caulfield12

Fake news!!! http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/09/c...a-senate-238187 Politico's doing a good job with the story so far, fwiw. The full Richard Burr quote is scary, in terms of its implications for the investigation. Maybe the Handmaid's Tale isn't as far off as everyone assumed when Margaret Atwood penned it in 1986.

Anderson's in danger of going under a .500 OPS, that Buxton vs. Anderson comparison is as relevant as ever. Buxton's only at 523, and that's an improvement from where he was. Renteria managing like this is a playoff game...

Anderson's in danger of going under a .500 OPS, that Buxton vs. Anderson comparison is as relevant as ever. Buxton's only at 523, and that's an improvement from where he was.

The Census job should be a breeze. Only white, male land-owners are being counted.

Would never in a million years have thought Tim Beckham was the RIGHT Beckham in that 2008 draft to take. Just goes to show you how long high school bats take to mature. Here we are, nine years later.

Hawkins another strikeout. In Asche territory at .125. Kopech 3/0/0/1/5 so far. 2.67 ERA. Adrian Nieto sighting, just struck out swinging, hitting .195 for Pensacola.

Probably just a planned day off, with the early start after a night game....and just a "mental" game off, with him going hitless the last couple of games. I think he's sat out at least one other time in the early season, at least.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 9, 2017 -> 05:55 PM) Nyt reporting that sessions was "looking for reasons" to fire Trump starting last week. One wishes it was that easy to fire Trump! Let's hope we get another "Southern gentleman" with a syrupy Southern voice like Richard Shelby or Howell Heflin to make Saturday Night Live impressions more entertaining. They're definitely not coming from the Southern Poverty Law Center. What's that AG from Florida on the Gore/Bush election up to these days? She'd be a prime candidate. Or the current one in Florida who dismissed the investigation into Trump University after a well-time campaign contribution.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ May 9, 2017 -> 05:19 PM) I loved this tweet Employees fired by Trump: Yates, Bharara, Comey Employees investigating Trump: Yates, Bharara, Comey Bharara's character (well, loosely based on him) in Billions is finally getting an indictment against his arch-enemy at the end of Season Two, so there's that. It's actually amazing how many t.v. shows are tying into the Trump election right now. Surely, House of Cards. Scandal. The Handmaid's Tale. Homeland. Designated Survivor.

The Cubs are definitely going to have to make a big trade for pitching at some point. Not to mention Contreras has been disappointing, Heyward slumped after the hot start...and their pitching looks like what we speculated Houston would have pre-season. Eventually, Zobrist will hit a wall with his age, too.

I guess the Dems will still push for a fired and pissed off Comey to testify to no avail. Any way you look at this, it smacks of vindictiveness and only gives the Weiner/Huma Hebedin October surprise then non-surprise on page 78D more weight. In the end, it will just polarize the country even more, if that's possible. There's no middle ground anymore. Then Comey's replacement...his confirmation hearings, he's going to be peppered with Trump/Russia questions and any possible ties to his not being an objective actor in terms of steering that investigation to a quiet ending. That's impossible now.

QUOTE (ptatc @ May 9, 2017 -> 06:49 AM) Where is this mentioned? The Baseball America article I linked right above from April 14th. http://m.mlb.com/news/article/229218144/lu...beyond-results/ Merkin just wrote another...after last night.

There’s one other important way the current system saps the US economy: You can’t take employer-sponsored coverage with you permanently if you change jobs or want to start out on your own. Economists worry that “job lock’’—holding onto a job for the insurance, even if you’d be better working at something else—may depress productivity by keeping workers out of jobs they’d be more effective at. It might also explain declining rates of entrepreneurship, another worrying sign for the US economy. Portable benefits for more independent workers One obvious economic trend is the fragmentation of the labor force: fewer people working for a single employer, long-term, and more people working as independent contractors without full-time benefits. Portable benefits, available no matter what your job, would give workers more freedom to find an employment mix that optimizes the return on whatever skills they have. Some economists hoped Obamacare would serve that purpose, though it’s not clear yet whether that has happened. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trumpcare-20...-200241585.html

QUOTE (TheTruth05 @ May 9, 2017 -> 05:35 AM) This was to be expected and yet it's doom and gloom 1 month into the season,even with his velocity creeping back up. For Giolito to be doing an Eric Johnson impression was expected? I don't think anyone said that the day of the trade...nor were the words "a total work in progress" commonly bandied about.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/07/opinions/dem...pinion-zelizer/ Greg, don't waste your time with Rush, Hannity, Huckabee or Meghan McCain. Or try Tomi Lahren, since I'm sure you will be taken with her. https://www.facebook.com/therealtomilahren/ What he's trying to say is more elegantly elucidated in this article.

