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QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Dec 9, 2011 -> 02:17 PM) Have a Rockford night/Peoria night/Champaign night/Indianapolis night/South Bend night, where you have packages that include round-trip bus ride plus ticket plus food. The local radio stations here in Rockford typically do Cubs bus trips during the summer. I don't remember hearing any for the Sox though. For some reason retailers think that everyone here is a Cubs fan. Almost every store I go into I'll see tons of Cubs stuff and maybe one rack with a few Sox shirts on it. We are also pretty evenly split with Bears/Packers fans so they sometimes do trips to each of those stadiums as well.

QUOTE (bmags @ Dec 9, 2011 -> 01:48 PM) They are indeed very similar. I suppose I could go to a nice restaurant quite often and order lettuce and water, and say I went to a nice restaurant. But instead I'll just cook at home for the majority of the time. That's the point. Indeed I don't do either of the things you mention terribly often, but when I do get to, I want to have more than just a basic level experience. But baseball games were not always such a luxury good. That would be an interesting study to see if the average cost of baseball tickets have increased in price comparably to movie tickets and restaurant prices over the years.

QUOTE (bmags @ Dec 9, 2011 -> 12:23 PM) I mean, once again, most affordable games are on weekdays, and I don't have the luxury of being able to leave work early to go tailgate...I also don't own a car. But I shouldn't have to go out of my way to make a game affordable and enjoyable. At some point it's just not worth it. That point has passed (and I went to 8 games last year...that won't happen this year) You can relate going to a game to pretty much anything you might "go out" for. Go to a movie and you have to spend $25 on a pair of tickets just to get in. Then another $20+ for popcorn and snacks. Go to a nice restaurant and have a couple of drinks with dinner and you'll probably spend $50+ What's the difference?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Dec 8, 2011 -> 03:15 PM) Eh, Sox fans are major fair weather fans. Dress it up how you like, but it is true. I don't think we're really that much worse than other sports fans. It's just that we are always compared to the other baseball team in town who are the one exception to the rule. How many other teams can manage to draw 3 million fans to watch a team win 60 games?

QUOTE (SOXOBAMA @ Dec 7, 2011 -> 09:55 PM) I am so tired of Sox fans bashing Jerry Reinsdorf.. The Sox has been in the top 10 in payroll many times but the fans continue not to show up to the ballpark. I been to the ballpark many times while we were contending first place, on a warm sunny night and the stadium was still half full.. The only good way for attendance to go up a significant amount in a single season is to either build a new stadium or win the World Series. Since the Sox have done neither of these in quite some time, they have to build up the attendance gradually by winning consistently. Something they seem to have a problem doing. Typically attendance jumps a little during the season the team is winning and more the NEXT season depending on what they do in the playoffs. For example in 2005 it jumped +412,297 over 2004. The largest increase since they won the division in 2000 when we fans were still starved for a WS. Then in 2006 it went up by +614,580. The largest single year increase since they opened the new stadium. The problem is the team didn't continue with it's success and the attendance started to drop again. Even in 2008 the team was just barely good enough to make the playoffs and only won a single game when they got there. Since then the expectations for the team each year haven't been great and they've proved us right with a 2nd place finish and a couple of 3rd place finishes. Had the team not completely fallen on it's face in 2006 and 2007 and won the division 2, 3 or even 4 times instead of just once since 2005 the attendance would've been much better. Simply being a contending team and making the playoffs once every few years isn't enough to make 30,000+ show up at the park every night.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Dec 7, 2011 -> 07:10 PM) I said all along, just pay him what he wants. It's pretty obvious our team is a mess financially cause of the three guys everybody's tired of me mentioning. Dunn, Rios and Peavy?

