Jake

Wow, Stafford. What a ballsy play

Well, starting RG3 over Vick seems like a good move so far. Other than that, this has been a tough week in both of my leagues in terms of byes

I think St. Louis Cardinals are the ones who know the most pain. I mean, just listen to them

QUOTE (Tex @ Oct 27, 2013 -> 09:43 AM) True. I no longer can track how many days I have worn a set of contact lenses on a calendar, it takes my phone and an app. oh! awesome idea!

Nobody is going to argue that there is bound to be some correlation between income and intelligence, but income is about as useful to measure intelligence as skin color is useful to predict criminality (not very useful)

There is not support for allowing hospitals to deny care - this is because we feel like we shouldn't have the ability to heal sick people and withhold it. Given that, we need to have a better system for distributing care than "poor people show up in emergency room" poor being used loosely here, since many healthcare is too expensive for many people that I would never consider poor

I think if he left his feet on the ground, it isn't called. Craig might have been safe, too, though.

I'm going to say that we don't know anything about this guy. Basically, his public statements tell us that he believes in swinging at good pitches and taking bad ones. Great. We know he'd make a great little league parent. Beyond that, everything is TBD

I'm a big fan of Turner. Lots and lots of skills. Lots of things would have to go wrong for him not to be a decent player. Sky's the limit if most things go right. Would be a huge challenge for player development, because this isn't just a raw toolsy guy. However, he will need some guidance (in all likelihood) to find his identity at the plate, especially as his body matures. He would be a guy that absolutely cannot post horrific numbers somewhere ala Hawkins, Mitchell

It isn't that a bundle of prospects wouldn't be a nice return for Quintana. The thing is, older players can get you bundles of prospects (Garza, for instance). What a young pitcher can get you that free agency and veterans can't get you is another young MLB player. A player like Lawrie isn't typically available except for another young player that has that kind of potential payoff. You can think of other guys. Even Gordon Beckham never seemed like he ought to be traded because the value of a non-horrible, young, talented MLB player is high.

Wow. I forgot Damaso and Blum. BLUM! I'm most disappointed that I forgot Blum. Damaso wasn't as important to that team as he was to other Sox teams, so I can see why I forgot him. Jeez, I suck. I just watched that home run yesterday on youtube.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Oct 25, 2013 -> 02:34 PM) Best defensive DH of all time is Rafael Palmeiro. I raise you Mark Kotsay

QUOTE (knightni @ Oct 26, 2013 -> 10:33 AM) Just got my first smart phone. This s*** is amazing, yo. Prepare to open up the app store whenever you are facing a problem. I remember getting a package in the mail and opening up the app store to see about a knife. Yep, that happened

I'm not at all interested in having Samardzija on my team and I don't think they should get anything too good for him in trade

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Oct 25, 2013 -> 01:22 PM) DJ Williams and 2016 G Zach Norvell are unofficially visiting as well, huge weekend for recruiting. Surprising to me that they have other recruits coming at the same time, I wouldn't want Cliff to feel like our attention is divided

I believe in JFG

Pitch recognition is affected a great deal by mechanics and approach. Viciedo's pitch recognition magically gets better when he keeps his weight back on his load step. This is because it gives his body and hands the chance to adjust to the pitch. When he or anyone else can't keep their weight back, there is usually just one pitch they can hit (whichever one they are timed for). Your mental approach will also affect pitch recognition. A guy with a really aggressive mindset will do poorly adjusting to offspeed pitches. If you back it off too much, you won't hit fastballs. Guys that struggle to hit fastballs will get so aggressive, trying to catch up to heaters, that they start swinging at bulls*** offspeed stuff because they are cheating so much mentally. There are so many things that affect pitch recognition that it is really fairly difficult to tell if a guy has it or not. Bad mechanics, approach, etc. can easily overshadow these things. If guys have bad mechanics, bad approach, and still rake, that probably means they have excellent pitch recognition.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 25, 2013 -> 09:18 AM) She had been on the job for a matter of weeks, she was paid like $26k so it's not like she's the brightest person in the department , and she claims that she was never told anything about talking with the media (a claim I believe given she's a call center employee). Ohhhh, so people making less money aren't very smart. This will make my evaluations of people much easier

