raBBit

POTUS making good on that promise of $10k of relief would be a start.

Looking at it again, I didn't see he had a sac fly. Thought it was just 1 plate appearance which would have been an abundance of caution but that makes more sense.

Why did Grandal exit so soon?

Konerko and Podsednik are #1 & #2. I was at WS Game 2 and have always held Konerko's as #1 just because without it we were going back to Houston 1-1 whereas Podsednik could've walked and scored and we still would have won. Thome's should probably be #3 but this one by TA was really something.

I don't go in there once the games actually start.

Depends. Yesterday the good seats were wide open and the bleachers were backed. The party is still on.

He's now third in the Southern League with 18 homers.

Someone was frothing with anger when the Sox traded for him. I couldn’t understand why. He’s a nice ball player.

He was technically added to the active roster and then added to the 60 day IL. Where the Sox couldn't put him on the 60 day IL because he was a minor leaguer.

This would make annoying people be annoying. Glad to see the MLB considering something to attract young people to the game.

What could possibly be the reason for them staying Minnesota until tomorrow after a day game today?

That's awesome. Grad school is a cash program. It is nowhere near as rigorous as undergrad. Try and find an employer who will help with the MBA. There are a still a few that exist.

I wonder how willing Sox are going to be to put pitching prospects in AAA. Guys are being put through the shredder there. Stiever and Lambert have had their values taken a hit from the bandbox.

Per Buster Olney, the Cubs offered Baez an extension in the range of $180M prior to 2020. Do you think he gets half that this offseason? https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/sports/nbcsports/report-javy-baez-turned-down-cubs-180-million-extension-offer/2489584/#:~:text=The Cubs were ready to,prior to the 2020 season. Per Ken Rosenthal, the Cubs offered Rizzo an extension in the amount of $70 prior to 2021. Do you think he beats that this offseason? https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/anthony-rizzo-contract-extension-update-cubs-president-jed-hoyer-very-confident-a-new-deal-will-be-reached/ Per David Kaplan, Cubs offered Bryant around $200m in 2018. Obviously this one is more complicated since he still had control and has since seen his production decrease, but do you think Bryant would have been better off financially accepting that deal? Absolutely. https://www.si.com/mlb/2018/10/11/chicago-cubs-kris-bryant-rejects-contract-offer So for the bolded, you're wrong. Ricketts absolutely has the money. The Cubs were more affected by COVID from a financial standpoint than any team in baseball. They're likely rebounded now and Ricketts will likely return to his annual top 5 payroll by the end of the decade. For the italicized, this isn't true. Free agents don't care. Set the market and they will come. Especially for a team like the Cubs in a city like Chicago. If you think a 30-year-old with one big crack at free agency is going to spur the Cubs because they manipulated Bryant's service time in 2015 or because they weren't able to convince a flawed player in Baez to take a deal he isn't/wasn't worth or weren't willing to give an aging 1B more than they thought he was worth you're crazy. Both Eloy & Robert had less than 500 PAs above A Ball and were 22 when they made their major league debuts on Opening Day 2019/2020. They both set records for getting the largest contracts before playing an MLB game. Their next generations would have been set for life if they were busts that hit .100 in the MLB career. Moncada was a 3B. He was kept down until Todd Frazier was traded and the position Moncada played opened up. If they were simply trying to wait out the Super 2 Deadline, they could have called him up a over a month or conservatively, at least 2-3 weeks earlier. The Yankees Frazier/Robinson trade went to the media. The Sox game ended. Rick Hahn called Moncada's agent and said he was getting called up. Hahn had a presser talking about the trade and call up of Moncada together. You have no evidence of what you're saying here and it is not true. Kopech had ERA's over 5 in AAA during the months of May and June. He had a WHIP over 1.5 during those two months. In the month of July 2018, Kopech stopped walking people. In the month of August, he absolutely dominated leading to his call up. To imply it had anything to do with service time is baseless. Sox have never been concerned with Super 2. Giolito was awful for most of the year in AAA in 2017 when he was called up. If his name wasn't Lucas Gioltio, he would have never been called up at all given his production. The fact that you're trying to create parallels with Carlos Rodon - a player who made it to the MLB 10 months after being drafted and after having less than 50 innings in the Minor Leagues - to Kris Bryant is insane. In 2014, Kris Bryant had a ~1.1 OPS in ~140 games in AA/AAA for the Cubs. He won minor league player of the year after hitting 43 homers and 110 RBIs. The Cubs sent him - the #1 prospect in baseball - down and played Mike Olt (who had a .160 batting average in over 250 PAs the year before) at 3B. Kris Bryant filed a grievance with the union. Scott Boras has championed Bryant's circumstance as the case to change this quirk in the CBA. Kris Bryant stands alone as the most egregious case of service time manipulation. I have no idea what you're trying to do villainizing the Sox akin to the Bryant scenario. What is hilarious though, is the only clear case of the Sox manipulating service time was Nick Madrigal and he somehow didn't get a mention as you listed players who either had record breaking deals or didn't face service time manipulation. You make the case that the Sox are bad for using service time as leverage as they signed Eloy/Robert to long term deals, but why didn't you also mention Vaughn? They used the same leverage with Vaughn as they tried to extend him this spring. They didn't get a deal and Vaughn made the opening day roster. Pretty big hole in your argument. Vaughn never played in AA. He never even dominated A+ ball. Sox could have sent him down for 2 weeks in April (LaRussa played him 40% of the time at that point anyway) and kept him for an additional year and there would have been no case of manipulation whatsoever. They didn't do that. They called him up despite what their best interest was from a financial/control standpoint because they thought he was one of the best 26 players to help them win from day 1.

