caulfield12

The Giants are very resilient. They'll tinker with some August small moves. Still would be shocked if they're not right there til the end. The only surprise is the reason for falling short will be pitching and not hitting. As far as Schwarber goes, that would have been an excellent question for Hostetler...he might not have pinned it down to one, but who were the top 2-3 (we know Hoffman early) that the Sox were considering if Rodon was off the board?

The Giants are very resilient. They'll tinker with some August small moves. Still would be shocked if they're not right there til the end. The only surprise is the reason for falling short will be pitching and not hitting.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fantastic_four_2015/ 9% and comparisons to Cat Woman. Is it true that it takes 70 minutes to introduce the villain? Never thought it was possible Jessica Alba would be missed or made to look good (acting wise)...

QUOTE (SoxPride18 @ Aug 7, 2015 -> 10:10 AM) What seems odd to me is that why did this take so long to get out if it happened Saturday night? One theory would be the negotiating/blackmailing conspiracy....that the woman involved didn't get a satisfactory resolution and decided to push the case forward (or her attorney, who smelled a high publicity case).

It was a little better than average. If you took Christie and Trump out, nothing really stood out... Too many candidates, not enough time for each. For example, 1992 was really compelling because you had Clinton, Perot (who was leading at one point and seemed plausible) and Bush, Sr. Another great one was Lloyd Bentsen lecturing Dan Quayle that "he was no Jack Kennedy." Obama debated too intellectually, like a law school professor he was, instead of connecting to people like Clinton could always do. If you go back and watch the JFK/Nixon debates in the 1960 election, you'll be amazed how little substance there is now in comparison. As a Democrat, having Gephardt, Gore, Dukakis, Gary Hart, Paul Simon, Biden, Jesse Jackson in 1988....that was a lot of political talent in one room.

Derek Jeter has managed it quite well...how many models/actresses has he bedded? Never one scuff on his pristine rep like Tiger or A-Rod. Perhaps the key is dating women who are independently wealthy and high profile enough that these types of situations are more unlikely to occur. The point isn't about the sex, it's how you carry yourself on and off the field, and whether you're consistent in your behaviors.

QUOTE (bmags @ Aug 7, 2015 -> 08:52 AM) You think there were better republican candidates that lost in 2008 and 2012? There's another argument as well. Not only did the long (16+ months) process make Obama a better debater and general candidate, playing out almost all of those states until the very end of primary season gave the Dems the advantage for the ground/organizing game later in the fall. Not only that, but the opportunity (additional time for finetuning) to improve their technology/social media to the point it ran circles around GOP efforts.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 7, 2015 -> 07:38 AM) The challengers always want more debates than the front runner. In 2004 John Kerry asked Bush to "debate every week". Frankly, I can't make a better argument for fewer debates than "look at how it worked for the Republican candidates the last 2 times out". The process actually worked well to eliminate Cain, Bachmann, Perry, etc. Gave Gingrich second life and spiced things up. Both McCain and Romney ran terrible general campaigns, and the combination of Palin and the economic catastrophe in Sept/Oct 2008 gift wrapped that election, although Obama was likely to win anyway without two more GOP attributed "mistakes." Hard to say that Romney didn't improve a lot as a candidate with all the extra prep, but for some reason, he ran like he was afraid of his own record and the dog on the rooftop/dancing pony/car elevator tags were never conquered...along with his 47% will never vote GOP no matter what off the cuff remarks.