QUOTE (southsideirish71 @ Dec 6, 2011 -> 07:12 PM) PFB was just on the radio talking about how sox fans should of come out in droves based on the fact that we started out 3-2. LOL How winning 72 games a year is better than a rebuild. Assuming you're talking about Laurence Holmes and Chris Rongey last night around 6:20 or so I heard some of this too. What's funny is that they touched on exactly what the problem is without realizing it. The team has to win and win consistently for the fans to show up. Winning the division once every few years with some 3rd and 4th place finishes mixed in-between just doesn't cut. Win the division 2 or 3 years in a row and you'll see the fans show up.

For many years my wife was told that she had an uncle that died in Pearl Harbor. Over the weekend while researching her family history she found out that he actually died 2 years AFTER. It's just one of those funny family legends that everyone repeated but nobody bothered to verify.

QUOTE (SoxFan1 @ Dec 7, 2011 -> 12:08 AM) I'm about to start working on my last ever homework assignment. I'm sure in the last few years there are a lot of people that had that same thought once before but ended up having to go back to school.

I can usually come up with a few things that I want simply because I never manage to actually go out and buy them for myself for some reason. This year I want the new Stephen King book that just came out, a new Sox hat, the Family Guy Star Wars Trilogy and a small hatchet to chop up firewood when we go camping. On BF I picked up a 72-piece drillbit set for $20 at Lowe's just because it was too good a deal to pass up. My wife is wrapping it up and putting it under the tree for me.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Dec 5, 2011 -> 07:49 PM) Until someone can give me a scenario where a team has quickly and successfully rebuilt after a complete tear down, I am considering it to be in the realm of BigFoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and Cubs World Series titles. The Florida Marlins between 1998 and 2003?

My daughter, who is in 4th grade, brought home a math worksheet last night for homework. It had about 10 problems on it and they were dealing with order of operations. Parenthesis first, then division/multiplication, then addition/subtraction. One of the problems she had looked something like this: 102 - (34+20) / 17 + 203. The answer comes out to 301.823529 in case anyone wondered. I just found it odd that the answer comes out as a decimal. It's the only problem on the sheet that did. Every other answer was a whole number. They could have just as easily made it (31+20) so that it divides out evenly. I told her to write down the number with the decimal. I'm interested to see how the teacher grades it.

I saw a Corgi/Shar-pei mix at the vet the other day. It literally looked like they took the head of a Shar-pei and put it on the body of a Corgi.

This is something that has always bothered me. In the first Friday the 13th movie, his mother wants revenge for the camp counselors allowing her son to drown in the lake. Yet in the sequel it was revealed that he didn't die. What happened to him that his mother thought he was dead and how the hell did he survive all those years in between?

As per our yearly tradition we were out shopping on Black Friday. Er... Black Thursday night. We actually started at the local mall because my wife's favorite clothing store had everything 50% off starting at midnight. We got there at about 11:40 and had to wait in line behind 2 people. Mostly because the store isn't actually connected to the mall itself. It's in a separate building just across the parking lot. Meanwhile we watched the hundreds of people lined up around the various entrances to the mall. One of the ways to get into the mall is through a Barnes and Noble store... that didn't open at midnight. So it was kinda funny to watch the huge line of people suddenly disappear when they realized they weren't going to get in that way. After the clothing store we headed to Best Buy and waiting outside in line for about 3 minutes. This was after we got yelled at by somebody accusing us of stealing their parking spot even though we had been waiting far longer than they had. The person leaving the parking lot had to do an 8-point turnaround to finally get out. We picked up a 40" LCD TV for about $400 and Sons of Anarchy 3 on Blu Ray for $12(?) and again only waited in line about 15 minutes or so. The line in the TV department was really short. Then we moved on to Target and picked up a few movies and a Wii. No line at all at the checkout. We stopped at Wal-Mart to pick up some 8 GB Sandisk flash drives and SD cards for only $9. It was around 5AM and the place was mostly empty. One last stop at Lowe's to grab a Dewalt 72-piece drillbit set for $20 and then we headed for home. Overall we got everything we wanted to get and hardly had to wait in any lines at all.