Wonder how typical these postponements are. Assuming the Dodgers are past any scenario where he returns in 2021, I imagine both them and assuredly the MLB want this to drag into the offseason.

It's always an eyebrow raiser when a CFO is made President of an organization. Davis promoted CFO Badain to President in 2015. Putting the head accounting exec in charge of strategy for an organization opens the door for fraud. When it's a private company like the Raiders, the risks of carrying that C-suite title is much less.

Ball/White/Caruso/Green Lavine/Caruso/White DeRozan/Williams/Brown Jr. Williams/Markkanen Vucevic/Bradley I feel like the last thing the bulls need is another guard. If Williams is going to be at the #4 mostly, I still think we need another big even with Bradley added. There isn't a lot of rebounding/D there. What are the options for S&T with Lauri?

It's a fair question. Particularly when people have degrees that aren't really useful from an earnings standpoint. There are certainly people who went your route and made others look ridiculous for spending what they did. I remember taking the one required science lab for gen ed at my local community college during the summer. The counselor or whoever I talked to was explaining that the lab was more expensive than most classes because of the lab materials required. It was $600. One of my regular classes at my university was over $3k. At the end of the day, the kids I knew who went to community college and worked hard and transferred to a university for junior year got the biggest bang for their buck. I worked at a prestigious place out of college and we had kids that did the community college to university route and they were looked at no different as the kids that went to university for four years. 2 years at community college and working and then transferring is probably the best route but societally it's hard for a lot of people to do that. There's unfortunately a stigma with community college. If you can get past the stigma, get past the loss of the social experience and tackle the learning curve with the increase in difficulty from community college to university it's almost inarguably the best path for kids. I take more exception to the government's involvement in it all. Guaranteeing the loans is what allows the universities to charge whatever they want. That's what makes it so tuition grows at twice the rate of inflation/time value of money. The government is making crazy money off of interest for anyone who gets over $20k in loans and anyone who has grad loans. In my situation, as a 17-year-old, I didn't really think of the ramifications of going to a private school. Of course in Illinois our state school situation is awful but it's really hard to make sense of private school tuition once you understand the dollar and cents of it all. I graduated high school in 2012. I finished my undergrad and grad degree in 5 years and 1 trimester. I lived with family and never paid rent. My freshman year tuition was over $33k. My last year of grad school was $39k. That's not including room and board or books. So for two degrees it was just under $200k. My parents had 529 plans set up for me and helped a great deal with my undergrad degree. I got decent scholarships for undergrad for my ACT score and even got financial aid the first year because my dad was in between jobs. However, once he returned to work, I was never eligible for financial aid because my parents made too much even though I was footing the bill at the end. I was never eligible for scholarships past the standard ones offered at admission. I tried, i looked and signed up for all the email lists. So with scholarships, a touch of financial aid and a great deal of help from my parents, I still ended up being on the hook for over $60k in loans and that's after I cleared my savings (about $15k) at 22 because I didn't want to take out additional grad school loans (interest rate offered for that additional government loan was over 8%). So I never needed to go to private school and I