Jake

I'd be surprised if the Sox brought somebody in to take ABs from Semien. My guess is that both Sanchez and Semien are on the MLB roster to start the year, the question is just what roles they will play. It almost seems as if they prefer Sanchez, which is very surprising to me. Semien shouldn't be relegated to a platoon role at this stage in his career.

Age is a turn-off for me. Great 27-28-29-year-old pitchers rarely make it to market and there's a good reason why. You don't want to compound the built-in risk of pitcher contracts with the many risks associated with aging players.

Yeah you could read it as UIUC playing the game (throwing money at these guys gets their attention) or refusing to (charismatic coach but no $ doesn't bring home the big dogs)

Jay has always had awful fundamentals when it comes to ball security in the pocket. He is very averse to putting both hands on the ball and he tends to hold it low. You can't pick and choose when to secure when you often don't see the threat coming - it's surprising to me the fumbles haven't been a bigger problem in the past, when he was sloppier and sacked more often.

You should be more worried about the existence of the credit card for security. President Obama recently signed some sort of legislation/order that will require the tech on these credit cards to change because of the ease with which bad people can steal your info from them.

One thing with PFF is the point allotment can have to do with things that can't easily be conveyed by looking at other statistics. For instance, in their ReFo for yesterday's game, they said they didn't reward Tannehill handsomely for his hot start because he had several easy throws where he threw them inaccurately, costing the receivers (who made good plays to catch them) chances at getting YAC

PFF for Bears yesterday: Best O: Kyle Long (+2.4 overall, +1.6 pass block) Martellus Bennett (+2.0 overall, +0.9 pass) Matt Forte (+1.9 overall, +1.8 pass) Worst O: Jay Cutler (-2.2 overall, -1.0 pass) Jordan Mills (-2.2 overall, -1.1 pass block) Alshon Jeffery (-1.5 overall, -1.6 pass) Best D: Jay Ratliff (+2.6 overall, +2.0 pass rush) Tim Jennings (+1.7 overall, +0.9 pass coverage) D.J. Williams (+1.6 overall, +1.9 run defense) Worst D: Khaseem Greene (-3.4 overall, -2.4 pass coverage) Jared Allen (-3.4 overall, -1.9 run defense) Sherrick McManis (-3.0 overall, -2.6 pass coverage) Some season numbers for the defense: Top: Ratliff (+8.5 overall, +4.2 run defense) LaMarr Houston (+4.3 overall, +4.4 pass rush) Willie Young (+4.3 overall, +6.4 run defense) Lance Briggs (+2.9 overall, +4.5 run defense) Also of note... LaMarr Houston leads all 4-3 DE in QB hits with 10, despite his 0 sacks. 5th in hurries. Second in football regardless of position, after JJ Watt (who has 20 f***ing QB hits for Christ's sake). Bears O ranks 8th in NFL, just 3 spots ahead of this past week's opponent MIA. Bears D 18th. ST improves one spot to 30. Green Bay, in spite of reputation, ranks number one in pass blocking.

FWIW, I don't feel like Chicagoans coddle Cutler all that much. I think, over the course of his time here, he has tended to receive more blame than he has deserved. I do think that nowadays he tends to not receive enough blame, but early in his tenure he was seen as more responsible than he probably was for the awful offense.

Brandon should probably make that catch

I would be surprised if Mills starts next week

Kyle Long was beastly on that one

You do have to grade on a curve here. The defense was constructed to be slightly better than average at best. Now, I'd say they are around average. Null expectation would have been "must not be worst in league" as they were last year. The team was built so that it could be good if the offense was elite. Entering today, the offense was merely better than average. After today, it's looking like it's just average. It has been far below expectations and doesn't have convenient excuses for it. ST have been bad too, but we didn't have high expectations and they just don't matter as much.

Rosario, always the good teammate, trying to take some heat off of his QB

That might be the first kick we've taken across the 20

I'd say the defense is about average, which is remarkable considering how much they've been affected by injuries

Don't forget guys, the problem with this team is the defense

QUOTE (chw42 @ Oct 19, 2014 -> 02:56 PM) Please tell our defensive ends to stop overpursuing on the options. Looks like the play call had Shea ccovering the QB

Shea McClellin looks comfortable in his role as defense's worst player.

Right now, I don't see anything to the Royals model except you can win less than 90 games after a decade of brutal baseball then get lucky in the playoffs. I'm going to need to see more seasons of success before I see anything worth emulating here

Defense is not the side of the ball worrying me today.

The Nexus line (at least, the phones) just isn't built for "average consumers" and this release seems to confirm that. Google thinks the Nexus 5 is still a plenty good phone and their priority is to get a phablet-sized reference device for developers. As far as the price, it is unlike any previous Nexus phone because it absolutely souped up in just about every possible spec. No cut corners to reduce cost. Also, what a bummer with the iPad Mini update. I've got all kinds of Apple enthusiast friends pissed off that all they did was add TouchID (not even an upgrade to the A8x processor) and jacked up the price.

