lostfan

Yeah, I figured you meant that when you said "8-9" since there's only 8 seeds in the playoffs.

This dude may as well have put vials of his blood and semen labeled with his address and SSN in each package. Did he think the feds wouldn't find him immediately?

Boston has been a juggernaut this whole playoffs. I need them to drop at least one, though...

If you ask anyone who coaches youth sports they'll pretty much all agree to a person that the parents are the worst part. I can remember this one mom particularly who told everyone in so many words I wasn't shit as a coach (this is a fair criticism honestly, if you think I suck as a coach you're allowed to think that) and that I didn't do anything and wasted her time (this is bullshit, I gave them at least 10-15 hours of my time per week FOR FREE on top of my day job - this actually deeply offended my wife more than me because she could see how much time and energy I was putting into this). But she was the main one who protested when I held practices at noon on Saturday afternoons and tried to complain about me to the commissioner, whose response was along the lines of "he is the coach and practice is when he says it is." She had a problem with the fact that her son didn't improve very much by the end of the year. 1. You bring your son to less than 50% of practices where I do drills with the kids for that specific reason 2. The season is only like 2 months, the fuck 3. The pitching rubber and mound are 45 feet. Your son can throw, on average, 44.5 feet. The only way he'll develop that arm is if he throws more and I left him in games to improve. He didn't, and I'm sorry if I couldn't turn your noodle-armed son into Chris fucking Sale.

I did, at the time, because I use the logic "do it if you gain something if you make it but lose nothing if you fail" but then I thought about it and analytics/probability says that's the correct call. If you fail but score again, you get another shot to go for 2 again to even it up, and that's what they did.

I would not say that but travel baseball seriously siphons away the pool of available kids, and that gets really expensive. It's hard for families without some sort of means to stay with it for very long. The regular leagues start to atrophy and the kids that aren't as talented start to lose interest. If you're a kid from a lower-income family, basketball is a LOT easier to get into (at least until you get into the debacle that is AAU). That's always been true, though.

Anecdotally, I was coaching youth baseball until a couple years ago. I loved it, there was a fair amount of interest from kids starting from the lowest ages until the first year they do live pitching, then at age 10-11 (proper "Little League" age) there was a sudden, sharp dropoff in the numbers of kids. I don't know if that was overall participation or just the league I was playing in, but I was really surprised and kind of disappointed to see that. That was the age I taught myself to be a switch hitter so I could swing like Ken Griffey Jr. Also the environment was different from what I remember growing up... we used to ride our bikes to practice by ourselves and our parents were barely involved except as coaches or to come to games, these kids' parents would drive them to practice and watch them the whole time. I would be thinking "GO HOME AND COME PICK THEM UP LATER. DON'T YOU HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO?"

Honestly this is a structural problem all of baseball is going to have to reckon with when the older fans eventually start dying off and the people who are middle school kids now become full adults. Most of us thirty and fourty-somethings latched onto baseball as kids, but the interest level with today's kids isn't there like it was.

Bears fans do this all the time. "Ditka said they throw around nickels like manhole covers." Yeah he said that in 1963 there Grandpa

Yes. 2018 went by for me really fast, lol

Last year was downright toxic with all the veterans sandbagging the team. It wasn't obvious to me at the time but it definitely is now. *looks in the general direction of Jimmy Butler*

Sprained elbow wasn't it? I lose track of things like that these days.

How soon is Lauri coming back?

My 401k took a dive of about 15k but I knew that those gains in 2017 were not going to last so I'm not tripping too hard off it. I debated whether I was going to move all that money (it's not a bank-breaking number, but it's a lot) into the TSP when I went to the government but for now I think I'll just leave it as is. I'm allowed to borrow against it with pretty decent interest rates if I have to, and since I don't work there anymore, I don't have the 3 or 5 year deadline or whatever it is.

I was actually bummed when I left my old job this past summer that was matching 6% to my new job that matches 5%. Granted, it's offset by a pension, which most people don't get, but that's a pretty large deduction out of my check, too.

I'm increasingly okay with this. If a sports team wants to be in a city I live in they need to pay taxes like everyone else does, otherwise they can go fuck themselves. This has never really been an issue in Chicago (save for Reinsdorf when I was a little kid, in different times) and probably won't be, but it's the principle for me.

The best thing about the NFL losing money in LA (especially the Chargers) is that for at least a decade, the NFL held the threat of moving to LA (real or not) to try to coerce local/municipal governments into giving them massive tax subsidies for them to pocket profits. Now they can't do that anymore.

It's unusual for women to be in the Olympics at that age, but then again so is everything Biles does anyway.

I think I'm okay with what the Bulls got for Jimmy Butler, with a little bit of hindsight.

This makes me think of Alexei Ramirez, who could make just about any play in his direction if he just paid the fuck attention

At some point in 2016 I decided to just tune everyone who overuses the word "establishment" because I found that, by and large, they really have nothing of value to say, but they really, really, really want you to hear their opinions and take them seriously. The effect of this has been that I engage in a lot fewer circular discussions.

It's been in my signature for years

It's a fair criticism of him, and it's definitely in bounds. I think some of it is just general inexperience. I don't think he's like John Fox where you just KNOW before the play is even called that he's going to do the most conservative, play-to-not-lose play, he's trying to decide what gives him the best chance to win is and it hasn't worked. I like him as a coach, but he can definitely improve and I think he will.

Nagy hasn't been perfect (there's no such thing, though sometimes Belichick comes close) but overall I'd say he's done a fine job with his playcalling and decisions. Sometimes he makes a call everyone hates (a pass play in the 4th quarter on 3rd and 1 when Howard is running over LBs all game) but often he will make a good call and his guys just don't execute the play. More often than that, though, they do, and it works out great.

This loss was disappointing but really if Trubisky is going to keep having games like this where he has 3 TDs on 10 y/a, the Bears will win 90% of those games. It's pretty clear where the blame belongs for this game and it's definitely not where any of us expected it. Yes, Howard's fumble at the goal line sucked, yes the interception after the TD was negated by OPI sucked, but it would've been nice for the D to do... I don't know, basically anything at all after that? the bare minimum?