Interesting no mention of Hawkins. There were hints (contact skills, specifically mentioned Anderson but not Courtney, and the whole thing about social networking which plagued Hawkins in his second season)...one gets the idea he wouldn't have been the pick if Hostetler was running things at that time.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Aug 7, 2015 -> 07:18 AM) Couldn't stomach watching the entire debate last night but watched some clips this morning and Kasich's answers on Medicaid and gay marriage show that he isn't afraid to challenge the hardcore right-wing of the party. He's far and away my first choice from either party right now, but I believe that if he gains much momentum at all, the Koch machine will take him down well before he can get near the nomination. The Koches should turn to Rubio. He has youth (contrast with Hillary is like Obama vs. McCain/Romney), more experience than Obama now...Florida is put into play, he will draw at least 50% more Hispanic votes than the last two elections. The immigration issues, and his real beliefs (Tea Party or more moderate, such as abortion rights) must be overcome. Of all the candidates, he and probably Kasich and then Bush (who's already raised $120 million) come across as the most likeable. It's a quality Hillary lacks, but her husband and Jeb's brother possess, that touch with everyday people. Rubio was relaxed and confident, that's important.

The only ones who looked presidential to me were Kasich and Rubio. Kasich hopefully doesn't end up like Huntsman...wiped out for being too reasonable/moderate and actually having command of policy issues and speaking articulately and authetically. Walker just seems to be lacking in gravitas...he was very evasive about foreign policy and the BlackLivesMatter/racial bias in policing issue. As noted, Wisconsin doesn't exactly have an economic miracle story to back him up. Austerity policies tend to have that effect. Carson was non-existent the first half, not even sure why he's running for office besides cracking one liners. Besides Kasich and Rubio, Bush is the only one with half a clue about actually governing/policy. Huckabee (religious right), Cruz (his usual spiel) and Paul did nothing to expand their constituencies, serving up a tired set of bromides but not suggesting any real solutions to actual problems everyday Americans are facing. Kasich with Rubio as VP would be a difficult ticket for the Dems to beat. Ohio would be lost, and Florida as well.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Aug 6, 2015 -> 08:31 AM) Oh yea, September call up numbers are to be taken at their face value. And Semien sure has proven that wrong this season with is 100 error pace and rapidly falling batting average, slugging percentage, and OPS SOMEONE CALL DAN JOHNSON Brilliant, Adam LaRoche has an ops not even close to Semien, but we wouldn't be better off with a 23 year old at DH making close to the league minimum. You probably thought Royce Clayton was a much better defender than Valentin because Jose had a lot more errors. Why do we have advanced metrics if it's 2015 and we're still going by error totals? I guess some on this board know more about baseball than Billy Beane.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/player/gamelog/_/id...4/marcus-semien He had an 818 ops in September. Generally 23 year olds don't excel in their first go-around in the big leagues, and he was bounced around the infield throughout his minor league career. Even if he wasn't playing 2b or 3b everyday, he has a 776 ops against lhp, so he would have been the perfect platoon candidate with LaRoche...not to mention playing half his games in one of the worst hitter's parks in baseball.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015...ou-in-debt.html Bai writes a column questioning the "experience/i'm fighting for you" strategy that authentic candidates like Sanders and Biden will force a Clinton campaign rethink on sooner or later... Clinton’s pitch is pretty much the polar opposite. If there was any doubt about that, it was dispelled when Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s senior communications aide, told my Yahoo colleague Michael Isikoff this week that honesty and trustworthiness were, in Isikoff’s words, “beside the point.” There followed this pretty remarkable quote from Palmieri: “That’s not the question voters have in their heads when they decide who to vote for. It’s who is fighting for me, and who has the solutions for the American people. She’s still the person who is most likely to be the next president.” In other words, Clinton’s argument is, at its core, like Richard Nixon’s in 1968: You’re not hiring a friend or a babysitter. You just have to believe that I get what’s wrong, and I’m the only one with the competence to fix it.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Aug 6, 2015 -> 07:47 AM) Just to be clear, when I said those net worths seemed low to me, I didn't mean I thought candidates needed to be higher. I meant I had a hard time believing they were actually that low. I don't care how much money they have, as long as they haven't been bankrupt or something. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015...ou-in-debt.html The anti-Romney approach.

