Balta1701

QUOTE(redandwhite @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 04:07 PM) 26 and 35 at bats into the month respectively doesn't prove much. As Tony pointed out Crede's been hitting the hell out of the ball this month, I just tend to favor what Ozuna does in the ninth spot over Crede. Last nights lead off double in the 8th also looms large in my mind aswell, considering the life that he showed compared to Crede who had none in his ninth inning at bat. Crede is an incredibly streaky hitter. When he gets going...you want him in that lineup. Conversely, when he get cold, he's almost better on the bench. He's going well now...we should try to take advantage of it.

We have got to do something to get Rally Crede's into the ballpark. Could you imagine the last game of the regular season and 35,000 people twirling around Rally Crede's?

QUOTE(Tony82087 @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 04:03 PM) Joe has also been hitting the ball well since coming back. Im fine with Joe at the hot corner for now. BTW, I love EVERYONE with the Rally av. Seriously...we need to do something to try to get Rally Crede's into the ballpark.

QUOTE(redandwhite @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 03:50 PM) Pablo Ozuna should be starting at third. Joe Crede is hitting .423 in September. Pablo Ozuna is hitting .194 in September.

Personally, I find his obsession with sexual relations involving Ducks and Goats (2nd link) far more disturbing.

QUOTE(The Ginger Kid @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 03:28 PM) You are not alone my friend. Best record in baseball? One of only two with a winning percentage over .600? 31 games over .500? A 3 game lead in the loss column? These are reasons to panic? The past is past. Play ball! Um, we have the 2nd best record in baseball, not the best.

QUOTE(santo=dorf @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 03:31 PM) The rehaul started in the middle of 2002, so that's two and a half years of rebuilding. Didn't KW try to trade Magglio to Boston as part of the A-Rod only to have Boston (I would love to see you try and spin that one on KW) f*** up? Didn't KW try to trade Magglio to the Braves for Andruw Jones, but it didn't go down because Maggs never recovered and the Braves went back into contention? Oh great, now I just gave you ammo how KW f***ed up a potential Jones-Ordonez deal. Actually if my memory is working well, KW tried to deal Ordonez to the Bravos, but it didn't work out because KW wanted to get a pitcher (Russ Ortiz) back along with Jones, and the Braves weren't willing to part with both a pitcher and Jones in exchange for 1 bat. In the Boston deal...I believe we'd have wound up with Nomar. Thank God Boston screwed that up. (Nomar also btw had 1 year left on his contract at the time...the exact same duration as Ordonez had left...so it really wouldn't have helped us in terms of finding people that we can hold onto unless we got a quality prospect to go along with Nomar)

Here's a new part of the "why weren't the New Orleans buses used" question that I haven't heard before...Link

You know...something tells me there are going to be so many rally Crede avatars in this game thread that I'll end up panicking because I'll feel surrounded by them.

QUOTE(ZoomSlowik @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 03:03 PM) Don't make the Indians out to be this ungodly good team with a superb manager. They're where they are right now because they traded off the bulk of their veterans while they were still decent and have been brutal since 2000. In breaking up their team, they somehow convinced Montreal to give up most of their farm system for Bartolo Colon, managed to get Hafner and I think Hafner for almost nothing and I believe they drafted Sabathia. They managed to have like all of their prospects pan out over that stretch (with the exception of Brandon Phillips). No matter how good your scouting in that takes some luck. Plus, they decided to give a decent sum of money to Juan Gonzalez, and I'll eat an Indians hat if Millwood pitches this well for the rest of his contract. This formula, by the way, is something the White Sox have been very unwilling to do except for 1 year...1998, the infamous surrender trade. Williams may very well have started to change that last year with the Lee deal. But think about this...we lost Ordonez for nada. We lost Valentin for Nada. We lost Bartolo Colon for nada. In each case, we made the decision to try to win rather than trading the guy when they had less than 1 season left on their contract and we could have gotten something for them. This year, we've done the same thing with Konerko, and potentially Thomas and Everett. Next year, we could be on the hook for the same thing with Garland, AJ, Dye, and a couple others. Every year, we're close. As one person pointed out in a different post, we tend to have a winning record or a .500 record almost every year. This makes our guys very unwilling to trade players. Remember last year when I believe there was some discussion of an Ordonez for Andruw Jones swap? KW's move with Carlos Lee was so masterful in my opinion because at the end of 2006, Carlos Lee will be a Free Agent. So instead of losing him for a consolation draft pick, we managed to get Podsednik, Viz, and a minor leaguer, instead of nothing. Unfortunately, if we can't resign people that we develop like Konerko and Lee...it helps the organization far more to just go ahead and dump them in the last year of hteir contracts, even if we're winning. The problem is...we're moderately close every single year, so there's no GM who wants to stand up and say "We're not going to win this year but we'll win 2 years down the road" when we're close to the race.

