NorthSideSox72

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Nov 25, 2009 -> 11:38 AM) With all of the layoffs and cutbacks, most places are very thin. It is conceivable that you could have much larger than normal holiday season temporary hiring going on. Or, they are hiring fewer of those because the anticipation is for fewer shoppers. Both will play a part.

I still cannot believe we don't have a do-not-mail list like the do-not-call list. We could save consumers all sorts of time and annoyance, save millions of trees, and help marketing firms save a ton of money, and reduce the size and cost of a government agency (USPS) if we had a centralized opt in/out system for junk mail. Really is a win-win all around. Amazing this doesn't exist yet.

Interesting that two people think he WILL make it. Other OF's like Dale Murphy and Andre Dawson were more dominant in their times, and they keep not getting in.

QUOTE (Cknolls @ Nov 25, 2009 -> 10:11 AM) People could be reprioritizing their debts. Using cash flow to pay credit cards and monthly bills and not their mortgages. So, are you saying that they use the cash flow to pay down debts and bills, and then spend more on those cards because the balances are down? Thus, the retail sales impact?

QUOTE (qwerty @ Nov 25, 2009 -> 07:10 AM) The only way omogrosso sees any time in the majors is if the sox have to do their yearly call ups due to the desperation of no one on the big league roster being able to record outs. He would likely come up, get smoked, and never be seen or heard from again. If i went back through the years at all the candidates (relievers from the minors) that people have thrown out there... and i mean they truly believed they could make any sort of impact for the major league roster...well it would be amusing to say the least. Age is such a key factor, even for relievers, that i cannot believe so many think so little of it. Sure there are aberrations, but that is why they aberrations and nothing more. I cannot stress strong enough how much age matters in the grand scheme of things. Generally if you do not make the majors by a certain age/time frame that the organization has in mind, they move on and you are thrown onto the back burner. There is always new up and coming talent, so the room for error is rather small. Just one set back may be your last. I understand the farm has been depleted in recent years past, and that is why i feel some ''prospects'' here are giving unwarranted hype, but give me a break. If i knew absolutely nothing about the chicago white sox, and i stumbled upon soxtalk, i would think the major league roster was composed solely of minor league players. Age is key, but I don't agree it is AS key as some make it. I have always been in the school of thought that some organizations are focused on age to a point where they are significantly shrinking the pool of possible talent for themselves. And that makes no sense to me. If two players put up similar numbers in AA and AAA, for example, with similar physical and mental skill sets, but one is 22 in AAA while the other is 24, I don't think that should matter. What is more important is the reason WHY they are those ages. If one player was drafted two years after the other, and they spent the same time in the minors, then the difference between them is almost zero in my eyes (the exception to this being that one would have more "young" years in the majors than the other). Or, if one player is blocked by a superstar above them, that may be an indicator that they could be very effective, even if a couple years older than ideal. And then, yes, as you said, there are the late bloomer aberrations occasionally. I just think the focus on age is a bit overdone, more often than not, for no reason that has real consequence.

I've played a digeridoo (sp?) on a couple occasions.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Nov 25, 2009 -> 10:01 AM) See, this is also an issue. Recycling doesn't necessarily mean good. There ARE things that actually use more energy to recycle than to create new...blindly recycling because the name "recycle" is synonymous with good isn't the answer to our pollution woes. I get that it prevents the creation of more wasteful raw material, but it's still not the way go to. How about we stop using plastic when possible and move back to glass? We won't do that, because it makes things too expensive...but it's the REAL answer...where as recycling plastic is NOT the answer...as it creates more pollution than to just create more plastic. Instead of recycling this garbage, we need to stop making it and abusing it. I prefer my milk and soda in glass anyway...and I'd be willing to move back to the deposit format to get off of wasteful plastic. Water bottle people are some of the most wasteful polluters on the planet. At least they're healthy, though. They get to live longer breathing bad air...oh, wait...no they don't, since the bad air is killing them...so the benefits of drinking the water instead of the sugared sodas are negated anyway. These are all good points. Recycling, in general, is good, but there are definitely exceptions. Glass is cheaper and easier to recycle than plastic, and metals being recycled is good because you also cut down the need for more mining. but plastic is, itself, a major issue, for multiple reasons (more costly and polluting to recycle, it also uses petroleum in some form or another, etc.).

