cabiness42

Has to be Danks, right? No other roster move frees up as much as Melky will be getting. Also wondering if there is another SP target out there if Danks is being moved.

Given that most of the other suitors for Scherzer are in the AL, I wouldn't mind if the Cubs signed him.

Just got a Tribune e-mail alert on this, awesome news, and even better got him on a 3 year deal!

Yeah, gotta keep both hands on the wheel.

Zipping along, it was for a while there.

Surely you can't be serious? I am serious . . . and don't call me Shirley.

Aren't we all?

One more thing to keep in mind when comparing the Cubs to the Yankees in this is that the blackout rules are still in existence and so the Cubs being a national team doesn't help much. How many Cubs fans in AZ are going to be rushing to get the new Cubs network when the games will still be blacked out?

I appreciate the value of advanced metrics in evaluating individual players, but I really don't think it works well to just add every player's projected WAR together and think that's going to be a team's projected win total. The whole is often greater than (or less than) the sum of the parts.

Wandering a bit off topic, but I don't see a la carte even happening. The companies that own the few channels you do want to watch also own most of the channels you don't want to watch so it doesn't benefit them to give you the option of only getting the channels you want to watch.

Depends on the salary, but yes, I'd go 4 years on Melky. He's only 30 right now.

Fortunately for the Sox, they have the two best lefty starters in the AL, so their lineup does not have to face them. Also, while you couldn't tell from watching either the current or previous manager, managers are actually allowed to re-arrange the lineup when facing a lefty starter to move those lefty bats farther down in the order. There is no state or Federal law that requires LaRoche to bat 3rd or 4th vs LHP.

I don't know if it would work or not, but I think the argument would be: Cubs are more popular than the Sox, so the Cubs RSN is going to get better ratings than the Sox RSN, and your team will benefit from better ratings by being affiliated with the Cubs RSN. That may not be enough to get the Hawks to split from the Bulls, but it's probably the angle the Cubs will take. If there weren't such strong pre-existing relationships between the Sox-Bulls and Bulls-Hawks, the Bulls and Hawks would be fighting each other over the opportunity to get on the Cubs station.

You look at his overall numbers and he looks fine, but the dude is so extremely streaky that it's hard to watch. He goes off for a month with a 1.000+ OPS and then follows it up with two months of sub-.600 OPS. Plus his defense isn't really good. If the price is right, I don't mind signing Rasmus because he is a plus defender in the corner OF spots and can be an adequate backup for CF. He may not reach his offensive potential but I'm OK with that. He'll still be at least a little bit better hitter than Viciedo with much, much better defense.

No it's not silly to say that. Before the bill comes up for a vote, leadership of both parties get together to agree on whatever compromise they think they can pass, with each party pledging a certain number (or at least a ballpark estimate) of the number of votes their party can provide. If your side doesn't provide the votes promised, then the failure is on your side. In 2013, Boehner and Reid negotiated a bill, and then after that, the Republicans took a hard line and refused to pass what had been negotiated and passed something different. Sure, the Republicans tried to point out that the House bill had as much right to be considered as the Senate bill, but the reality is that the Republicans did not stick to the deal that their leadership negotiated. In 2014, a bill was again negotiated, with the understanding that it would need (and have) a certain amount of Democratic support in the House. When it initially looked like that support wasn't going to be there, that would have been the Democrats' fault for not holding up their end of the bargain. Just because they are the minority party in the House doesn't absolve them from being accountable to what their leadership has agreed to. At the end of the day, the Democrats did eventually hold up their end of the bargain. You can chalk that up to some combination of (1) unlike the Republicans in 2013, the Democrats in 2014 had the pressure of the White House to face, which even in a lame duck WH is substantial and (2) the Democrats just aren't willing to be assholes to the extent that Republicans are. I didn't want Dodd-Frank changed either, but there are a lot of worse things the Republicans wanted to do that ended up not happening. This is the best deal that we could have possibly gotten given the makeup of the Senate. Not passing anything and having another shutdown, aside from personally making my life much more difficult, would have ended with a bill leaning much more to the right than the one we have now.

I guess the question is which iteration of the YES Network are the Cubs actually shooting for? The original YES was a parternship between the Yankees and Nets and was a premium subscription channel like HBO or Playboy. Since then, YES has really morphed into a regular regional sports network. If the Cubs shoot for the original version of YES, it will be a disaster. If they are going for a more modern version of YES, it could work, but they still need to either get the rights to Hawks games (I'm assuming that the Bulls are a non-starter for obvious reasons) or get an affiliation with FOX Sports that gets them access to college basketball and other programming to fill the winter.

The article did say afternoon, primetime and weekend, though it didn't say how many of each. You're allowed to pre-empt up to a certain number of hours of network programming. It happens down here all the time with UK and UL basketball games. They run the newtork stuff that was pre-empted overnight.

Yes, I think trading Porcello for Cespedes was a bad deal, compounded by the fact that they don't seem to be getting Scherzer back.

That's a pretty big deal if WLS is willing to pre-empt ABC primetime programming to show Cubs games.

I'm looking at it from the standpoint that the President and the Senate Budget Committee chair signed off on this bill, knowing full well that it would take some House Democratic yes votes to overcome the House Republican no votes. It would have been a failure of the Democratic Party not to get those votes. You can't honestly say that the House Democrats don't have some responsibility to help pass the bill, knowing full well that any bill that could pass the House without any Democratic votes would be a bill that you would find even more objectionable than this one. In any case, the bill has now passed the House, so it's now in the hands of the Senate. This is why it's more fun not to affiliate with either party--I can be on the right side of the argument in both 2013 and 2014.

The party with the minority in the House has to help approve the bill because the compromise bill does not contain provisions stripping funding for the President's executive order on immigration. Would you prefer the House pass a bill that couldn't garner any Democratic support and then fail in the Senate? Would that make you feel better?

And which party has the White House, which has endorsed the bill? The Democrats have three choices: 1) Approve the current bill, which sucks 2) Approve a CR and then get faced with a bill in January that sucks worse 3) Don't approve either and get blamed for shutting down the government

The bill up for consideration has been approved by the House Budget Committee, Senate Budget Committee and the White House, yet can't get enough votes to pass. I get that the bill has a lot of things Democrats don't like, but the alternative is to pass a short term CR and then the the Republicans run the Senate when the next deadline comes. The Dems probably need to cut their losses.

I highly recommend Wisconsin hire Brian Kelly.

Regardless of Viciedo's price, having him start in LF doesn't make sense when you've gone out and acquired LaRoche, Duke, Samardzija and Robertson, and he doesn't really have the skillset (playing multiple positions well) to justify keeping as a backup.