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 12:54 PM) This is the funniest thread ever. At least in Palehose. So...I'd just like to make sure of 1 thing...this entire thread is dedicated to calling Joe Crede a monkey, correct?

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 11:43 AM) For a visual of how fast this thing is blowing up, here is the radar loop. Look how much bigger, and how much more red there is in Rita, in just the short period of time on the loop This thing is going to be HUGE! http://www.intellicast.com/Local/USNationa...v=none&pid=none This thing is going to be huge because it's heading into the same waters that took Katrina from a category 1 to a category 5. The good news is that with time, it seems like most of the models have shown it starting to drift south, towards the southern part of Texas, and away from the areas that are already reeling. Hopefully no low pressure areas will appear and change that.

QUOTE(AddisonStSox @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 11:21 AM) Awesome, that adds some serious street-cred. 27 left... Losing one's mind sounds like a sane response to this month. Make it 26.

Why the Hell not...count me in.

QUOTE(fathom @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 10:35 AM) I don't feel as if our catchers have done a very good job over the last few months calling pitches in crucial situations. Of course, that has a lot to do with our pitchers just not executing. However, when I see Hermanson allow a game tying homer to Cuddyer, and Hermanson questions why he threw an inside slider, I just don't get the feeling that there's a great chemistry between the pitcher and our catchers now like there was earlier in the year. When you're winning...it's amazing how good your chemistry seems. When you're losing...well...that chemistry that was working so well? Yeah, bye bye.

QUOTE(aboz56 @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 09:41 AM) - Rowand could be gone, replaced by Anderson. More likely would be Dye being gone in my view and put Anderson in RF. - Marte moved for, well, whatever he could yield. Hopefully more than a one armed man. - Konerko gone via FA. Thomas gone via FA. Everett gone via FA. Rogowski or Gload gets a shot or you go get Tracy or Overbay. - El Duque moved for, well, whatever he could yield, similar to Marte. - If you can move Jose Contreras for a good bat, you do it. Otherwise, you keep him and talk about an extension. - McCarthy goes to the rotation. There are other moves that can be done as well. I think I like basically every single one of those moves save 1...letting Frank walk. If this team collapses, there will be exactly 1 reason to come out to the ballpark next year...to see Frank, if healthy, push 500. A couple other I might toss in there would be giving Borchard the Everett/Timo backup outfielder role with the thought that he can't possibly put up worse numbers than Timo. Trading Dye, who's value has gone significantly up this year since he actually stayed healthy the whole year.

QUOTE(aboz56 @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 09:48 AM) Buehrle is only 7-7 lifetime vs Cleveland with a 4.28. Westbrook, versus the Sox, is 4-6 with a 5.83. Against Cleveland THIS YEAR, Mark is 2-0 with an ERA of 2.11 in 3 starts. Against the Sox this year, Westbrook is 0-3 with a 4.95 ERA.

