Jake

His average fastball velocity dropped 2mph from 2011 to 2012 and dropped .2 more in 2013. This screams, "high ERAs are not bad luck!" to me

Nobody said that, it's actually much better. J'Marcus Webb rated as our best, and his aggregate rating over 16 games would put him as our 5th best this year. PFF does say, though, that our line is still bad at pass blocking. Jay was "under pressure" in 38.7% of his dropbacks this year. Peyton Manning (whose line is on the opposite end of the spectrum) was under pressure on 21% of dropbacks. This is actually a portion of a percent higher than the past two years, but much lower than 2010 when it was off the charts (43%). He was at 22% in Denver as well, btw, and 28% in his first year in Chi-town. Another way to look at it is pass blocking efficiency for our line. On 45.7% of dropbacks, Jay was hurried, hit, or sacked. 22% for Manning. What might really blow your mind is that almost half these hurries/hits/sacks came from Jordan Mills. Replace Mills with an average player (roughly the level of play from Webb last year, fwiw) and our pass blocking rating goes to middle of the pack for the league. This statistic is even worse than Arizona, whose PFF rating is actually much worse than ours. PFF gives relative weights to hurries, hits, and sacks. Jay has been hit and sacked relatively little given the amount of pressures and hurries he's had, which is likely due to scheme and decision-making. Our line seems better because 1. The majority of the bad is concentrated on one player and 2. we have an o-coordinator that can scheme to cover up our weaknesses.

Jesus, that's really bad. Francisco Liriano would be a 100 million dollar man on this market

What I will now refer to as "tough luck" league - 2nd most points scored, 3-4 record

I'd be interested to hear Buddy Bell or someone comment on that. (Trayce)

Don't talk about the line as proof that you can rebuild things quickly. PFF ranks us second to worst in pass blocking (6th best at run block, though). The bottom 3 on pass blocking: Long, Bushrod, Mills in that order. Mills being the worst as well as PFF's worst tackle in football. He leads the league in QB hurries surrendered by a fairly large margin; Bushrod is 10th worst and Mills has allowed twice as many. Slauson has been our best lineman, according to their stats, with nobody else having a markedly positive impact. The only thing that you can improve right away is your coaching staff, it seems, which has been good enough to cover up a really iffy line.

I hope to get a Mac whenever I can afford one. Very sad that my MBP pooped out. I think Mac OS X is the absolute best operating system. If anyone wants to get rid of their Mac for cheap, hit me up

Jay is an excellent fit and is, honestly, a lot like Rich Gannon - they act like him having a bigger arm than Gannon simply makes him "different" than Gannon. Jay happens to be highly talented. Sweet. He's a great fit for the offense we're running. I'm sure they'll consider everything, but it will be very difficult to sell letting the best QB we've ever had go with so many other veteran assets on offense. If I'm letting Jay go, I'm probably cutting Forte as well and going with Bush for the near future. You sure as s*** aren't going to stick a rookie on an offense with so many high-salaried stars

I'm not convinced that Headley would outproduce Gillaspie by very much

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Oct 22, 2013 -> 01:57 PM) Everything creates jobs. Sometimes I hate myself because I cant remember this one economist, but basically the idea was that everything adds to the pie. That a criminal is a job creator because criminals = police, security systems, jails, judges, lawyers, etc. of course.... that means the system will be vulnerable to changes in the amount of criminals. the "market correction" if our prison systems collapsed due to the release of a huge portion of inmate would be extremely painful

What do folks think of Carnegie - basically, he felt (maybe I should say "he said") that the most immoral thing a rich person could do is hold onto money. His hope is that all such people would invest the money into their communities. In his case, he did a great deal of that and it is the only thing that has allowed history to have any kindness in judging him. He knew that he could never convince anyone to do this, so he advocated for a very, very steep estate tax: he didn't think you should pass much at all down to your children, just a little security and by no means a fortune.