QUOTE (lostfan @ Nov 25, 2009 -> 09:45 AM) We aren't doing enough IMO. For example, I wish it was easier for me to recycle. There's no reason for me to not be recycling but if I wanted to (and I do, as I'm typing this I'm going to go look) I have to go find a way to do it. It should be as easy as putting my trash out. Your town doesn't do recycling bins of some kind? My ward in Chicago just recently got away from the failed Blue Bag program, and went to seperate bins.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Nov 24, 2009 -> 10:02 PM) OK so I watched America before Columbus tonight and had this thought. The Euro's came over and brought all kinds of diseases that Indians had never seen before and 60-90% of them died after that. So how come it didn't work the the other way? After thousands of years of isolation, why weren't there any nasty things that were here that the Europeans had never been exposed to? Also, as a final irony, the Plague (once Europe's scourge) still exists and still kills people in the US, almost always in one specific area - the complex of Indian Reservations in the Four Corners region. And, the only known hemorragic fever naturally resident in North America also calls that region home - Hanta Virus.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Nov 24, 2009 -> 10:02 PM) OK so I watched America before Columbus tonight and had this thought. The Euro's came over and brought all kinds of diseases that Indians had never seen before and 60-90% of them died after that. So how come it didn't work the the other way? After thousands of years of isolation, why weren't there any nasty things that were here that the Europeans had never been exposed to? The full answer is complex, but the short answer is that Europeans had a society that had been slowly co-mingling with various previously seperated groups over a long period of time. The AmerInd groups all came from one or a few small populations to begin with, and spread from there. The former will give you more variety of diseases, but also better immune systems. The latter makes you strong against a certain few conditions, but less prepared for anything else. Wow, that American Indian Studies minor came in handy for once.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Nov 25, 2009 -> 09:01 AM) What? If we get to unemployment claims to a number, we have "job growth"? This is a bump for temporary holiday work. No, its seasonally adjusted, so its not a holiday bump. And actually, you need two numbers to figure out job growth - there is no magic number of UE claims, IMO, that signals growth, because it is not about growth anyway. Growth is jobs added, which is a different number. 400k new claims might be reported and we lose jobs, 500k reported and we are gaining them. The are related but not perfectly correlated.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Nov 25, 2009 -> 08:29 AM) I think in some cases I'd agree, but when it comes to Global Warming (or Climate Change as it's now known), there is a lot of hysteria/hype backing this, and we all know what happens when hysteria meets hype and people begin to worry. They start spending other peoples money like it's water, because we all know that if there is a problem, throwing money at it fixes everything, even before we fully understand what's going on. Both sides have a case in this debate, but neither side is 100% correct, so instead of either side calling the other stupid and ignorant, we need to have serious scientific study continue, ignoring the political motivation/hype and figure out some REAL steps we can take. Now, I don't feel anyone would be against anemic steps to curb this and I think everyone here has already begun to scale back waste where we can...HOWEVER, and this is the rub for me, almost none of the steps being offered are anemic in any way, they're all way over the top expensive, not only to implement, but to sustain and to actually use. That's not really true. First off, the behavioral steps being encouraged about energy use, are small but could have a nice positive effect. Second, a major push to renewable energy is certainly expensive in the short run, but much, much cheaper for us in the long run, when you look at the complete picture.

QUOTE (Kalapse @ Nov 25, 2009 -> 12:05 AM) 29 multiple winners, your non-hall of famers: Dale Murphy, Roger Maris, Juan Gonzalez (how many people would have guessed that?), Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds. Pujols and Thomas are the other 2 but they'll be getting in as of now but these things are known to change. So among players that have actually come up for vote, its just Murphy and Maris, right? And I personally think both those two SHOULD be in, though for different reasons.

QUOTE (Heads22 @ Nov 24, 2009 -> 07:28 PM) Each year that they've been on the 40 and not made the 25, it's used up an option. Thanks for that info, makes sense with what Kalapse said.

