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QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 05:44 PM) I think this having to win multiple years in a row to expect fans to show up at the park is complete bulls***. If a team is in first place in the middle of any given season, then fans should want to come to the park. Why else are you a fan if you don't want to watch your team when they're actually competitive? I don't blame anyone for not supporting a s***ty product and obviously I wouldn't expect season ticket sales to increase without sustained success, but in terms of single game tickets the product on the field right now is all that should matter. It might take some time for expections to catch up with actual results, but once a team is clearly in a playoff race the fans should want to be at games supporting their team. How a team did the previous season or how they may do the next season should be irrelevant. I guess I don't get what your point is Marty. It is reality though. Look at the attendance from 2005 and 2006. Guess which one is higher? But since they didn't do anything in 2006 it went down in 2007. The previous season absolutely matters.

QUOTE (My_Sox_Summer @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:59 PM) What I was asking was, if winning was the cure, the Sox would have been selling out at the end of the year. They weren't. Once again, it's not just winning. It's winning consistently for 2 or 3 years in a row. A few months of being in first place in one season is not going to suddenly cause sell-outs.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 11:36 AM) I think the last thing they did a solid job marketing was the "return by noon" concept. A lot of customers were confused by this and I honestly felt if you didn't understand it, it wasn't Blockbuster's fault, you were just dumb. I had people cuss me out about changing the return time without their consent and one guy said it was 12 hours less and we were being deceptive. No, dips***, it would've been due "tomorrow by midnight" like it's been for the company's entire existence, but we gave you an extra 12 hours. You can still return it the following evening if you want but now you won't be late if you return it in the morning, and the store loses no money because the movie's not gonna be rented early in the morning anyway. I had forgotten about this but it was one thing I did really like. Many times we would finish watching a movie and it would be 12:30 or 1 in the morning. Changing the return time to noon saved us a lot of late fees.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 12:25 PM) I never knew of a specific deal until reading that but I did always wonder, why were movies available for rent several weeks before you could buy them but this didn't apply when we started getting DVDs in 2000? To an employee, the way this looked is the sale price would show on the computer screen of a new release VHS for something like $109 (next to the rental price of $3.99 or whatever) until it was designated "for sale," when Blockbuster would start selling it in stores along with other stores. But when we started selling DVDs, the sale price was the standard $19.99 or $24.99 and you could get the movie at any other retail chain. When I was in HS I found out how much Blockbuster paid for VHS tapes when I accidentally mixed 2 up from 2 different stores. Put the wrong tape in the wrong case. BB caught the mistake. The other store not only missed that it was the wrong tape, they actually rented it out to another person! They finally figured it out when the other person brougth it back. This was after the dumbass store manager vehemently denied that it could have gotten rented out and insisted that they didn't have the BB movie. In the meantime I'm freaking out wondering how I'm going to come up with $100 for a VHS tape.

QUOTE (My_Sox_Summer @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 11:19 AM) What about winning DURING the season? That is what the Sox did all season (till the end) and there was still attendance issues with a first place team. It was blamed on price then, but of course playoff tickets sold out (which a much higher price tag). Bandwagon makes sense, doesn't bother me at all. The only thing that bothers me is the fan complaining about something, it get's changed and they still don't show up. Someone in this thread compared the few games that have been played with last year's and there has been a slight boost. Just don't expect attendance to suddenly jump to 30,000 every single game simply because ticket prices went down.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 08:48 AM) I think Family Video has a good business model. In La Grange they just took over an old blockbuster store and appear to be doing well. I'm not sure what they are doing different than Blockbuster. Although I think Blockbuster shot themselves in the foot when they went to their "no late fees" program but then upped their rental prices. We stopped going there soon after that.

