Jake

The notion of a 4K screen on a cell phone pisses me off and I perceive it to be a virtual slap to my face. WE CAN'T SEE THE DIFFERENCE. We will feel the difference in battery life, though. What a waste.

QUOTE (MexSoxFan#1 @ Jun 12, 2014 -> 09:54 PM) Classy Heat fans booing It's okay, they'll all be saying they are Spurs fans soon

God damn it Steve can you please learn the pronunciation of Dayan

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 12, 2014 -> 09:53 PM) It reminds me of Nestor Molina, where his stats were so incredibly bad compared to past performance that you hoped there was some simple explanation for it other than that they forgot how to play the game. In Nestor's defense, he's spent a fair amount of time on the DL and apparently saw an instant degradation in quality of stuff. He also had less of a track record of success than these guys since he'd only been a starting pitcher for one season.

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 12, 2014 -> 09:49 PM) Avi seems to be one of their 4 core players going forward with Sale, Q and Abreu. They'll give him every chance to become a solid major leaguer. I'd actually prefer they make him a LF. If this year was any indication, he'll have to be a LF. I don't know how such a solid athlete could look so incredibly awkward trying to catch a fly ball.

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 12, 2014 -> 09:47 PM) Good call on Eaton being great on defense...which he has been. However, I still believe if he's your best hitting outfielder, then that's a very bad hitting outfield. As for Davidson, his AAA numbers this year are extremely scary. Not sure what happened to him, but he's basically been one of the worst hitters in the IL since the second series of the season. Eaton needs to hit better. But I also think that the Eaton we eventually get is a player that we wouldn't mind being the best hitter in the OF. Anyway, Dayan is our best hitting OF as of today. I don't know how there's much disputing that. Hopefully De Aza keeps rolling and can make that conversation a little more interesting, not to mention what a more developed version of Eaton ought to do at the plate. Davidson has been troubling, but it's a deal where it's so bad that I find it hard to perceive it to be a legitimate part of his development. If it was more of a .230/.310/.400 kind of line I'd be thinking that maybe he lucked into more production than he deserved last year. With the way it looks, it screams "external factors."

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 12, 2014 -> 09:45 PM) +1 I said this yesterday, but LF, C and a SP slot seem to be the places where there's no one locked in for the future. I wouldn't narrow it down to LF. I think the non-Eaton places in the OF, and it's looking more like it would be hard to displace Eaton as CF, are fair game and we'll actively pursue new options there. If next year is "the" year, I'm not just handing that position to Avisail. He looked inferior defensively to Dayan and he has a lot left to prove at the plate. I want him to get his shot, but I wouldn't move heaven and earth to do it.

Eaton is fabulous out there. I really didn't know he'd be this good in CF

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 12, 2014 -> 09:31 PM) PCL numbers mean nothing to me....ie- Matt Davidson You act like the rest of the league doesn't bat in the PCL either. .381/.456/.539 163 wRC+ (a league-adjusted stat!!) in AAA last season .302/.409/.429 133 wRC+ in AA .332/.455/.492 152 wRC+ in A+ .381/.496/.571 182 wRC+ in R He's dominated every single level he's been at up to this point. His "bad" in MLB looks like 80 wRC+ with a big added value on D that leaves him at least as a solid regular. He struggled coming off the second DL trip of his career and I'm really not that worried about whether he'll kick ass like he has done everywhere else. As far as Davidson goes, you need to realize that him playing bad right now has nothing to do with the legitimacy or even lack thereof of his PCL numbers. His "worst" league-adjusted professional season to date involved him hitting 20 HR and driving in 107 RBI. His struggles in Charlotte are not some poor translation of PCL stats. It's something extraneous. Maybe he's got something personal going on, maybe the coaching staff has him working on something asinine, maybe he's hurt, maybe he's mentally weak. We've already seen the kid hit well in MLB last year and he even capped it off with a great ST this year. I'm guessing he was hit with tremendous disappointment at his demotion and it has gotten him into a funk that he needs help getting out of. Release yourself from the "worst case scenario is the reality" mindset.

The Heat are just such a badly coached team and Pop knows how to use his abundant talent to dissect such a poorly schemed team

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 12, 2014 -> 09:28 PM) Cause he's a mediocre hitter at this stage of his career. The "batted .350/.450 in the minors and is just starting out in the majors" stage? Sure. Luckily, he's a fantastic defender, which I didn't expect when we got him.

