Jake

The problem with Sanchez is how low his upside is. 2 homers in 1800+ PAs so far in his career and not a whole lot of other XBH either. He's a guy who looks like he will have to bat .300 to be worth a damn at the plate

I just love my Roku or else I would check out Chromecast

Yeah, the broadcasters don't want to be discussing the definitions and validity of sabermetrics very often

Maybe it doesn't matter if all the games sell out when the teams continue to make money? I'm just as much of a baseball fan as ever and while I want to go to games, there's only so much I will do. I make at least one game a year, sometimes two. A playoff team would probably increase that to three or four (or would have under my previous living circumstances). I watch the team all the time, though. I miss maybe 15 games per year on TV. I'm profitable

Mr. Unreliable!

QUOTE (flavum @ May 3, 2014 -> 01:04 PM) De Aza LF Beckham 2B Abreu 1B Dunn DH Viciedo RF Ramirez SS Danks CF Flowers C Semien 3B I usually don't get very worked up about batting orders, but I was already getting pissed about having our worst hitter batting in front of Abreu. Now we have our second worst hitter batting in front of our worst hitter who is in front of our best hitter. Sheesh

I'm skeptical about how much anyone earning that much in a non-contract season can net you midseason. Most teams max out their budget in the offseason, making it difficult to accommodate a shiny new >$10M/year shortstop.

I love how even with Rizzo off to a good start, Cashner still looks like he'll be the more valuable player in the deal at a much more important position

He showed some real good signs last time out. I wouldn't mind giving him another start if he looks decent again, but it's certainly something I'd look at on a start-by-start basis

The absolute guarantee is given, followed by guarantee plus all arb. players, followed by all arb. players plus all team options. Note that I don't have Arb players repeat and in those final seasons, you have some chunk of payroll being eaten up by the arbitration of players that probably won't be getting paid arbitration. For the White Sox, for instance, you have guys like Jared Mitchell being accounted for.

Boras would likely listen to an offer that isn't way overslot if we can make some sort of promise about starting his service time, ala Chris Sale. It'd shock me if Rodon wouldn't be ready to act as a LOOGY by end of season

If I had to have one or the other, I'd probably take Paulino. I can hide a crap pitcher who might come around, it's hard for me to hide a redundant, slow, bad-fielding infielder on a bench that already includes Paul Konerko

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Apr 30, 2014 -> 02:32 PM) How about Yankees fans chanting "sellout" at Robinson Cano? Sweet Jesus, talk about the pot calling the kettle black

FWIW, catchers are notorious for being very late bloomers. Not uncommon for very decent catchers to seem to come out of nowhere when they are 27-30 years old. Honestly, Flowers is the type of guy that is on a very conventional catcher career track. I don't know that he will be one that actually turns into a good starting catcher, but spending a long time in the minors, then some unexceptional years as a backup, an unexceptional run as a starter, and then finally getting it at an advanced age is a pretty common deal.

I'm surprised he said that much - since he did, it makes me wonder if something funny happened with Puig's defection...maybe Abreu was to be involved, maybe Puig was supposed to be a part of Abreu's defection, something like that.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ May 1, 2014 -> 08:42 AM) Just so it's said, my initial response is "why am I hearing about this before peer review"? My impression is that this has already passed the internal and external double-blind peer review process and is now in final revisions as it awaits printing

I was surprised to see two faces on the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night: Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, two of the more respected political scientists in all of academia. They are both quantitative researchers and they were there to promote...a scientifically rigorous research article. I point this out because there are often academics on these shows, but this is usually to promote their "I have tenure and now write non-academic drivel to make money off of my reputation" books. Instead, they were there to promote an article coming out in Perspectives on Politics, arguably the most presitigous journal in the field. What were their findings? Well, they were bleak. They tested four different theories of democracy: "majoritarian electoral democracy," "economic elite domination," "majoritarian pluralism," and "biased pluralism." The latter two refer to two interest group-based approaches to democracy, which means a way to think about electoral politics by looking at interest groups, which might seem to have more sway than individual voters - "majoritarian pluralism" would be a system in which there is a marketplace of ideas between interest groups that is generally fair. "Biased pluralism" would be such a marketplace in which a few groups dominate more than their numbers would dictate. The former pair of theories refer to populist approaches - majoritarian electoral democracy is basically your ideal of democracy, in which majority opinion tends to be represented in legislative outcomes. Economic elite domination means that the tastes/preferences of the wealthiest are represented in legislative outcomes. The findings in a nutshell: there is strong evidence in support of economic elite domination and biased pluralism. I'll let the researchers speak for themselves a little bit... The key here is that the researchers had access to absolutely perfect data and over a very long period of time. They had nearly 2,000 cases over the course of 13 years in which representative samples of Americans were asked to express a favor/oppose opinion on policy issues that lend themselves to that kind of opinion (issues with significant shades of gray were excluded) and, in each case, the researchers had income information on those people expressing those opinions. Now with a decent amount of time since the surveys have finished, we have a pretty good impression of whether government was ever going to listen to those opinions (nobody is holding out hope for the public opinion of 2002 to finally make its presence felt in Congress). This is a particularly striking point. Benjamin Page, the researcher I'm more familiar with out of the two, has made a name for himself by demonstrating the responsiveness of politics to the opinions of the average citizen. This research contradicts his previous research in a big way by adding this new variable (tastes of the elite) and contrasting it with the average citizen. The government only seems responsive to the average citizen because, occasionally, average citizens and elites have the same opinion. When you just look at the cases where elites and average people disagree, average people usually lose. An important thing to think about for those that might just say that it's a good thing that we might be ruled by elites. Elites are not intrinsically any more likely to be selfless or benevolent, not to even mention the extent to which they may not understand the lived realities of the people they may or may not be interested in helping. Full study, in near-final draft form, available here: https://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%2...es%203-7-14.pdf

They just want us to get a better draft pick! /green

I would send down Semien and Danks

QUOTE (MexSoxFan#1 @ Apr 29, 2014 -> 12:34 PM) http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories/20...h-distribution/ Ok, so I might've been wrong on the 3rd world part but my point still stands. Lot's of poor people, and pretty pissed off that the government is spending so much money on the WC and Olympics instead of on education, health services, public transportation, infrastructure, etc... Hmm, I wonder what other countries suffer from profound inequality while the government neglects spending on education, health, public transport, and infrastructure

Of course, it would be impossible for Booz to skip media session in order to check on status of fighting girlfriend

It would be hard for me to go for more than one year at a time with Dunner.

Bring on the Melo and/or random Clippers players

If anyone is at fault here, it's clearly ptatc. He's been sabotaging players for his own profit for years!!

Pitch counts are one of several useful tools. The pitch counts on Chris really aren't that bad, though. 112 is high, but over the course of 4 starts it really isn't insane.