get that now. I am lucky to have a great degree in a useful industry where I can keep employed and I am thankful for that. That said, I think I am very fortunate with all the help with my parents and being able to live with family in the city during college. I got $10k a year in undergrad because I scored a 28 on my ACT. If I scored a 27, I would have only got $2.5k in scholarships. So that one point, which could have been from rounding, on the ACT was worth $30k in scholarships which is just crazy. So given my good fortune with my family/living situation, getting a pretty significant scholarship and even getting a touch of financial aid, I still ended up clearing my savings ($15k) and taking out about $61k in loans with a WACC around 5%. I am not complaining and delighted to say my loans are under $25k now after refinancing and staying with family my first few years after school to hammer down the principal. So suffice it say to say, I had a very fortunate situation. Of course I didn't need two degrees and didn't need to go to private school but given my good fortune, I still think it's insane that the cost was what it was. For someone who didn't have my parents and got a 27 instead of a 28 on the ACT, how could they even stomach this? Just be in debt forever? Obviously they could be eligible for financial aid if they didn't have the great situation I did but man it's a lot to put a teenager/young twenty something. TLDR - If you have a kid in high school and you're not made of money, start coaching them up on the economics of this stuff as soon as possible. Staying home going to community college while working could be a huge cost saver if you have a disciplined kid who will get the grades required to transfer to a good school. Sending your kid to the community college next to their desired university for two years could be a nice "meet-in-the-middle" situation. If you're footing the whole bill for your kid, incentivizing (monetarily, with a car, etc.) them to stay home or to get good grades at community college could be one of the best financial decisions you make. Buying your kid a $5k used Camry to help them cope with staying home for two years could very easily save you $50k in the long run.

The Sox Park is the best place in MLB to have this godawful outfield defense. Sheets needs to play and Goodwin deserves to play against RHP. After this week, Robert returns and with continued health there is no reason Goodwin should play CF again. For me, he's 5th on the depth chart in CF: 1. Robert 2. Engel 3. Hamilton 4. Garcia 5. Goodwin. Goodwin has hammered RHP and came up with a lot of big hits. His defense has been atrocious though. He gets the worst jumps. Night or day. Home or away. Sucks because he seems to have the natural ability required but just can't get a bead on the ball. I thought he had the reputation of being a solid outfielder but I've more confidence in Vaughn when they're going after a ball.

I wouldn't say that definitively. They have been playing him a lot. I think they probably want to keep Collins options for next year or to keep his trade value/flexiblility but I don't see this as cut and dried really.

It's a vesting option that converts to a team option if he doesnt finish 55 games on the year.

It was just a general statement as the Rays (among the others listed) are a team that finds value in imperfect players like Collins.

I don't know. Gallo is a better fit than Mancini, I agree there. Gallo had plenty of suitors and his cost is higher than what Mancini would be. Sox aren't exactly flush with prospects so a team with a top guy on the market Gallo isn't prioritizing the Sox when other suitors can easily beat what the Sox have to offer. And your point is?

They could use another 25+ home runs and 800 OPS though. If Sox have Engel and Billy on the roster, they have defensive replacements. If they're willing to play Sheets/Lamb in the outfield I don't know why they wouldn't be willing to play Mancini.

What are you even talking about? Did you just want to say Fabian's name?