Jake

I no longer carry my HTC One in a case because it is extremely sturdy and I've seen it be torture-tested by CNET, so I know it can take a beating and still be functional. It doesn't show wear easily because of the aluminum, so the minor scuffs and such aren't there. I use a screen protector that I honestly never even notice, because I know that I would end up scratching it. Love the glass on this thing though, as that has taken impacts a couple times and shows no signs of damage. I broke two iPhone 4 screens -- those things were built very poorly. I'm not an amazingly careful person by any stretch, but the impacts that broke those screens were ridiculously light. I was using a case on those, too, of course. For me, it is basically an "it depends" proposition. Depends on the phone, build material, what I'm going to do with it, etc. I put a case on my tablet because I toss it in my backpack and I want it to be somewhat protected from all of the things rubbing up against and possibly the weight of those things.

Curved/flexible phones? Anyone think these have appeal? I just don't see it right now.

I mean, maybe he'll kick ass? Have to wonder if we have something arranged to send Dunn out of town

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Dec 4, 2013 -> 08:53 AM) My thoughts exactly. Gotta play the veterans, they've earned it. We fired Ozzie and cut Darin Erstad a long time ago

Enough teams will start saying this and then his price will go back up to where it was speculated originally

I can't wait for when some of those guys are flops and we will all agree that the teams that picked them were dumb and they were clearly bad picks

Let's be real, Salty sucks. He has one season in his career above 1.9 WAR, strikes out more than Adam Dunn, and was cut loose in favor of AJP after being benched in favor of David Ross in the World Series

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Dec 3, 2013 -> 08:04 PM) Swapping Cano for Ellsbury probably makes the Yankees worse, not better. What was the point of this signing if they can't keep their biggest bat? Also getting McCann and pursuing Stephen Drew and Omar Infante, things that probably aren't possible if they are spending on Cano. That is, unless they know something about the ARod case that we don't...

I mean, if we wanted him we could pay him. But it wouldn't be a good allocation of our resources at the moment

This has a high probability of being a big problem in the future. I see no way they sign Cano at this point.

If someone said I can have Salty for 3/21 or Beltran for 3/48, I'm picking Salty a thousand times though

QUOTE (chw42 @ Dec 3, 2013 -> 02:05 PM) At $1400, you might as well build your own computer. That setup you have might cost you $1000 + whatever it costs for the monitor (won't be touch screen though). I thought about doing that. At this point, I have so much stuff going on that I can't really dick around with building a computer. I also value the touch screen quite a bit, as well as not having a tower. The low imprint is a big bonus for me as I expect to be living in shared spaces for the immediate future. I ended up paying quite a bit more to get the higher resolution (the other choice being 1920x1080), since I felt like poor resolution was something that would likely lead to me wanting to replace it. The main alternative would have been an iMac, but for 27" it was quite a bit more for not as much/similar specs (7200 RPM HDD on iMac, but a fast i5 instead of i7, 1GB GPU vs 2GB GPU on the Lenovo, same RAM, no touch screen but similar resolution)

I'm not going to get worked up about Hahn passing on him. I might have paid him that much, but he's a super-duper-high strikeout player that has had one good season in his career in a pretty decent lineup

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Dec 3, 2013 -> 03:20 PM) You are CONSTANTLY deriding these metrics by using them in a context for which they are NOT meant to be used. These numbers are only inaccurate if you insist on asking them to do things they are not designed to do. They are NOT "the end all," whatever that even means, and absolutely nobody is claiming otherwise. The reason no one has EVER suggested that we "cancel the playoffs and give a WAR trophy" is because that's totally ridiculous. WAR exists in order to allow us to try to compare the sum of different players' contributions under a common frame of reference -- and that is EXACTLY how lasttrip just used it, and it lended an interesting insight to the discussion. It was never meant to be able to predict team W-L records or to imply that adding X player will add exactly Y wins to a team. It is a metric that STRIPS CONTEXT and it would therefore be ridiculous to expect it to hold up when context is introduced. It gives us a frame of reference, DA. That's it. Please stop pretending it's not useful just because it can be misapplied. The most significant misuse of statistics is using bWAR. Their s*** is all f***ed up. FanGraphs. Please. They have better offensive, defensive, and pitching metrics to calculate WAR.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Dec 3, 2013 -> 10:32 AM) My S4 acts as a remote for any TV, smart or not. Yeah, my One does that -- Google Now always notifies me when I'm at my parents' place because they have a Samsung TV. Asks if I'm watching, but I've never fiddled with it

With the exception of the McCann signing, which I thought could get a lot more expensive, teams seem happy to pay catchers so long as they don't have to pay them for a long time

Isn't there some cool stuff you can do with Samsung Smart TVs and Android phones?

I had a change of heart on my computer, based in part on the fact that my shipping was delayed indefinitely, so I suspect they may be out of stock. So now...for $1400 I get the next year's model, the A730 i7-4700MQ processor 2.40 GHz 6MB cache 8 GB DDR3 1600 MHz RAM NVIDIA GeForce GT745M 2GB GPU 27" AIO QHD Multi-Touch 2560x1440 monitor 1TB 5400 RPM HDD Blu-Ray drive The HDD is the only thing holding it back from being a "perfect" computer IMO

Thibs is going to play Luol 60 minutes during practice as punishment for the team's defensive breakdown

And yeah, I love that I can make my phone work exactly the way I want it to. Change for the sake of change is okay, but the beauty of it is that it actually functions for me. My workflow is all about the customizations I've made on my Android devices. Also, it is really immature at this point, but Windows is taking notes from Apple and really unifying their OS across devices. I really like the direction they are going -- at this point, they are just in dire need of app development over anything else. They have their stuff on some really great hardware, their UI is unique, attractive, and functional, and the company has been acting like they really want to do things differently. I sent in a "complaint" about a bug in an app and they emailed me back telling me that their developers were part of the way done in patching it and that they appreciated the input

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Dec 2, 2013 -> 07:11 PM) I was deciding between the S4 and Nexus 5. I can't argue free and the resale value better on the S4. I already hate all the bloatware on these f***ing android phones (or at least this android phone). I know the IOS had some stuff but jesus, this thing seems to have way more. And no, I don't want to f***ing root it. Samsung is the king of bloatware. I've been actively avoiding their stuff because their UI is slow and the design is yucky. Nexus 5 is literally zero bloatware and can have nice resale value, especially when they randomly go out of stock in the Play Store. S4 has some really cool features though and is in general a top-notch device, not trying to say you screwed up

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Dec 2, 2013 -> 12:55 PM) He's never been that good and he hasn't played like a starting MLB 2nd baseman. He's at the point where his salary would start going up from arbitration and there's no reason to pay him more money to be a below-average 2b. You can call up 27 year olds from the minors to do that for minimum salary. That he's had better numbers than Beckham is an indictment of Beckham more than anything, it shows how bad Beckham has been. Beckham career wRC+ - 86 2014 projection - 92 Getz career wRC+ - 67 2014 projection - 72 QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Dec 2, 2013 -> 07:27 PM) Wow, apparently the Yankees are not willing to offer any more than 7 yrs/$175M for Cano. That comes out to $25M a year. That's the most realistic figure I've seen so far. I wouldn't want the Sox to pay that, but it's barely above what I'd probably offer, which would be 7 yrs/$155M. I'd go 7/175 with Cano. I'd try to frontload, but I'd do it.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Dec 2, 2013 -> 08:18 PM) Remember when this franchise went ahead with Axelrod over Santiago? But we needed a good LH middle reliever that gets righties out better than lefties!

Sounds like JR needs to start an expansion team, the Chicago White Tenders