Seems like this guy's philosophy is geared towards solving a problem that we don't have.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Oct 23, 2013 -> 04:23 PM) Everyone still has the ability to vote to change the law right? So if all of these people want to do these things, why not just vote to change the law? Youre entire paragraph can be summed up into a simply into: Life isnt fair. But the question we have to ask is, so what? We have to acknowledge life isnt fair and then we have to try and create a baseline of "fairness". To me its more important that people get access to free public education, free public healthcare, roads and other stuff. What isnt so important is whether or not everyone can pay to break the law. Because if that means regular people get all the other stuff (education, healthcare) so what. Sometimes the ends justifies the means. Governments exist to inject fairness into chaos. The reaction to unfairness under government rule shouldn't be, "forget about fairness. We tried fairness and it didn't work." We don't need to undermine the rule of law to give people free education, healthcare, roads, and other stuff. Most industrialized countries offer all of these things. You simply tax people. To sell off the rule of law is to violate the basics of the social contract. One of the basic truths that makes us accept our role in society is the knowledge that there are certain things that apply to everybody. The more special privileges you allow the upper class to have, the more class division will exist. While there are issues of tax unfairness and many lifestyle benefits that go along with wealth, our social order is invested in the attempt to hold all people under the same set of expectations. Right now, if a rich person gets off unfairly because of their celebrity or wealth, that pisses us off. We try to fix the system to prevent further abuses. We shame that person. If the system suddenly tried to allow the wealthy to buy their way out of legal trouble, it brings into question the reasons for existence in the first place. Why have laws? If you can buy your way out of law, then the law doesn't seem proper in the first place. Even when we disagree on laws, the spirit of a law's intent makes us respect it. A law whose apparent reason for existence is government profit offends us; think about our reaction to supposed "quotas" for traffic stops. We could make a law, for instance, that you can only have one child...unless you buy the right to more (China). Unfortunately, this redistributes one of the most important human experience into the upper class. Getting "free education, healthcare, roads, and other stuff" in exchange for undermining the entire purpose of governance doesn't make sense. You see this as everyone benefiting from the rich getting what they want. The question is, why would people accept this? They wouldn't, unless they thought it was the only way to get these services from the government: this is patently untrue, as we see all over the world and in our own history. This proposal amounts to coercion, the illusion of freedom. You give the public a choice of "no public goods, everyone follows the same rules" or "public goods, you can buy your way out of select violations of law," but these are not the choices. The choices are, "the wealthy pay a fair share of their earnings to the public goods that make their wealth possible and follow the same rules as everyone else" or "the wealthy buy their way out of laws, violate the basics of the social contracts, and there is little evidence that they get more or better benefits from the government." There are many other choices in between and outside these as well, and most of them don't involve a fundamental loss of liberty allowed by bribery.

Why are we pretending that healthcare reform has anything to do with "helping people get back to work"? These are not mutually exclusive and, again, it is disingenuous for conservatives to talk about legislating for jobs. That just means tax cuts, which we know doesn't create jobs. If conservatives were willing to invest in infrastructure, research, and education, things that create jobs and public goods, we'd have no sequester and the legislation would be flying through. And quit pretending that the people getting covered under the ACA somehow had it good before. They weren't getting "healthcare for free," they were getting emergency care that you were paying for. The ACA is not only trying to do one of the most basic things a government should do, it is helping those same people that are out of the workforce that you are so worried about.

I wouldn't have fired her, I don't think, but you shouldn't be telling members of the media (while at your job, for Christ's sake) that you don't think people like your employer's product

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Oct 24, 2013 -> 09:57 AM) He also seems to be injured frequently. That would not be great Definitely. I actually think it looks like a fair deal, where it is tough to say which team will win. They get what seems to be a higher degree of certainty, we get more talent at a position that is weak on our squad and in the league on the whole. Lawrie has done fine during injury-riddled seasons and may really break out if healthy. Q has been healthy and relatively consistent, but not dominant. A very interesting deal.

You guys are seriously underrating Brett Lawrie. He has been a "disappointment" so far and has been posting near 100 wRC+ with very good defense. Steamer has him posting a 110 wRC+ and 3.0 WAR over 130 games next year. That would be great.

QUOTE (bucket-of-suck @ Oct 23, 2013 -> 01:47 PM) Could be Quintana to Toronto for 3B Lawrie and RHP Aaron Sanchez. This is exactly what I would be hoping for. Q is more certain to be a 3+ WAR player, but Lawrie has the chance to bust out and be a 5+ WAR player at a thin position