For us it's usually both. I have a little 3-foot tall black tree that we put up in our kitchen. It's my White Sox tree. I put all my Sox Christmas ornaments on it, some baseball lights and a baseball tree-topper on the top. Then we sometimes put another fake tree on our front porch. Then we'll have a real one in our living room that we actually put the presents under. We actually have a couple of fake 6-foot trees that we put up in the years we don't get a real one. We thought that getting a pre-lit tree was a pretty good idea. Until the lights stopped working. We ended up taking them all off and throwing them out. We got it really cheap on clearance one year after Christmas so it was a good deal though.

This should be surprising... But it really isn't.

QUOTE (JoeCoolMan24 @ Nov 18, 2011 -> 04:01 PM) I had no idea either. Must just be one of those weird random facts that I heard one time and have never forgotten. I'm full of useless random information like that.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Nov 18, 2011 -> 10:46 AM) I had no idea it was supposed to be set at Comiskey originally. Really? I thought that was pretty common knowledge. I'm pretty sure Hughes has said he's a Sox fan before.

My daughter got out my old SNES and we were playing Super Mario World over the weekend. This is probably the easiest Mario game they've ever made because between the two of us we ended up completing all 96 "worlds" in less than 24 hours. It's really amazing how easily all the little tips and tricks came back once I started playing. I even remembered where all the secret exits where. Then I got out my game genie and put in the codes for infinite lives and unlimited invincibility. It's hilarious to just blast through the levels running all the enemies over.

QUOTE (IlliniKrush @ Nov 1, 2011 -> 09:50 PM) Maybe not 500x, but it's way more difficult. The average person is a much better bowler than they are a golfer. Plus, bowling is repeating the same exact thing for the majority of the game - 10 pins, same shot, nothing changes. You don't have the same exact shot in golf very often, if ever. There are plenty of things you can list that have "a very specific set of skills" but it doesn't make them require the skill golf does. I admit that I have never actually golfed except for mini-putt but I can't imagine that golf is that much more difficult than bowling. At least to the degree you're taking it. Bowling isn't the exact same shot every time. The oil actually changes/moves the more you throw. You have to adjust your shot accordingly. In golf if you play the same course multiple times the tee shot will be the same every time except for the wind. As far as the average person, being a better bowler than a golfer, I don't even know how you would judge something like that. If you take someone that's not a regular bowler and let them bowl a game they might get a score around 100. Which is pretty bad. I'd guess the average league bowler would be somewhere between 160 and 180. Although I know people that have been bowling 20+ years and can't get their average above the 130s. I'm guessing we are both under-estimating the difficulty of the opposite sport.

QUOTE (IlliniKrush @ Oct 28, 2011 -> 06:41 PM) Because it takes 500x the skill to golf well compared to bowling well? I don't think that's true at all. Each has a specific set of skills that are required to master the sport. Sure any joe blow can pick up a bowling ball and heft it down the lane or smack a golf ball down a fairway but at the professional level either one takes a lot of practice to really be good at it. I know the pros on TV make it look really easy but to maintain the averages/handicaps they do it requires a ton of skill. I've been bowling for about 25 years and usually maintain right around a 200 avg give or take 5 pins or so. The pros usually maintain 220+. Plus they bowl on much more difficult oil patterns.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 28, 2011 -> 04:14 PM) Yes, it's happened to a number of players, including Ryan Braun, Ian Kinsler and Jay Bruce. Braun had his wind up as a triple. The Kinsler one wasn't so bad because it wound up being foul. I'm curious how they decided to put Braun on third though.

Reviewing fair and foul balls via instant replay could be tricky. If a ball is called foul and it turns out to be fair where do the baserunners end up? How many bases does the batter get? Although I could see the same thing with home runs. Has a situation ever occurred where a ball was ruled a HR and it was later overturned via instant replay?

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Oct 28, 2011 -> 12:29 PM) Little Giants was a staple for anyone our age, Rowand. That scene where they "pitch to Johnny" gets me every time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCildVCn2No Very few things in life compare to watching your kid doing something good while playing a sport.