pay as long as they realize what the stakes are in 6 months. I'll listen to every lecture they want to give.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Apr 20, 2016 -> 01:23 PM) If he loses Indiana, it guarantees he can't win enough delegates for a majority without the various unbound delegates. That means a convention fight. And we know how poorly Trump handles that political ground game aspect. You're focused on 1237, but even if he reaches that, you need to consider how many of those are unbound and could switch. So far, we've already seen that any process requiring a ground game or insider game has been terrible for Trump. If he reaches enough delegates that are bound to reach 1237, then he can avoid the convention fight, but it's unlikely he pulls that off. I'm not sure what else to say about this thread but I am somewhat impressed that you kept it running all the way through April 20. This isn't laughing or taunting as much as half way to a postmortem.

Hi from like 1500 miles from normal home in hotel room. This period is ****ing unbelievable.