QUOTE(SoxFanForever @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 10:12 AM) Is there any evidence that KW is actually still alive? I haven't heard a peep out of the guy in months. I thought I read like 8 KW quotes in the papers this morning.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 10:11 AM) I don't think that would be much of a problem with the battery storage capacity that is available today in hybrids. Hybrid batteries only are really effective because they are being constantly recharged as you're breaking and as you're idling the engine. This is a totally different beast we're talking about here. You're talking instead about taking the battery and having it be the sole power source for the vehicle. The battery itself is driving the reaction of water into hydrogen. It seems to be a very efficient process, but the battery itself is still what is providing the energy to the whole system. It seems to me like a different mode of electric car...hopefully a more efficient one.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Sep 20, 2005 -> 10:12 AM) As would the incentive to come here illegally. I think that was sort of implied by my statement, but thanks for the clarification.

QUOTE(FlaSoxxJim @ Sep 19, 2005 -> 10:19 AM) Balta, I had a question. There's a lot of yahoos talking about heat extraction of oil from oil shale rock finally being technically feasible, if not yet economically so. Of course I hope they never try this on a commercial scale since it will be the beginning of the end of a lot of relatively intact hatural habitat out west. But when the oil yahoos hear stats that note we have like half the world's oil shale deposits, and that there are billions of gallons of oil locked up in the shale (regardles of theimpractibility of extraction), they start to hatch some wild schemes. What's your professional take? Is big energy going to turn more attention to the shale, other than the pilot heat-extraction studies that have been carried out so far? It is actually technically feasible...but the cost per barrel is prohibitive. Right now, the cost of producing 1 barrel of oil from oil shale is about $100-$125, depending on who's process you're using and what your source rock is. Think of it this way...to generate oil, what you need to do is take oil shale, bury it, expose it to slightly elevated temperatures, and let it decay. As time goes on, the oil that we know and love comes off of it as the organic matter itself decays. In order to process oil shale into fuel...we're basically taking the step that was formerly done by the Earth and having to do it ourselves. So in other words, there's a hell of a lot more processing done, and it takes a hell of a lot more energy to produce 1 barrel of oil. Therefore, the costs go up dramatically, and it becomes economically difficult to pull it off. Furthermore, this doesn't even begin to take into account the environmental problems associated with processing oil shale. Because it consumes quite a bit of energy in the refining process, plants that refine the stuff release a huge amount of pollution. On top of that, because the material they're processing hasn't gone through the natural refining step, you wind up with almost every possible impurity showing up in the material you're processing. Something has to be done with these impurities - most notably sulfur, but also nitrogen, sand, etc. When you process this stuff, you release a huge amount of sulfuric acid, nitric acid, other pollutants. And even on top of that, it's basically strip-mining on a massive scale, so you're also destroying a mountain and exposing everything in the mountain to air, which can create further problems. As a stop gap solution, oil shale might be able to buy you a few years after peak oil production arrives. But It's going to cost you a ton to do it, and the environmental impact will be huge.

If you want to stop illegal immigration, there is only 1 method to do it...go after the employers who hire the immigrants. Right now, there's a huge advantage to hire them...you can employ them for below minimum wage and avoid paying attention to other workplace safety rules. There has been basically no effort by any agency to slow this practice down. If there were a genuine reason for companies to not hire illegals...then suddenly, the jobs for illegals may very well dry up.

The key to making this feasable of course will again be the battery - it takes some sort of charge in order to make the whole system work. In other words, you need to be able to carry on board the automobile the power to drive the hydrogen production system.

QUOTE(Greg Hibbard @ Sep 19, 2005 -> 09:15 PM) However you slice it, Oakland is choking way worse than the Sox in September. Except of course, the team they're trying to keep up with, the Angels...is trying as hard as possible to keep the A's in that race too.

QUOTE(Flash Tizzle @ Sep 19, 2005 -> 09:14 PM) And if they lose tomorrow the result of the game is irrelevant and our "key game" is moved to Wednesday. Every game remaining with Cleveland is important. From this point on, every player wearing a White Sox uniform needs to step--it--up. Tomorrow is the key game to give us a shot at winning the division. Wednesday is the key game to avoid completely embarassing ourselves.