caulfield12

.746 for his minor league career...

Sonny Gray for just Tim Anderson....don't think so. Now since we're on the subject of the A's, Josh Reddick is a much more realistic and relevant name to our discussion. Presumably, Dan Jennings would be the one to go in possible Danks demotion to pen/long man/second lefty. And, with the way Duke has been pretty shaky against LHB, there's zero chance they just cut him.

Should also be praised for developing Marcus Semien. The quietest four homers from any hitter in baseball. If we could get that type of pop with just league average defense at SS, this team would really be dangerous.

I think "we're all in" is closing in on needing Carlos Rodon or Robertson to replace Cespedes/Gordon.

The only thing better would be if the Royals and Tigers were both struggling out of the gate...but we'll take what we can get. Now we just need to figure out a replacement for Garcia, and June would be better than July/August. We missed our big chance to get CarGo in the first half of last year and now he's back to being close to untouchable. Jay Bruce is still out there, though...theoretically. Finally, must be pretty miserable to be a Twins' fan. Last year they were 1-5 and came out of it to go on a 20-7 stretch at one point and briefly even take first place for a spell. Sano and Buxton are definitely going through growing pains. Sano's is a bit of a shock, but not really...pitchers/scouts make adjustments the second time around (see Beckham, Gordon).

That said, 6-2 is HUGE for this organization. Going back a decade, since 2007...we've never been more than 2 games over .500 at the end of April and are typically 3-5 games under. Of course, we've arguably played three of the worst (CLE will be better) teams in the AL at this point. The real test is yet to come, but Rodon pitching so well is encouraging.

We expected that Rollins, Avila, Jackson and Garcia weren't going to set the world on fire. Had no idea about Danks and Latos (well, maybe a PRETTY good idea on JD 50). The funny thing is if you could just re-start the 2014-15 offseason and purge Beckham, Duke, Bonifacio, Samardzija, LaRoche and Cabrera (basically, Robertson is the only one who has come close to earning his money, but he's tied for the highest paid closer in baseball fwiw)...you would have the White Sox in a position to be one of the best teams in baseball. As it is now, it's going to be a huge battle with KC plugging along and Detroit decidedly improved.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/adam-laroche...-151844831.html Adam LaRoche "on practical/applicable education" is quite the hot topic... Btw, this whole Bangkok trip puts the "battle of good versus evil" quotes into their rightful context of pimps/traffickers and away from an accusation against KW and the Sox.

It's left unsaid, but the writer obviously didn't push too hard about the KW angle...just some intimations. Hopefully this puts the "hard feelings" to bed for good and everyone can move on. The LaRoche camp can rest with the idea that his side has been told in more explicit detail and that should be that. Kenny Williams, be smart enough not to comment for once in order to get the last word in and leave it alone.

It's left unsaid, but the writer obviously didn't push too hard about the KW angle...just some intimations. Hopefully this puts the "hard feelings" to bed for good and everyone can move on. The LaRoche camp can rest with the idea that his side has been told in more explicit detail and that should be that. Kenny Williams, be smart enough not to comment for once in order to get the last word in and leave it alone.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/15159499...p-decision-walk

Makes the Shark deal look more like a bargain for Hahn? Wasn't he sidelined in spring training for awhile? Seemed like he couldn't get going last year with any consistency without being sidelined with injuries. At any rate, you can guarantee the only way we see him is in a blowout loss...or in atrocious weather conditions or if the starter goes out and there's a 2-3 hour rain delay.

Winning the likes of Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Colorado isn't just dominating lily white rural states. The irony here is that states like Ohio, PA, WV, Indiana, KY...that's where she clobbered Obama 8 years ago. Now she's losing almost all of them to Sanders. The only realistic way for Sanders to make this a race again would be to win NY. Otherwise, it's just white noise with all the focus on the GOP and the fascinating political machinations going on behind the scenes over there...are they pretending to support Cruz vs. Trump, only to turn to the likes of Kasich/Ryan, etc.?

I think you meant the centerpiece of the Shark deal...

Saladino can play basically everywhere on the infield. Some argue he's best at SS, some 3B...more recently, because of the presence of Sanchez/Micah Johnson in the high minors, he's probably had the least amount of time at 2B but he won't embarrass himself anywhere you put him.

I'm almost bored because the students in my Chinese school are TOO good, but they don't particularly enjoy debate/critical thinking (of course, they're miles ahead of US students on math, physics and chemistry, with students getting teased for anything below 740 on SAT Math). We have A-levels, IB, AP and International Foundation Year. Seven of our seniors got into Oxford/Cambridge, another 8 to UCLA, 5 to USC, University of Chicago, Cornell, Notre Dame, UNC, UC-Berkeley, Georgetown, UVA, etc. The students in IB and even some in A-levels look down on AP and believe it's not as academically rigorous, haha. Talk about the opposite of teaching in the inner city, where I had refugee/asylum students from 13 different countries on my girls' soccer team. I think the average SAT score for the IB program is around 2150-2175.

