cabiness42

I can almost always get under $100/night for a 4-star hotel downtown, especially in January, and if I need to make the trip on an even tighter budget I can get a 3-star hotel out by Midway for under $70/night and take the Orange line downtown, so in my mind the cost for Soxfest is about $100 more than the cost of the actual pass to the event.

Palmer House Hilton's profits also, or just the Sox portion? I don't have a problem with the cost of Soxfest tickets. I do have a problem with shelling out all that money for a hotel room.

Yes, the Sox could make a qualifying offer to Youk after 2013 and get a draft pick.

I'm not saying that ND is a top ten team, but I think they're better than #23. All five starters back plus three good additions.

Didn't hear the details, but I thought I caught somebody on Mike & Mike this morning saying that ARod would only waive his NTC to go to Miami, so this may be a pointless discussion. But yes, I'd trade Rios for Arod, but I think the Yankees would insist that the Sox pay more than $13M per year for him if they have to take on Rios' contract in return. And I like Rios, but in a terrible year ARod still had an OBP of .353 and in a career year Rios had an OBP of .334. Plus corner OF is one of the easier positions to find some power to replace him.

I'm as fat and out of shape as it gets, and I can make the walk to Soldier Field from the Roosevelt Station.

Is it because of the FieldTurf? Are World Cup qualifiers required to be played on grass?

I don't know who you think the alternatives were. Rios and AJ had great power numbers the second half, but their OBPs were .315 and .311. Everybody else had just as bad a second half as Dunn. The reason this team failed is that a guy with a .302 OBP and .729 OPS was the best choice for the #3 spot.

I did read the whole thing. I think you're right about factor #1 being the economy. I also like your idea of a rewards system. The Sox have official sponsors. Give people Sox rewards points for patronizing those sponsors. If I still lived in the Chicago area, I'd seriously consider switching to US Cellular if it got me free or majorly discounted Sox tickets.

He's been in charge of Chicago ever since Rahm got elected mayor.

Chicago is a city of 2.7 million people in a metro area of 9.8 million people. There are less than 600,000 available football tickets per year, about 900,000 available basketball and hockey tickets per year, and over 6.5 million available baseball tickets per year. It's not a very fair comparison. The biggest way to improve attendance is sell more season tickets. Every season ticket sold adds 81 to the season total.. Sell 6,172 more season tickets and you've added 500,000 to the season total. That alone moves the Sox from 24th to 14th. Winning helps sell season tickets. The economy improving would help as well.

The one and only bit of relationship advice I can give: You should probably look for relationship advice somewhere other than a baseball message board. I'm guessing that as a group, we suck at relationships.

Nick Swisher would not understand that metaphor.

You're only a bad White Sox fan if you fail to negotiate beer and/or gas money in addition to the free ticket.

I don't know if this constitutes proof, but there seemed to be a bit more excitement about the Sox in the South Bend area while the team there was affiliated with them.

Yeah, after the Texans getting blown out and the Ravens almost losing at home to Dallas, it's hard not to see the Bears as the 2nd best team in the league right now.

The NBA may have blackout rules that would prohibit showing Bulls games in the Pacers market, but there aren't any prohibitions against carrying the channel. The e-mail exchanges I had with Scott Reifert a few years back are that CSN has chosen not to pursue distribution in some locations even though they are within the team's territory. When I pressed him as to whether or not the Sox would challenge a re-drawing of their local territory to match CSN's distribution, he couldn't (wouldn't?) answer that question.

Since we're on the subject of TV markets, here's a link to the map: http://www.bizofbaseball.com/images/MLB_Bl...Map1000x733.gif You can see what teams are considered "local" to any area of the country.

Central Indiana is within the Sox/Cubs "exclusive rights territory", so games on CSN would not be blacked out. CSN is only available on DirecTV/DishNetwork if you buy the "sports package" that includes all of the local sports channels from all over the country (which is a very very small percentage of households). It is not available in the same programming packages as the Reds' station. What's worse is despite the fact that CSN gets hardly any distribution in Central Indiana, Sox/Cubs games are blacked out on MLBEI/mlb.tv because it is within the Sox/Cubs exclusive rights territory, so for about 99% of people in Central Indiana, WGN games are the only games they can watch.

The Reds TV station is on cable/satellite systems in Indy and CSN is not, so of course Cincy has a better market. That's why they need to get CSN on--to change that market.

Yes, but if CSN is airing in more households, that equals bigger ratings which equals more ad revenue which equals more money in the next TV contract.

Assuming that neither team wins tonight's game by more than 55 points, the Bears end Week 6 with the league's best point differential.

Yankees lineup making Adam Dunn look like a contact hitter.

It's worked very well in Indiana. We're getting a lot of roads built, which is employing a lot of people, and since the economies of the surrounding states are so awful that none of them can afford to build anything, Indiana is getting bargain prices on the work. Best thing is that it's being mostly paid for by trucks going back and forth between Illinois and Ohio.

I hate the 49ers for having a home game yesterday, causing me to be subjected to six hours of Joe Buck instead of just three.