As much as I enjoy watching the Royals, Lorenzo Cain hasn't been one of the five best players in baseball this season. There's another example that fits with someone like Heyward/dWAR and projecting $120-160

As much as I enjoy watching the Royals, Lorenzo Cain hasn't been one of the five best players in baseball this season. There's another example that fits with someone like Heyward/dWAR and projecting $120-160 million contract offers for him. Just seems nuts. And yes, we are all aware he's only 26-27.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 6, 2015 -> 07:27 AM) It's not unique or special except when you look at a team like the White Sox where they have a talented right fielder who started the season at age 23 and who we were counting on to be the #5 hitter on a contending team so much that we traded away a bunch of pieces for a starter with 1 year before free agency. Or when you look at a team like the White Sox counting on a 24 year old 2b to leapfrog over AAA almost completely and be a key contributor to the lineup on a contending team. Or when you look at the White Sox calling up a 22 year old starter with like 25 innings out of college and expecting him to be a key piece in the rotation on a contending team. Not every player you give time to develop is going to succeed. Listing names of guys who failed doesn't mean that you will never find guys who are late bloomers. If Drabek doesn't succeed in AAA it doesn't make Jake Arrieta no longer exist. If Avi Garcia remains a .675 OPS hitter for the rest of his career Anthony Rizzo doesn't suddenly vanish from existence. The thing they did that is different from what we did is they gave guys a chance to struggle. When guys didn't work out, they weren't screwed by it. When guys needed time to become good players, they weren't suddenly trying to figure out what to do with the big player they traded for who will become a free agent at the end of the year. Their worst mistake out of that time was going to the FA market for one big name pitcher in a way that totally didn't fit what they were doing otherwise, and even then they didn't give up a draft pick to sign him like we did with two positions this year. When our 2b position guys turned out to need a couple months to grow into big league hitters it majorly screwed us. When our 23 year old wasn't ready to carry a roster it was exceptionally damaging. Those were things that people should have seen coming easily. Those were positions where we needed to recognize - "hey, we're not quite there yet, let's give these guys time to struggle and see what they become". And maybe even "let's look into backup plans, keep acquiring talent that isn't quite there because we don't know what every guy will do." You can argue they actually gave Beckham and Vicideo too much time. The problem is pulling the plug so quickly on the likes of Semien, Micah, Erik Johnson, etc. That and all the position changes we've put guys through trying to shoehorn them into major league roster holes. Plus, it's not like Olt, Junior Lake, Baez and Alcantara set the world on fire. Bryant, Soler and Russell are all taking their lumps. Schwarber has been the most surprising to me...and there were plenty of skeptics on draft day.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 6, 2015 -> 07:27 AM) It's not unique or special except when you look at a team like the White Sox where they have a talented right fielder who started the season at age 23 and who we were counting on to be the #5 hitter on a contending team so much that we traded away a bunch of pieces for a starter with 1 year before free agency. Or when you look at a team like the White Sox counting on a 24 year old 2b to leapfrog over AAA almost completely and be a key contributor to the lineup on a contending team. Or when you look at the White Sox calling up a 22 year old starter with like 25 innings out of college and expecting him to be a key piece in the rotation on a contending team. Not every player you give time to develop is going to succeed. Listing names of guys who failed doesn't mean that you will never find guys who are late bloomers. If Drabek doesn't succeed in AAA it doesn't make Jake Arrieta no longer exist. If Avi Garcia remains a .675 OPS hitter for the rest of his career Anthony Rizzo doesn't suddenly vanish from existence. The thing they did that is different from what we did is they gave guys a chance to struggle. When guys didn't work out, they weren't screwed by it. When guys needed time to become good players, they weren't suddenly trying to figure out what to do with the big player they traded for who will become a free agent at the end of the year. Their worst mistake out of that time was going to the FA market for one big name pitcher in a way that totally didn't fit what they were doing otherwise, and even then they didn't give up a draft pick to sign him like we did with two positions this year. When our 2b position guys turned out to need a couple months to grow into big league hitters it majorly screwed us. When our 23 year old wasn't ready to carry a roster it was exceptionally damaging. Those were things that people should have seen coming easily. Those were positions where we needed to recognize - "hey, we're not quite there yet, let's give these guys time to struggle and see what they become". And maybe even "let's look into backup plans, keep acquiring talent that isn't quite there because we don't know what every guy will do." You can argue they actually gave Beckham and Vicideo too much time. The problem is pulling the plug so quickly on the likes of Semien, Micah, Erik Johnson, etc. That and all the position changes we've put guys through trying to shoehorn them into major league roster holes. Plus, it's not like Olt, Junior Lake, Baez and Alcantara set the world on fire. Bryant, Soler and Russell are all taking their lumps. Schwarber has been the most surprising to me...and there were plenty of skeptics on draft days.