My wife has a real tenuous relationship with her parents so neither one of us even thought about asking for permission. Her having a kid 2 months after she graduated HS didn't exactly make me their favorite person either. When we finally did get married we had already bought a house together and had 2 kids. So it was just a formality at that point.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 10:18 AM) I think the Sox were a big cause of that. Cub fans didn't seem to care if they lost until the Sox won the World Series. Now I see more angry Cub fans than I can ever remember. Going into triple digits in 2008 didn't help either. So many people thought that was going to be THE year simply because it was a nice round number.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 8, 2013 -> 04:39 PM) It is the new reason du jour. Before it was prices. Then it was winning. Now it apparently is winning for a half of a decade in a row. I don't know about anyone else but I've been saying the same thing for years. Win consistently and the fans will show up. This average of making the playoffs once every 5 years just doesn't cut it. It's really not hard to compare attendance with playoff appearances. It shot up in 2005 and even more in 2006. It's gone consistently down since then. That one and done in 2008 didn't really help much when they backed it up with 4 straight years of missing the post-season. The die-hards will show up no matter what but the band-wagoners just want to follow a winner. They don't know or care what place the team was in on Sept 1 of last year. They only remember where the team finished.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Apr 8, 2013 -> 04:38 PM) Few, fewer and almost no teams do that - it is just really tough to do it in baseball. Let's start with making it once, that goes a long way. I'd like to see them make it twice in a row. Just to say they did it once in their history... Not a complete list but: Twins where in from 2002 to 2004. Then went back to back in 09 and 10. Indians were in from 1995 to 1999. Tigers 2011 and 2012. Cardinals made it 9 times from 2000 - 2012. Twice they went 3 times in a row. Yankees every year since 1995 (minus 2008) Red Sox 2003 - 2005 and 2007 - 2009

QUOTE (My_Sox_Summer @ Apr 8, 2013 -> 10:17 AM) Although the team did miss the playoffs last year, it was an amazing year most of the time. I hate to say it but the first part of that sentence matters much more than the latter. You can't expect one miracle fix that suddenly makes attendance jump 10K per game. It doesn't exist. Make the playoffs 3, 4 or 5 years in a row. You'll have no problem selling tickets then.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Apr 4, 2013 -> 08:15 AM) I still get sad when I think that my future offspring won't know the excitement of going to the video store to rent a movie or game. We had a Blockbuster in town that was still hanging around up until last week. They finally closed down. I don't think we have any in the area anymore. We do have a place called Family Video that still seems to be thriving. We haven't caught onto the netflix/streaming thing yet so we still rent/return DVDs. We definitely aren't alone either. It actually gets pretty busy on Friday nights.

QUOTE (Swingandalongonetoleft @ Apr 5, 2013 -> 11:28 AM) Whatever they do decide, I hope they can come to some agreement with the rooftop people that would prevent them from building something for the sole purpose of obstructing their view/locking them out. I think they're an integral part of the ballpark. How? They are background scenery more than anything. I think the Tribune owners were stupid to give them a 20 year contract so they could continue to profit off a product they have no rights to when it handcuffs the current owners from upgrading their park in whatever way they see fit.

Even with this information, was there anything anyone could have done that would've actually prevented the shooting?

QUOTE (DukeNukeEm @ Mar 30, 2013 -> 01:00 PM) Part of responsible gun ownership is not behaving like that when you have your weapon on you (you really shouldn't behave like that at all, but skip that point) Why are you skipping over the facts that 1) he's probably not a responsible gun owner and 2) that he's the one that initiated and then escalated the situation and then later had to resort to using a gun to diffuse the situation? They seem like pretty big points to just skip over.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Mar 26, 2013 -> 02:15 PM) Joe Doe, who is the pentultimate 5 tool player The second-to-last 5 tool player?

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Mar 28, 2013 -> 12:12 PM) All I see is the magic red X, but he has been posting pics of the new additions to US Cellular food all day long It's not food.