Realistically, the only two young players that would be added are going to be Delmonico/Hayes...unless you want to get rid of Soto/Narvaez for Kevan Smith. Saladino or Sanchez would get more playing time, depending on what they do with Moncada. Maybe Willy Garcia, he'd be the other choice, or Rymer Liriano. Then you've got Carson Fulmer, maybe Lopez when he improves his control and Burdi. Doesn't seem like we're going to see any wholesale changes.

He's not changing his mechanics or throwing motion, though. What he has been working on is more related to leg drive, downward plane, towel drills, etc.

Wait a second, isn't Steve McCatty the pitching coach for Charlotte now? In 2009, McCatty became the second pitching coach in Washington Nationals franchise history, replacing Randy St. Claire, who was fired, and McCatty was called upon to replace him after working at the Nationals' AAA affiliate. The Nationals fired McCatty and the entire coaching staff after the 2015 season.[1] McCatty is the one supervising his mechanical changes? I'm assuming they brought him in to work with Lopez/Giolito because he was already familiar with both of them from his time with the Nationals? http://www.baseballamerica.com/minors/comm...cago-white-sox/ Going back to this BA article from mid-April, it says all of the "interventions" are about fastball command/control and adding a slider...but nothing about mechanical changes. Hmmm... http://www.masnsports.com/nationals-pastim...own-tigers.html So McCatty was credited with helping Strasburg and Jordan Zimmerman, but also took a lot of the blame for the Bryce Harper/Papelbon blow-up in late 2015. One would assume he was also blamed for the way Strasburg was held out from pitching in order to prevent an injury, which later blew up in their faces. Interesting.

4 starts and 6 games total is a lot more of a look than Daniel Hudson got in the middle of a playoff race. If we want to argue "extended" is 4 weeks or 6 weeks or 8 weeks rather than 3-4, okay. I'll obviously agree that Lopez got more of an extended stretch than Giolito, though.

QUOTE (bmags @ May 8, 2017 -> 07:33 PM) Fans of a team that has just seen Matt Davidson return from 2 borderline DFA seasons to playable in MLB and are watching Yolmer Sanchez and Leury Garcia hitting in our top 5 for OPS, and to top it off have our top reliever as 27 year old TommyKahnle who for years had been unable to harness his control are about to write off a 23 year old former top prospect after a bad month. If you are currently bad you will be bad forever, good, good forever. When's the last time the top right-handed pitching prospect in all of baseball got lit up in the major leagues for an extended stretch...then followed it up with a month of throwing up a 7+ ERA at the minor league level for over a month the following season? Just curious if anyone can think of any relevant examples...especially someone Giolito's size and having already gone through one TJ surgery previously. Luke Hochevar comes to mind, but he never made it as a starter. He did end up having a successful MLB career as a 7th inning set-up specialist.

They probably think Delmonico needs another month or two of seasoning at AAA, after he struggled there at the end of last season. That said, if Asche continues to hit .100ish, they might have no choice.

That's why Ted Cruz will never be the GOP nominee. That Harvard debate "gotcha" side of him, he's just not likeable...and he's a very smart guy, but he wants to let EVERYONE around him know that fact, which basically means he has zero friends. There's just no way Yates was going to come in there under-prepared after her reputation was dragged through the mud by the right-wing media after Trump replaced her.

The White Sox for most of the last decade would have been fairly happy to have an OPS of 700 at the leadoff spot. For the Cubs, compared to what Fowler did for most of last season, it's unacceptable. Granted, a month ago Kris Bryant was one of the worst hitters in baseball, it doesn't take long to reverse those numbers in the first half of the season.

I was going to guess Jared Mitchell. He was probably 3rd or 4th. But too recent.

Well, that's all we can do here for now. But yeah, if you throw 93-95 and don't know where it's going and have to throw it when behind in the count, you're going to get killed. You're probably still going to get killed at 96-98 MPH. He absolutely has to get his offspeed stuff over the plate to keep them off the fastball and vary his pitch selection tendencies. I remember when Felipe Paulino was up with the Sox after all those injuries, he was throwing about as hard or harder than Giolito but he absolutely got killed. It's about a lot more than velocity, as you mentioned. There's location, and especially movement. Some prefer to go with spin rate. I'm not sure what's going on between the two and four seam fastball, if he's having trouble with both or one pitch specifically or what the heck's going on with him. Maybe his two-seamer's not getting that good sinking action and he's leaving it out over the plate and hitters are feasting on it? Obviously the four-seamer is the one that should be the highest velocity, but he's off by 2-4 MPH with that pitch compared to a year or so ago.