QUOTE (Soxfest @ Jun 12, 2014 -> 09:27 PM) Why not walk Miggy I do not understand RV? I'd honestly rather face Miggy than Victor right now. I wouldn't walk either to get to the other.

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 12, 2014 -> 09:25 PM) It's not good when Eaton's your best outfielder Why?

You're a f***ing idiot Gordon

I take it back. Holy hell is that a miniscule streaming library: http://geeksided.com/2014/06/12/amazon-lau...ify-competitor/ (I wrote this)

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Jun 12, 2014 -> 02:50 PM) Amazon Prime now has PrimeMusic included. 1 million + songs free to stream. Will definitely have to check it out and will probably cancel my google play music account. mmm...this is a tough one for me. I really like GPlay Music All Access and am locked in at the intro rate. It's awesomely integrated into my Android devices, too. I'll have to at least give Amazon's offering a spin, though.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Jun 12, 2014 -> 05:26 PM) ? He's terribad defensively and can't hit very well. He's got a good arm so I guess he has that going for him. He probably isn't going anywhere but that's only because there is no one can take his spot. IMO he's fielded very well for us and he's looked pretty good at the dish at times, too. Before ADA heated up, he deserved a shot to take his place

The Carmelo to MIA thing sounds like such utter bulls*** I can't believe anyone takes it seriously. I refuse to until there are names on the dotted lines.

Moises has played really, really well for the Sox. No reason to think he's going to lose his job.

USPS has to raise all of the money for those pensions/benefits, yes? That's the whole issue with their budget - they have to have over 70 years of retirement benefits in the bank at all times. The USPS represents, to me, the thing I hate most about today's mainstream conservatives. They want USPS run like a private business because they think that works better. We see a degradation in an essential service because of this. However, because they are a government organization and must be (nobody would serve those remote areas otherwise), they still have to take directions from Congress, who does not fund them. It's like a stupid mixture of free market conservatism and authoritarian conservatism - I want free markets and I want to tell them what to do!

Suck it Tigers.

I'd like for someone to think of a way to get guns off the street (and by street, I mean the multitude of guns sitting in random people's houses) that doesn't involve government seizure. Not so much because I'm against that happening, but because if we can think of a way to manage the former it might actually happen. We have more guns than human beings owned by civilians in the USA. This is a problem. I'm all for the "common sense" regulation - it won't work wonders for the general gun violence issue, but it will deter the mass shootings that have such a dramatic societal cost. Still, though, we can't do anything meaningful without getting some of these guns to go away. They don't just deteriorate, they're pretty much good to go no matter how little they are used.

Carmelo isn't going to do that. Melo is interested in 2 things and might be willing to forgo one of them: 1. Legacy 2. Money He'd lose both if he went to Miami

Even if Gordon has improved, he's about to get expensive and then we lose control the year after that. Even if he has turned a corner, it makes all kinds of sense to cut ties with him. Put me on the record - if we sell high on Gordon and he turns into a perennial all-star, I don't care. We've seen too much bad for this to make sense. There is little incentive to keep him considering how pricey he gets next year in his final year of arb...and if he becomes worth that high price tag, then we have to pay him an assload as a FA to keep him around. I'll let him prove himself for somebody else and we can always think about signing him as a FA. For now, we have Semien, Johnson, Sanchez, and Saladino that could all contribute at that position. Hell, I'm still on the "teach Conor Gillaspie 2B" bandwagon.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 10, 2014 -> 05:14 PM) Food for thought: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014...ters-murder.php edit: and for those that will surely respond with "correlation does not mean causation," at minimum this suggests there isn't some wild increase in murders with concealed carry, which is often the (irrational) fear. There's some awful statistical inference going on in that "study," which has the rigor of an undergrad research project. Other highly significant predictors of gun violence found: presence of young people, rural vs urban (more gun violence in rural areas per capita), alcohol consumption, how white the population is. Of those with any statistical significance, the presence of the federal ban or a state-level CCW "may issue" or outright ban were the least significant predictors. Even so, the entire method was bad IMO - the fixed effects regression is best for accounting for variables that you have not accounted for so that you don't have results that are biased due to some unforeseen covariance. For instance, this method would help me tell whether something was really affected by race or if something else correlated with race was the significant factor. But they included all of the expected extraneous factors and we get a nasty "hey look, everything's significant" result. A good rule of thumb is that when everything appears significant, you probably have made a procedural mistake or you have not yet included the significant factor