QUOTE (gosoxgo2005 @ Apr 10, 2016 -> 07:12 AM) If the sox are contending for a playoff spot at the end of the year, Jackson is hitting 9th The Tigers did just fine from 2011-14 not hitting him 9th. If he hasn't changed from his form of the last 1 1/2 seasons, sure, but then he's probably not an everyday player if that's the best we're going to get out of him.

Jackson has been pretty bad offensively for the better part of 1 1/2 seasons. You have to leave your best OBP guy in Eaton at 1 (where he's most comfortable, despite his base running issues) and then see how things go with Rollins/Saladino and Jackson for the first six weeks. If Jackson's showing signs of his former self, then you move him up to #2, but Jackson is also a guy who strikes out 125 or so times even at his best, so he's not ideal for the #2 spot because of the contact (or lack thereof) issue. Therein lies the conundrum. Normally you want your most professional situational hitter who makes contact and can work pitchers in that spot. The best options are Cabrera (when he's hot), Rollins and Jackson, but all three of them have flaws. Lawrie could also be in that spot as well, but has many of the same contact issues as Jackson.

QUOTE (Tex @ Apr 9, 2016 -> 08:39 AM) Finally, let's look at the scope of what we are trying to accomplish with the schools. Lately the social emotional character development of kids is being thrusted on the schools. http://www.casel.org/ We aren't really into taking anything out of the school day, but we keep adding. Does society really want me to be responsible for the emotional development of a kid I see 48 minutes a day? How am I going to have any meaningful impact on the social development of a kid who goes home to a dysfunctional family? When I was at my last school 15% of the students had a parent who had been in jail or prison, close to 50% had a family member or close friend in jail. And I am going to be judged on that child's character? I take seriously the fact that I may be the best role model that student sees each day and I do my best to help guide my students. They know when I'm talking to them like a dad and appreciate that. I would rather throw that in for free than be expected to and evaluated on how well the student's turn out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_emotional_learning http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/it...earning_why_now Therein lies part of the problem, expecting teachers to also function as social workers/counselors. I taught for four years in the Kansas City MO Public School District and we had a serious fight nearly every week. Pretty much every month, at least one student was directly affected by a murder or violent crime. One student stands out...he said his mom was always having sex with her boyfriend and there was never any food in the house, there were some nights I heard the cafeteria workers allowed him to stay in the cafeteria or not go home at night they were so concerned by his home environment. One of the ironies is that many of my students were born with crack addiction...and, of course they were over-prescribed ritalin to calm them down, turning many of them into zombies. Of course, if you allowed a student to sleep in your classroom (even if he had to work from 3 pm until 11 pm to 1 a.m. the previous night), you could be brought up for child abuse/negligence. I also had an economics class with 38 students when the district cap was supposed to be 33 in a classroom. Not ideal. A Fulbright Scholar didn't make it through the first month of teaching in our school...he was "bum rushed" because he was blocking the door to stop the students from leaving early at the end of the day and the situation became so confrontational and uncomfortable with that particular student that he ended up quitting. And let's not get started on breaking up fights with girls (we were basically told never to intervene because you could get accused of inappropriate contact) with long fingernails/hair extensions...22 1/2 hours teaching hours per week, usually the one planning period each day for my first two years was given up to substitute because the absentee/attrition rate in our district was so high (some positions went unfilled, others had teachers barely hanging on for their pensions that for instance were locked in their lab closets while the lab was set on fire, for example, I distinctly remember another teacher having his computer taken away due to an allegation of having child porn on it and him trying to hold onto the monitor idiotically, not to mention female students saying he tried to look under the table if they were wearing a skirt), and then I was coaching volleyball/basketball/soccer in addition to taking 2 1/2 hour classes for my master's degree 2-3 nights per week...and then I consistently had 2-4 different plans to do as well (for history, you have to teach American History, World History, Economics, American Government, Sociology, Psychology, World Geography). No surprise that only about 15-20% of teachers can survive that environment for more than 5 years, and that's what it felt like sometimes, a combination of survival/babysitting. One year, the seniors in our school that actually had an interest in college were averaging about 12.5-13.5 on their ACT prep test work. And that was the BEST 25% of those classes, god knows about the rest of them, and they felt so hopeless and/or unable to pay for college that many of them didn't even try despite the school paying KAPLAN a ton of money to improve their ACT scores. There was just no real world application to them, many of them already were parents at age 15-18 and the only thing they really cared about was economically providing for their families...sad situation, but reality. And then you're making about $2000 a month take home after union dues, pension payments, FICA, medicare/medicaid, etc. When we substituted, it was around $75 gross for 1 1/2 hours but only ended up around $30 after taxes, something ridiculous like that. At any rate, I always enjoy hearing the judgments and wisecracks from those who have never been inside a classroom and don't have the first idea about it...the program I was in, there was an actual medical doctor (neurosurgeon) who gave up his position to teach (our program was very similar to Teach for America) and he didn't last because his expectations were so high, the student ability level/morale/attitude so low that they simply decided to join together and accuse him of hitting or touching them in order to get him sent to "teacher jail" and he became so frustrated with the whole situation he just gave up...granted, there are certainly times when students had legit cases, but in my school, there were just as many when students knew they could screw up a teacher's career with a simple allegation backed up by just a couple of classmates. Not an easy environment, where any "tough discipline" leads to an inevitable accusation so teachers just give in and let the inmates run the asylum, so to speak.