My girlfriend's family had a indoor/outdoor cat who wore a collar and was neutered but not microchipped. He went missing and they found his collar on the ground - it was a breakaway, so it could have been coincidence that it just came off. They tried very hard to find him, but never did. So one of our barometers here is if this was THAT cat, would my girlfriend's family find him? We think yes, now that we've spread the word through the neighborhood and posted on PetFBI (Humane Society doesn't maintain any listings themselves, they refer everyone to PetFBI) and Craigslist. It's crazy to think someone might have abandoned this cat. He's so well mannered. Uses his box, is affectionate, doesn't scratch things, etc. I can hardly think of a less offensive animal to have around.

For all we know, Friedman will do a bad job when it comes to having a lot of money to spend

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Oct 15, 2014 -> 09:04 AM) IIRC taxes at state and local levels are regressive in most of the country. They often are. I just expect better from a state which is led by supposed liberals. For all the moaning and groaning about Democratic control in IL, we hardly have the legislative output of a Dem state

So my girlfriend and I both love cats. Since we moved to our new place, we always look forward to seeing the neighborhood cats out and about when we walk to work. Not having a cat of our own, this was one of those simple pleasures. By becoming acquainted with these cats, we've gotten to know many of our neighbors as well. We'd heard from one neighbor that there was a possibly stray around. The neighbor was peeved because the cat hunts her birds (neighbor's cats are apparently too old/docile to dent the bird population). She had been feeding the possible stray, though, because she thought it looked skinny. She still wasn't a big fan. We began to run into this young black cat now and then. Cat wasn't as completely enamored with human contact as the obviously owned cats, but was willing to accept some petting if we approached carefully. Naturally, we like this cat. Having witnessed lots of outside cats, both owned and stray, get killed by the various dangers of the outdoors, we were worried about this little guy. As we see him more times and talk to neighbors again, everyone seems to think this cat has no owner. He exposes his belly to us and it looks like he has balls, at which point we decide we want to get this cat off the street. It was surprisingly easy to get him in the door as he allowed my girlfriend to pick him up without too much wriggling. First order of business before getting attached was checking for microchip. We also wanted to confirm that he was intact as we suspected. A vet will do microchip scans for free and we asked if they'd take a look at his package to see if he is neutered. The vet tech came back and told us the cat is not micro-chipped but she *thinks* he's neutered. The balls we're seeing, she thinks, is just the leftover scrotum. Either that, or he has non-descended testes. Regardless, she's congratulating us on our new cat. After having this cat in the house, we had a few observations: -Cat seemed hungry. Ate through an entire can of wet food before we could even notice he was eating that much. Ate more dry food shortly thereafter, too. Drank A LOT of water when we put it out. -This cat has definitely been around humans. Happily accepts petting and doesn't do the things I'd expect from a cat new to a household...that is, he can walk around without getting into every kind of mischief. A cat develops an ability to not knock every single thing in the world down and it seems like he has it. -Seems litter trained. He actually eliminated outside his box at first, but it turns out that was our fault as he accepted a different litter readily. With the rejected litter, he waited a long time before rather frantically searching the house for an acceptable place to go to the bathroom. Bathub, yowling at the front door, cat carrier, looking really hard at litter box...finally disappeared into the closet and left a loose bowel movement in there. As soon as we got a different litter, he peed a bunch into it right away and has now used it as expected. Anyway, we're really fond of this cat. However, we probably wouldn't have taken him in if we thought he was neutered already. To us, along with not having a collar/tag, that was a clear signal of lack of/poor ownership. As it turns out, he is probably neutered but owners did not give him a collar or microchip. If he's owned, his owners had to know they were letting him out that way too - we saw him over the course of weeks and have scoured the missing cat listings in various places and haven't seen a potential match. So here's the thing - we don't want to steal someone's cat! And short of being a black cat and having claws, which are hardly major offenses, this seems like a cat whose behavior would never earn him the boot out of a house (not that any behavior would truly justify that). Assuming he is neutered, I don't feel as much moral high ground in terms of saying reckless owners take risks sending their cats outside without precautions. Neutering is a precaution. I want to own this cat. I'm horrified by the thought he might belong to somebody, though. I've gone ahead and made some found cat postings, so we'll see if anything comes of that. How long do I give to sort those things out before we go ahead and more clearly make him ours? I don't want to invest in micro-chipping, vaccinations, collar/tags, etc. just to have someone take the cat a day later. FWIW, we do not plan to let this cat outdoors. He's been very okay with this so far, too, which is surprising. Hasn't made any attempts to go out the door nor does he pay much attention to it at all.