QUOTE (OmarComing25 @ Aug 6, 2015 -> 12:09 AM) I fail to see how what they did with Rizzo and Arrieta is special or unique in any way. Rizzo was always a highly regarded talent, and struggles at the MLB level at 23 are hardly surprising. He was always going to get time to struggle whether the Cubs were rebuilding or not. How much time did we give Beckham to struggle? How about Viciedo? The Phillies have been giving Domonic Brown a lot of time to struggle, every team does this, especially with guys who have Rizzo's talent level. The White Sox have done this plenty in the last 10 years, often to the point of getting criticized for giving too long of a leash (see Beckham again), and the only true rebuilding year we've had in the last decade was 2014. Even this year we've shown plenty of patience with guys like Sanchez. How many teams would have cut their losses after his performance the first 6 weeks, and these guys don't have the talent that Rizzo does. As for Arrieta, the move the Cubs made with him is the same move that every team makes every year. Teams take flyers on talented pitchers all the time that haven't put it together yet. How is letting Arrieta struggle in Iowa different than us continuing to give Drabek starts in Charlotte? I just fail to see how those two guys' successes were from rebuilding, you can do those exact same types of moves while trying to compete (and the White Sox have a lot). We had plenty of time to develop Gordon Beckham but look how that turned out. Many of the Cubs' young hitters are struggling right now and they're no longer rebuilding. They're still going to give them time to struggle. I don't see the difference between now and when Rizzo was struggling too, it's the same idea. It's what we did with Jenks, Santos, DeAza, Gillaspie, Carlos Quentin, Quintana, Putnam, Humber, Noesi, Drabeck, Paulino, etc. Even Montas was essentially a lottery ticket. Alexei was a flier like Kang for his first contract. The Cubs have simply done it better (recently) with Arrieta, Hammel, Garza and Feldman.