QUOTE (Jake @ Apr 9, 2016 -> 06:43 AM) I also think, especially at his stage in his career, missing a year of play is very costly. He seemed unusually polished in some ways, but between not getting the chance to develop further and the rustiness that comes from the time away can easily make something like his high K% skyrocket. See Jared Mitchell...although with Jared, it also seemed to rob him of some confidence and was even more crippling because of his status as a speed/athleticism-tools player.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Apr 4, 2016 -> 10:22 AM) I agree with most everything you say about the teachers, but I will point out, most people who have 401K's fully contribute to those 401k's with a very small amount (potentially) being contributed by others. That said, I value teachers and education and think they should be paid fair middle class wages, however, I do not support the union and think the union causes more harm than good to our overall education system. So what is your solution for recognizing and rewarding the best teachers? Because if you're going to cut job security/tenure and ask teachers to contribute more to their retirement, you need to provide some positive incentives as well. I always hear that charter schools are the magic bullet solution, and 10-15% of them work really well...but there are quite a few that are actually worse and the majority are average or below, depending on the financial resources and motivation for starting the school (if board members/founders are doing it more for their own enrichment, it usually doesn't end up a pretty picture.) If you start paying teachers based on the students' performance on standardized tests, then you are going to force them all to teach to the test in order to keep their jobs and/or you're going to lose some of the very best teachers out there who can make significant progress with the lowest level students. Even the worst teachers can't stop especially talented and motivated students from excelling, but the oldest/tenured teachers are often the ones who get the best classes/assignments/students, which often ends up burning out the newest teachers when they have to deal with the worst conditions in terms of student behavior/discipline/attitude. At any rate, great or good teaching is very subjective and hard to quantify...especially when results aren't easily corrected for comparison's sake when looking at the respective academic level of the students when beginning a year compared to where they finish...how much progress they make, and the different degrees of difficulty for fostering progress from the worst students compared to coasting along on the coattails of the best/highest performing ones.

Well, otoh, those teachers' pensions are much cushier than SS, by far...whatever the formula is, 60% of your five highest salary years, available when your age and years of service equal 75 (which might not be a 100% benefit if you start teaching later or retire early) or you've taught for at least 30 years. At any rate, there's no doubt that all the state/public pensions are going to be coming in for haircuts at some point in the near future...how "fair" that is depends on your belief in unions and in general, protection/s for workers vs. the "greed" of higher level management.

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ Apr 7, 2016 -> 09:49 PM) Last time I had Little Caesar's I had stomach pain for a week. My friend told me I needed to build up a tolerance for it. Imo's is an affront to pizzas very existence. But their garlic cheese bread (the one with the real cheese melting on it) and cheese-toasted ravioli are pretty darned good.

QUOTE (SCCWS @ Apr 8, 2016 -> 06:53 PM) We can also say that we are 3-2. We are on pace to win 97 games and probably the division as well. Well, one thing is for sure. Anything is an improvement on the first week of 2015. But if we struggle with Cleveland and Minnesota, hard to feel encouraged or like we've truly turned a corner. Have the feeling Minnesota is going to be a desperate team by the time we face them. They could be ready for the early knockout or fight back like a cornered bear.

QUOTE (BigHurt3515 @ Apr 8, 2016 -> 04:42 PM) Maybe we can trade for Bauer? Bauer could go a lot of places, but to another ALCD opponent isn't the most likely. Besides the fact there's nobody compelling we can trade in our farm system they would actually want after Anderson and Fulmer. They don't even really need either one of those two guys. If we had a legit outfielder or 3B to deal, but they signed Uribe and will get back Brantley this month. They're not going to trade Bauer for Avi Garcia/Shuck/Sands (he played for them last year or the year prior) and a spare part like Putnam/Petricka/Jennings in the bullpen.