southsider2k5

People not adequately praising it.

The message is they will do whatever it takes to attract business. Illinois is losing that battle right now.

NO way. Indiana absolutely intended to get the Bears if the Bears were willing to go, at a price better than Illinois was willing to pay. Illinois was the one only willing to spend a certain amount to get the Bears to stay.

Oh they did. Even sticking Illinois with a bigger bill is a win to them. Plus they get all of the free publicity.

Yep, the Bears got what they wanted from Indiana.

Honestly it was a great park, all except for the office building in LF blocked the airflow of moving air into the stadium. Having sat in the first two Arlington Stadiums for games, the first was was 70's generic, but at least when it was 105, the air moved. That didn't happen in Part 2. If the back of the stadium had been open to moving air, it probably drops the temp on the field 10 to 15 degrees.

That back injury scares me more than anything else. Not really understanding what happened to him last year I HOPE it was injury related, but it was never really explained, so I have no idea if it was more than that or not.

The Sox are absolutely monitoring everything and applying loyal tests to them.

I only wish they had done this previously when they could have gotten some return for their players instead of expiring contracts and 2nd round picks.

Occasionally the non-camp invitees are plugged into games late, but for the most part the non-camp guys are working on teh backfields.

Except that park was literally falling apart. It was unique and fun, but it probably would have taken more to restore it than to build new.

It's a netflix 4 part series, so I am going to put it with TV for now, but Death By Lighting is a great series, focusing on the pretty much forgotten assassination of James Garfield. For those who love obscure history, it was a very good watch.

I think the idea is completely backwards. It's the people who haven't been to a lot of parks who don't get what holds Sox Park back. Those who have been around MLB have seen it for themselves. Much easier to convince the ignorant.

The viaduct IS crumbling, but is NOT the stadium. I can't even figure out what the second thing is, but it appears to be talking about the original stadium. Are you referencing just a reddit commentor?

Where?

Crumbling?

DRINK! Oh wait this wasn't a report. Dang.

I have been to about 20 different MLB ballparks over the years. I think this typical praise of "it's not that bad" is remarkably accurate for it. It's not terrible, but it is absolutely nothing special. If you think of all of the typical things that make stadiums stand out, it has none of them. There is no special attraction, there is no skyline views, there is no activity around the ballpark besides the game (unless you want to drink at your parking place) and definitely none after the game, you enter at the very bottom of the stadium, giving an experience of everything being very high, even if it isn't that much different from low seat to high seat. The stadiums layering has no overlapping, which also makes the upper levels feel even more detached from playetc. It's a lazy attempt to disqualify those things as "listicles" instead of realizing that they are just easy ways to tell ballparks apart. The new park was a vast improvement over the 70's generic ballpark experience, but when the "new" park building phase really took hold, Sox Park got left behind. It just happened that the Sox went first in building their new park, and didn't have the 20/20 vision of seeing what others had done, that even 5 to 10 years of extra time would have given us.

This right here. Unless there is a huge outplay in ST, Baldwin should be on the opening day roster, clearly.

The "depth" has bigger names than in the past, but I am not sure it is any better. It's a lot of guys who have experienced major league failure, and we are apparently hoping that our dev team is better than places like NYM, Tampa, NYY, ATL, etc and can somehow save these guys from their current history. I want to see it actually happen before I start penciling in these guys. Competing with the Twins to not finish last feels about right so far.

Pretty sure after they took him to arb over 50k, that bridge is burnt.

What happened to that rant about none of us working in the front office to know what the team is thinking?

I guess I could go with bad.

Most likely spring training sorts this stuff out, but if all things are equal, it tells us what the Sox think of Baldwin, that they are still looking to replace him with marginal players already. It also tells us about them looking for a couple of more short term wins vs development time for Baldwin.