QUOTE (Lip Man 1 @ Aug 5, 2015 -> 09:46 PM) Balta's post is very, very, VERY good. I agree with him on many of the points he brought up. I think they went off the rails because Kenny simply couldn't wait. Many of these signing over the winter appeared to have his fingerprints all over them. (veterans in their 30's). Hahn appeared to want to be more patient but apparently he was over ruled as Kenny himself said anything Hahn and his staff want to do they have to run it by him first. The other factor I think was that even with maybe the best stadium deal in MLB (as outlined by the tribune) last year, attendance was dropping dangerously low. The franchise had lost fans from the previous year for eight consecutive seasons. They had lost 56% of the attendance since the end of the 2006 season. The decision was made in part to do something to bring back the season ticket holders. Obviously it hasn't worked on the field. Patience is a virtue, Kenny with his "football mentality," and his "go for broke" approach just doesn't have the capacity to wait three or four or five years so it's always "rebuild and contend" or "retool and contend" and that usually does not work. At least history shows it hasn't worked for this franchise for almost a decade. "It's time" for drastic changes at all levels in the front office. New blood, new ideas are desperately needed. Mark The BALTA SUPREMACY Yes, if you look at all of those free agents now, none of them would be perceived to be worth more and LaRoche has fallen off precipitously. Duke was a reach based on one year of results in the NL. Like Noesi, a pitcher the White Sox had actually torched. Bonifacio and Beckham have ended up blocking those young infielders that may or may not be part-timers/utility guys in the end. The odds of getting back the equivalent of Shark's compensation to the A's honestly aren't that great, and ironically, the player we complained about the most early, Cabrera, is closest to league average of all the deals but I'm still not sure he's a player that would be claimed on waivers. Besides where Balta noted, some other major miscalculations: 1) The presence of Shark alone would bring in fans. 2) Rodon was closer to 2012 Chris Sale than what we've seen out of him. 3) The failures of both Matt Davidson and Erik Johnson might be permanent ones. 4) The bullpen implosions of 2014 and 2006-07 reminded KW of the need for the Linebrink/Dotel acquisitions, so naturally he went the opposite of logic and overpaid a veteran in Robertson. So we jumped one or two years too early with Robertson and reached for Duke. 5) Between the TJ injury to Saladino, Sanchez's poor offensive performance, Leury/Nieto, etc.,...and the lack of evidence that Beck, Thompson, Anderson and Hawkins would be either regular contributors or able to be counted on before 2017, you can see where/why KW jumped the gun there as well, because there wasn't the patience to kick the rebuild two years down the road...and the presence of all those players like Sale, Abreu, Quintana, Eaton and Ramirez (or so the thought went) all "in their primes" was just too tempting to waste. Then there were the noted miscalculations on Flowers, Conor, Ramirez and likely Avisail. Looking back on it now, we would have been much better off simply going with Johnson/Beck/Bassitt at the back end of the rotation. Semien/Davidson would have started the year at 3b, with Sanchez at 2b...while waiting on Micah and Saladino to both be 100% ready for the big leagues. Thompson and Avi would have both started in the outfield, with a rotating DH concept...sharing AB's between Semien, Eaton, Davidson, Avi, Abreu, Thompson, maybe even Phegley or Ravelo, etc. While it's easy to say now someone like Grandal or Cervelli should have been targeted at catcher (Martin would have been premature), it needed to be addressed first and foremost (the Soto signing was the only one that actually worked out). The bullpen would have been another mess...the losers between Beck/Bassitt/Johnson for Shark's spot would have been there along with Petricka, Putnam and the one small addition would have been a veteran/ journeyman lefty from outside the organization, like a Franklin Morales or Breslow type. There's no doubt that team would have ended up with a win total in the 70's, but we would: 1) Have a much better idea about rotation needs for 2016. 2) The probability that Semien's bat could stick at 3b, 2b or DH. Or Davidson/Ravelo at 1b/3b/dh. 3) That Sanchez, Saladino or Micah would win 2b. 4) That Thompson would be more than a 1 war outfielder and surprise us offensively/defensively (or both). At least we would have the financial resources to do something in free agency. Of course, even assuming all the young pitchers worked out and you didn't need another veteran starter (Shields could have been plucked now for 50-75 cents on the dollar)...you're still stuck with Heyward, Gordon and Cespedes as the big-name outfield additions and no easy answers for 3b (assuming Semien and Davidson both failed) and catching. Let's be optimistic with Marcus for a moment. In this scenario, we're a catcher and probably two corner outfielders/DH (essentially two big bats) short. We might or might not need a closer, but probably/likely. This is now when Puig for excess pitching makes sense....a Cargo claim...spending on one of those three fa names, trading for another from the talent base of a much deeper organization than we have today and hoping/praying we can find the closer and catching pieces to fit. Of course, in this Balta Scenario, we could convert Danish or Montas to the bullpen and fasttrack them. We'd have two additional draft picks in the second and third round with upside. Maybe we make that big play in international free agency for Cubans Moncada, Eddy Julio Ramirez, Alvares, etc. More franchise what ifs for The Lipper.

Speaking of young hitters, Miguel Sano is mighty impressive...and he gets a ton of walks compared to most young Latin American players.

Angels had the rally monkey in their favor today...Toronto absolutely obliterating Minnesota. Baltimore also won again.

Avi can hurt you on offspeed pitches or balls he won't swing at....fastballs inside, not so much.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 5, 2015 -> 03:25 PM) They didn't really have a choice....so, not the same. Okay, as long as we're not mandating the sterilization of poor people. That's what it sounded like at first.