cabiness42

Well, we're still in the part of the season where you have to qualify everything with "WARNING: SMALL SAMPLE SIZE", but the Sox have only had 2 (successful) sac bunts so far this year. Five AL teams have less than two, but on the other end of the spectrum Texas has 11. Sox are also 88% on SB, meaning that they are being smarter about when to run.

I haven't read the details of the TV rights agreements, but it's possible that ESPN/ABC have exclusivity from 3:30-7:00, meaning that BTN games have to end by 3:30 or start after 7:00. So a BTN game couldn't start at 1:00 because it would overlap with the ESPN/ABC 3:30 game.

Your primary TV rights holder, which in the BT's case is ESPN/ABC, is going to dictate start times. They want their #1 BT game on at 3:30 ET, so in order to get a game in before that it has to start at Noon ET.

Schedule is released at 8pm ET tonight.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Wrigley Field. A pregame ceremony will honor all of the Cubs championship teams that have played there, delaying the start of the game by zero minutes.

Southwest flies nonstop from Midway to Vegas, and I doubt anybody else is going to have anything cheaper than that.

Lineups: SOX - Danks 8, Semien 5, Abreu 3, Dunn DH, Viciedo 9, Ramirez 6, DeAza 7, Flowers 2, Garcia 4; Leesman 1 DET - Davis 8, Kinsler 4, Cabrera 3, Martinez DH, Hunter 9, Martinez 7, Castellanos 5, Avila 2, Romine 6; Verlander 1

This is a season where the Sox are first in runs scored and last in runs allowed, and Tyler Flowers is leading the league in AVG. Nothing will surprise me now.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/footb...0,7262779.story

Under, if for no other reason than hopefully he is pulled after the 4th one.

That rule only applies at the end of the season, not during the season, so Flowers would not be listed as the batting leader right now.

OK, this partly has to do with sports, partly with music, and partly with life, so I'll just post it here, and if it gets enough discussion the mods can make it its own thread and decide where to stick it. I was home from work sick yesterday. Took a break from sleeping most of the day to watch the last 45 minutes or so of the Boston Marathon. Now I've been known to watch a lot of different sports--football, basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey, golf, auto racing, tennis, curling, lacrosse; but running has been something that I've never really had an interest in. But because of everything that happened last year, I figured there was some human interest so I decided to watch. Was very glad I did. The dude that won had two traits that made him a very improbable winner: he was 38 years old, and he was American. OK, he was Ethiopian born and a naturalized citizen, but still an American hadn't won since 1983. Boyleston Street absolutely went bezerk. Apparently this Meb guy is very popular with the fans and winning the year after the bombing was straight out of a Hollywood script. Hearing the national anthem being played for the winner was special. A while later I flipped over to ESPN to see what they had to say about it. They were in the middle of playing this: , which was apparently a part of an E:60 special that they did on the Boston tragedy. I pretty much lost it.

So, the QBs are apparently falling down the board. Despite the team's needs on defense, is there a QB you take if he's there at 14? What if a team wants to trade up from the 30s to 14?

I have a friend who works for the World Series of Poker as a dealer. He started out just dealing the WSOP in Vegas May-July and dealt at our local Horseshoe the rest of the year. However, the WSOP folks really like him and offered him work at any of their circuit events (which run all over the country pretty much year round). So now he is only home 10 weeks out of the year and is on the road dealing WSOP events all over the nation year round. If you need the scoop on any poker room in the US, he probably knows it.

There has been an issue of this happening recently in Louisville. However, instead of underreporting crimes, the police were mis-locating crimes. There was an incident of major mob violence in a downtown park. People complained that this happened too often, but police data showed zero previous crime reports in the park. A local TV station did an investigation and found that crime reports from the park had their locations changed to nearby neighborhoods so that the city could tout a low crime rate in the park.

Yes, there will be some problems with comparisons, but once you become 100% certain that changing the survey will make it more accurate, you have to do it even though it may make historical comparisons questionable. You don't just keep using inferior data because the old data was inferior.

Yeah, OK there's another case of people making all kinds of assumptions about a tiny fact that aren't even close to true. This is how the unemployment survey works - There is a monthly sample of 72,000 households. Any given field employee is responsible for about 30-40 of those households, or about 0.05% of the entire sample. Employees (and their bosses) are rated partially on getting a response from as many of their 30-40 households as possible. This sometimes leads employees to fabricate answers for households that refuse to cooperate. However, they aren't doing it to move the unemployment rate one way or the other, rather for their own job welfare. The most common form of fabrication is just to mark an uncooperative household as 'retired' because it brings up fewer questions in the survey. Being retired removes somebody from the labor force, so it has a net neutral effect on unemployment rate, and given that any one employee only has 0.05% of the sample anyway. It would take hundreds of people, all intentionally marking unemployed people as employed, in order to move the unemployment rate that far.

Census Bureau is very different than the IRS. A lot of statisticians move between government, private statistical research, and non-profit research, and their ability to do so would be totally shot if they accepted bogus changes to surveys while with the government. That order isn't coming down the chain to me because one or more people in that chain have professional reputations outside the government to protect. A lot of very wealthy people of both political leanings get/remain very wealthy by using accurate census data, and they aren't about to let politicians mess with it.

In most government agencies, including the Census Bureau, if one person changed things, it would take a couple thousand people to look the other way, including me. Some of that aluminum is seeping down into your brain from your tinfoil hat. Again, please don't pretend that you know 1% as much about how it works as I do.

OK, well I couldn't have been more wrong on that one. Konerko is playing 1B instead of Dunn.

I took a 5 and 3 year old to their first game last summer. It wasn't a Sunday/run the bases day, but regardless, here are some tips: 1) Arrive right as the game starts, or even late. 2) Take 1-2 trips to the Fundamentals deck and/or just take a lap around the concourse. 3) Get him/her cotton candy. It takes a long time to eat so it occupies them for a while.

Did the increase in Cubs popularity spur the increase in Wrigleyville popularity, or was it the other way around???

OK, I guess I should have clarified. You can pull the guy back from waivers, but only if you keep him on your roster. You can't pull a guy back from waivers and then outright him to AAA. If the Sox have DFA'd Veal, then they aren't going to pull him back if he's claimed. I can't remember a guy who got DFA'd and then added back onto the roster before the 10 days are up.

No, only in August can you pull guys back from waivers, and even then it has to be before you DFA them. The Sox have 10 days to work out a trade, but nobody is going to offer anything. Since he's a lefty, I give it about a 50/50 chance whether or not he gets claimed. Lefty relievers, even mediocre ones, are hard to find.

Didn't watch the game, but it appears from the boxscore: Downs walked 1/1 batters Petricka walked 1/1 batters Veal walked 1/3 batters Cleto walked 3/4 batters Now it's April and everybody but Veal and Lindstrom is new to this bullpen, so I don't know how you can expect Robin to have everything figured out by April 16. These guys need to stop walking batters or they'll be gone, and in Veal's case he already is.