cabiness42

Quentin

Beckham

Rios

Pierre

Konerko

First of all, just to confirm, is this the lot: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?ftid=0x8...aAou8zQXygpSsCQ Secondly, how early do they open? The rest of the cars are planning on arriving between 4:00 and 4:30, but I could get their earlier to secure the spots if they open earlier. EDIT: Also want to confirm that the church is OK with people consuming alcohol in their parking lot.

My extended family is attending the Saturday 8/20 game to celebrate my sister's birthday. We are arriving in several vehicles from various parts of Indiana but would like to park/tailgate together. My question is if there is any way to ensure that we can all park together, aside from having to meet up at some random gas station at some random Dan Ryan exit and then following each other to the parking lots?

Not much of an issue this year, is it?

I understand that it's costly to move the Jags, but they are the team that has the least fan support, so they need to be the ones who go. The NFL needs to come up with a creative offer to the city of Jacksonville to get them to agree to a lower buyout. Offer them a Super Bowl if they agree to it and make it clear that they will never have another one if they don't. Offer to have the combine or winter meetings or something like that there a few times. Realignment is a pretty easy fix as well. Jaguars move to NFC West, Rams move to NFC South, Panthers move to AFC South.

One thing has changed recently that might affect Notre Dame's thinking. The Big Ten+2 has decided to go to a 9-game conference schedule beginning in 2013, which cuts down the non-conference schedule to 3 games. Other than Purdue, Big Ten teams are probably going to be reluctant to continue scheduling ND every year, because they're going to neeed more home games. Losing a source of opponents may push ND towards joining a conference. Of course, on the flip side of this is that having a 9-game conference schedule makes actually joining the Big Ten less appealing to ND, who wants to play games all over the country and not just in the Midwest.

Edited Main Event Coverage starts Tuesday. This year they are skipping the Day 1s and 2s completely and starting with Day 3 to get more name pros and eventual November 9 players on the TV coverage.

I can't speak to how tired Humber might be, but his mid-season numbers suggested that he was going to regress a bit. He was getting Buehrle-esque results in having a low hit rate despite not striking out a lot (or a really low BABIP for those of you that speak stathead), without the history to suggest that he could sustain it like Buehrle. I still think he's an above-average #5 starter, though for the immediate future that may not be good enough for a team that is 4 games down on the Tigers and has 4-5 automatic outs in its lineup.

How do CSN games make more than WGN games, when WGN reaches far more households??

+1

I agree with what is said in the letter, but I want to add an area where I feel the organization fall short--marketing to the surrounding areas. If you look at the MLB "Blackout map" http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_wvoLtwni0kc/RhO4...lackout+map.jpg you will see that nearly all of Indiana falls into the Sox' "blackout area". What this means is that the team has exclusive TV rights in this area and therefore games are not available via MLB Extra Innings or mlb.tv. However, with the exception of the NW part of the state from the IL border over to about Elkhart, the main broadcaster of Sox games, CSN Chicago, is not carried on any cable or satellite systems, and to my knowledge the network has made no efforts to get themselves on in this area. So no Sox games other than the ones on WGN are viewable to people in the Fort Wayne/Muncie/Indy areas. There is no real dominantly popular team in these areas, and the Sox are really missing out by not going after these areas. I'm not familiar enough with Iowa and Central Illinois to know if the same problem exists in those places.

I will start with the disclaimer that my experience playing baseball ended at age 11, so I don't know enough to be any more than results-oriented, but I can spot an overwhelming trend. To start with, 5 of the 9 "starters" (guys with the most PA) have an OPS under .700. In a park like the Cell, there is no value in one guy, let alone five, hitting that poorly. The only exception might be a guy giving you gold glove defense at SS or CF, but the one guy who does that is over .700 anyway. Most of these guys weren't this bad before, though. Dunn is the most dramatic example with an OPS almost 300 points below his career average. Beckham tore up the minors and had a great start with the Sox before regressing horribly. Morel was a decent hitter in the minors but has never done anything with the Sox. Rios has always been inconsistent but never this bad. Teahen was never a superstar but got progressively worse here. Pierre is the one guy who really should be as bad as he is. Going back a few years, guys like Nick Swisher and Wilson Betemit were much more productive before and/or after their Sox tenure. I'm not saying that some of the signings/trades Ken Williams has made weren't poor, but in pretty much every case, it was realistic for him to expect better production than these players have provided. Again, I'm not an expert, so I can't tell you whether it's Ozzie's fault or Greg Walker's fault or some other reason, but I see too much of a pattern here for it to be a concidence. SOMETHING is causing hitters to consistently underperform. Something that Konerko has apparently been immune to all these years. Any ideas?

Keep going, I'm sure you can narrow it down to a three-game stretch that gets him over 10%. No matter what numbers you use, the point is that Quentin has some value that Viciedo doesn't have in his ability to draw BB/HBP. I'm not saying that you don't make a deal, and I'm not saying that that Viciedo won't eventually improve or that he doesn't still have value if he doesn't, but you add someone like Viciedo to a lineup that already has Pierzynski, Ramirez, and sometimes Morel, and you are letting pitchers get through the lineup on a minimal number of pitches, which has consequences. At some point, you need to replace Quentin with somebody who has the proven ability to get free bases. Dunn was supposed to be a step in the right direction, but you need the guy to actually get some hits along with all the walks.

This season he's up to 7.7%, which is improvement from flat-out sucking to mediocre, and that's against AAA pitching where the control isn't nearly as good.

In his major league career, Carlos has BB/HBP in 12.3% of his PA. In the minors/majors combines, Dayan has BB/HBP in 5.7% of his PA. It takes an awfully good AVG/SLG to make up for that kind of difference long term, especially on a team that already has too many guys in Dayan's category of plate discipline and not enough in Carlos'. I'm not saying that you don't make the trade if the return is good enough, but all those free bases will be missed, and opposing starters will be throwing 10+ fewer pitches the first two times through the lineup.

You ever wonder if a guy hears about a trade and thinks, "D*mn, the team that traded for me really got screwed!"

I would love to have him, but I have no idea if there is a good fit for a trade or if ARam would approve it.

This trade works as the first step down three potential paths: 1) Sox bet DET today and gain another game over the weekend and now there is $$$ and one more prospect to use to try and add an impact player. 2) Sox lose today and lose another game over the weekend and this trade was a head start in dumping salary. 3) Sox stay in the 3-4 GB range and the Sox hedge their bets by doing nothing other than having shed two salaries from guys they don't need and picking up at least one guy who can help right now. The least attractive option for sure, but then this team has put KW in a horrible spot by playing too poorly to give him the confidence to 'go for it' yet being close enough to first to upset the fans by doing a full-blown salary dump.

Maybe they don't need him, but they're apparently using him. http://twitter.com/#!/CST_soxvan: De aza starting in center field for sox

Hi, first post here after reading for a couple months. IF ARam would accept a trade to the Sox and IF his willingness to drop his option are both true (and I think those are both big IFs), then this smells like a 3-way trade waiting to happen. Find some team that both wants Edwin Jackson and has prospects the Cubs would like [i don't keep up with other teams' prospects, but maybe someone else can find a fit]. Between the 3rd team and the Cubs, they could send cash to the Sox to make it work. Or instead of kicking in some cash, maybe one of those teams takes Teahen.