At least we can all agree that Detroit not winning is the prime outcome. Things get more difficult for them with each coming year

This might be a stretch, but I'd like to go with Chris Beck. There have been some big question marks about his production vs peripherals, so I think he is a good candidate to really put it into overdrive and grab some starts in MLB at the end of the year.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Oct 21, 2013 -> 12:19 PM) ...and speaking on this thread, this is actually a very interesting subject. I know quite a few people that view me as rich, and I'm really not, but it would be impossible to convince them of that. In comparison, it may appear that way, but a lot of the reality behind it is overlooked. First, my wife is a stay at home mom, we have two kids, etc. Outside of my mortgage, I have no debt. Now, an interesting thing about Facebook, Twitter, and other such social media is it allows us to do is silently observe people. It doesn't take long for me to realize why I'm viewed as rich because I always seem to have money, while they view themselves as poor. All one needs to do is look at their timeline to see where they spend all their money ... which is eating out seemingly EVERY DAY. The last place I ate out at was Buffalo Wild Wings...29$. Meanwhile, I see picture after picture of these "poor" people at Blackhawks games, Bears games, restaurants, etc... Yes, I'm rich then. Because I don't spend more than I make. The worst part ... when your success is attributed to luck. Yes, my company pays me what they pay me because I'm lucky. That's what it is. There is actually a lot of research demonstrating the relative opposite of what you're describing (but exactly what you're embodying in your observation). When we "silently observe people" via Facebook, we see the best possible version of their life. People think their friends on facebook are happier and richer than they really are. This is because they will post pictures from the Blackhawks game, but not of the ramen for dinner/breakfast or the trailer they live in, etc. If people with little money want to save up to see hockey games, so be it. At some point, many people realize the system is going to f*** them and they just want to squeeze some happiness out of their existence. If I was told it wouldn't be financially prudent to ever go to pro sports games, eat out, etc. I'd spend "frivolously" to make sure it did happen when I could make it happen.

You don't spend just because you feel bad if you don't spend $X. Our available money will determine how much we can spend, but not how much we will. Hahn isn't going to hand out/take on crap contracts just to make sure we hit our budget ceiling. It just gives him the flexibility to spend the maximum appropriate amount on a given player.

McCown is smart and tough. He's not afraid of the spotlight or the pressure and is reasonably good at not making backbreaking mistakes because of it. His mistakes will be due to the deficiencies in his talent. There are too many weapons on offense to try to tear it down and roll the dice on a random rookie QB. It almost never makes sense to "rebuild" in the NFL anyway since it typically can be done in very short order

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1889carnegie.asp Andrew Carnegie

I would definitely try to sign him. I'd offer a lot. I wouldn't, necessarily, offer the most. If, for instance, we can push the Cubs into giving a catcher $20 million for 5 years...that sounds great to me.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Oct 21, 2013 -> 10:11 AM) supposed to be released this afternoon. Emery has a press conference scheduled for around 1:30, Trestman at 12:30 They've suggested that word on the MRI will come sometime after those press conferences

http://espn.go.com/mlb/blog/_/name/stark_j...more-parity-nfl http://espn.go.com/mlb/blog/_/name/stark_jayson/id/7420412/ http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20...lb&c_id=mlb Each progressively gets more out of date, but the good points remain. People just look at salary discrepancy and assume MLB has less parity, when it arguably has more. Especially consider the amount of games played. If the NFL has parity, that means you need lots of games to figure out who is best. They don't play a lot of games, especially in the postseason. Some of their change is likely random variation, where random variation is much less likely to explain playoff position in baseball, given they have 162 games to sort it all out. Then you get into the playoffs and play actual series to determine the best team, rather than one game that again is highly susceptible to flukes. The NFL passes off flukes as parity and still doesn't have the parity of MLB

The treatment of D Rose in that NBA 2K14 highlight is bogus. He shows up for a second, then gets dunked on by Kobe, then they let Anthony Davis dunk on people and look awesome while you never see Rose again. Get your s*** together.

I like Pablo, but yeah, you can't give up long-term pieces to get a guy like that on the last year of his deal.

bleh, my "tough luck" team really earned its loss this week. Lost Foster in the first quarter while DeSean Jackson, Giovani Bernard, Tony Gonzalez, Vincent Brown all played like s***. Rivers was mortal as well. Wasted great games from Gronk, NE defense, Adam Vinatieri

If you want to think of this season as almost lost regardless of a Cutler injury due to the defense, then maybe a Cutler injury would be a blessing in disguise as it should really drive his price down.

It's going to be pretty sweet if Derrick has somehow improved