I split off this bullpen discussion to its own thread. Let's have some perspective here on the Sox bullpen in 2009. First, here are the team's ranks among the 14 AL teams in various measures: ERA: 8th SAVE %: 6th BB/9: 2nd lowest K/9: 5th HR allowed: 3rd lowest WHIP: 10th Basically, all in all, the Sox had an OK bullpen last year, statistically. As for 2010, Dotel is gone (we are assuming). Unless a trade occurs, we still have these core guys: Jenks (had a down year) Thornton (had a career year) Linebrink (had his worst year) Carrasco (had basically the same year as 2008) Pena (had an OK year) Remember too, Pena's OK-ness replaced some extremely weak links, so this year, you get a full year of him, so right there is likely to be an improvement over that slot last year in total. Jenks and Linebrink both had bad years, its unlikely they'd both be bad again (but possible). Carrasco seems to be pretty much clockwork. That leaves two slots open from Williams/Nunez/Hudson/someone new. And those two slots would be replacing Dotel, and the revolving door spot. Williams was effective in his time there, Hudson probably would be pertty good, and Nunez has some nice potential. The Sox had an average pen last year, and all indications are that there's a good chance it improves in 2010, without doing ANYTHING. So, while I am all for looking for improvement, I wouldn't make it a priority, or spend a bunch of money on it.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Nov 24, 2009 -> 07:22 PM) Dotel is gone and the bullpen was horrible last year. If the Sox picked up Pujols to DH and Holliday to play RF, if the bullpen performs like it did in 2009, they wouldn't win. Did you actually read the stats I provided? Or look up your own? Because if you did, you'd see that, no, the bullpen wasn't horrible, it wasn't even bad. It was meh, or mediocre, or OK, or whatever middle-of-the-road adjective you choose. And as I also showed, the majority of the pen had numbers well worse than what was typical for them. So do you have any evidence or numbers to indicate that the pen was supposedly so horrible? And that somehow the performance of those pitchers is highly likely to repeat itself?

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Nov 24, 2009 -> 08:02 PM) By the way, I've not once said that I'm for the filibuster rules as they are. I'm just saying that everyone wants to play like their side is better, and they're not. Stop with the "everyone". Hasn't been true yet, doesn't get more true even if you keep saying it.

How is it that Lucas Harrell and Cole Armstrong have only one option left each, even though neither has ever seen the majors?

QUOTE (bmags @ Nov 24, 2009 -> 05:59 PM) Not really. I guess hateful rhetoric only matters when it's aimed at muslims. Trying to excuse something wrong by saying someone else does something else wrong? That's the best you can do?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Nov 24, 2009 -> 03:32 PM) The fact that tax cuts were stimulative doesn't mean that they were the most effective variety of stimulus. No one said you would get a zero multiplier from tax cuts (although corporate tax cuts are disturbingly close). Just that we might be closer to out of this if we'd focused the money on job creation. Via the WSJ: If you do the math, over 52 weeks, that's the equivalent of a $1352 check for a full family over a 1 year period. That was one of the larger parts of the stimulus bill. Hmmmm. Well that could certainly be playing a factor in this. I guess I hadn't noticed any change in my tax deductions on my paychecks, but now I'll go home and look.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Nov 24, 2009 -> 02:05 PM) No. The stimulus package included a huge tax cut over 2 years for every taxpayer. It was larger than the stimulus checks sent out last year, just more spread out over the course of the next 2 years, rather than a lump sum payment. If it lasted 10 years, it would have been the largest tax cut in history. Weird, I noticed no tax cut, but I do vaguely recall some talk about it. I'll have to go back and look - when did it happen? Of course, if that were true, that would sort of go against your stances on tax cuts, wouldn't it?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Nov 24, 2009 -> 02:04 PM) If you drop 10% and recover 2%, that can show that things are recovering, but it still doesn't mean things are better. That can be a simple function of people finally having to spend, as was demonstrated by the statistics that came out after cash for clunkers was done, that showed high amounts of backlogged buying had taken place. It becomes a statistical anomaly at some point. I don't believe "surprising growth" in retail sales means anything more than it does anywhere else, especially since lots of those numbers can be interrelated. When you buy a new house, lots of people buy new furnature, new TVs, new stereos etc. That is more or less what I was getting at - there is just a difference between you and I on sustainability. I don't see it as a single wave, but, I could be wrong.

Crisp is an OK solution, for cheap, and likely to spring back. However, I'd feel a lot better about it if we end up acquiring a big bat for DH/1B., or maybe two if we trade Konerko. If we don't, I'm not so sure.

QUOTE (scenario @ Nov 24, 2009 -> 02:30 PM) Anybody who throws can throw high 90's has a shot to make an MLB squad if they can get the ball over the plate with some consistency. Omogrosso has had some control issues (and a few health issues) that make his minor league numbers look mediocre... but he's got a major league arm. Not sure whether he can stick with the big club yet, but I'm glad to hear he's on the road to good health and going to get a shot in spring training. Well, the walk numbers wouldn't concern me as much if he was also striking guys out a lot. A guy who hits 97 but doesn't K anywhere near a guy an inning, needs some work.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Nov 24, 2009 -> 01:45 PM) No, I am not. Improving still doesn't mean good, or even respectful. It just means they have come off of how far they have fallen. It still doesn't make them good. Who said it was good? Nevermind.