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Mar 26, 2013 -> 04:47 PM) Thankfully the patch came out today and one of the fixes was for the 1st pitch meatball bug. I stopped playing RTTS at some point in AAA when I was batting .500 and on a 60+ game hitting streak in July. I've never heard of this bug or even noticed it for that matter. If anything, the first pitch for me is usually an off-speed pitch at my knees rather than anything down the middle. I was hitting over .400 in AA when I got moved up but now I'm down to around .375 or so. I figure that's not too terribly high for the minors. I figure it might drop a little more when I finally make it to the majors. I've gotten a few 20+ and 30+ hitting streaks as well. Besides, it's more fun to play when I can be one of the best. If I was hitting .250 and not advancing at all it wouldn't be much fun.

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Mar 25, 2013 -> 07:52 PM) I hate basketball, but I borrowed NBA 2k13 from a friend because The Show RTTS was boring me and I wanted to see how other sports game did their Player Mode thing. I must say, I still hate basketball, but 2k13's My Player thing is a LOT of fun. It's so much more in depth and put together than The Show RTTS is. RTTS seems more realistic, and you really need to "earn" it more in that game, but My Player does a great job with OFF THE FIELD stuff. Press conferences are fun to make my player sound like an asshole, sponsorships and billboards are cool, meeting with the GM is really cool, and best of all, ACTUALLY USING MONEY YOU EARN is good. Not sure I like that you use your money to buy skill, I think RTTS training points is more appropriate, but I actually have a reason to want to go to Free Agency, to sign a big deal, to get my next paycheck. It's actually worthwhile and makes me want to keep playing. Very nice job 2K. SCEA, take notes. I've been playing RTTS the past few weeks and I'm 2 months into my second season still toiling away as a CF for the Charlotte Knights. Twice now I've gotten a message that says my performance is good enough to earn a call-up but they just don't have room on the 25-man roster right now. I made the AA all-star game in my first season but kept getting benched because I would accidentally hit the analog stick the wrong direction on pick-offs and it would count against me as a CS. I'm also horrible at drawing walks. I finally figured out when one of my advancement goals includes drawing X number of walks that I can just sim a few games until I get the required number. I actually started out at 3B because I figured that was one place the Sox always seemed to have trouble filling but for some reason they are listed as "deep" at that position and "thin" pretty much everywhere else besides pitching.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 26, 2013 -> 01:24 PM) I'd imagine there's no way on this green earth they're giving up naming rights for free. That's just it though. They are getting no compensation for the use of the Wrigley name. I'm sure the Wrigley Co. thinks its great. But how much money could they get some company to give them just for the chance to put their name on the outside of their new stadium?

If they built a new stadium, would they still call it Wrigley Field? Wrigley II?

It's been quite a few years since I've been to Wrigley but the last time I went it was for a Cubs/Astros game. I wasn't real familiar with the players on either of the teams and I didn't have a scorecard or a program to look up their numbers. The fact that the scoreboard only showed numbers rather than names made it 10 times more difficult to keep up with the game. Especially when a substitution was made. It finally made me realize why so many Cubs fans had no idea who was on the team/field at any point in time during the game. I'm not sure if they've added any more LED boards anywhere in the park to display that kind of info but for the casual fans that scoreboard is pretty useless for anything besides updating the score(s).

QUOTE (chw42 @ Mar 18, 2013 -> 03:59 PM) How big is your dumbphone though? It wouldn't be a real issue on a smaller phone. On a phone with a 4.7 inch screen, things get complicated. I guess my phone is a little smaller than most smart phones. But I just picked up a paperback book and held it like I would hold a phone and I had no problem sliding my index finger up the back of it to the top. Maybe I just have long fingers?

I have a "dumb" phone but it's got a touch screen and the lock button is on the top on the left. It's easy enough for me to reach up with my index finger and hit it while holding it in my right hand.

QUOTE (Harry Chappas @ Mar 15, 2013 -> 10:51 AM) How envious are you of Donn Pall? I never minded because I really don't like my middle name anyway. My parents specifically made a point to not name me after anyone else they knew. Even though my first name was consistently in the top 5 baby names for like 50 straight years before I was born and remained in the top 10 until recently.