GAME05

it's become tough for a lot of the FAs, too. decline arbitration and a team is a lot more hesitant to pick up a middling player and surrender the picks.

my professional resume lists relevant jobs only and i never even bother talking about work gaps--would take up too much space that i otherwise fill with more appropriate information. i just let them ask if they want. i don't know, i feel like i should save the dead grandmother excuse for getting those three days of paid grievance time off once i'm on the job. or maybe the grandmother excuse would work if you're ever accidentally late for an interview. "sorry i'm late; grandma's funeral ran long."

more playing devil's advocate, but should we be automatically assuming that it's unthinkable Lee won't sign here? maybe there's been a change in philosophy in the organization. we've seen what happens when DM has aimed for the kinda-expensive mid-level pitchers.

but i thought a team had to offer arbitration and have the offer declined before there could be any compensation?

awesome tip. i've suddenly got a project to do tomorrow. got me a job at Wal-Mart and have an interview tomorrow at an outfitters. should i get that second job i'll be able to break even financially, which will be awesome.

http://www.deadline.com/2...uld-make-conan-a-success the ratings are out and Conan beat everybody including Leno, Letterman and Jon Stewart. his was the most-watched latenight talk show in cable's history. nice. love that it's on at 10:00 instead of 10:30, making it watchable.

maybe that has more to do with Uggla wanting off a terrible team than thinking he's worth more money.

i read "believe to be of interest" as a writer's own assumption that the Brewers need starting pitching and have the money available, but not based on any real conversation with Melvin about it. just speculation, which is fine. Melvin has always believed in nothing more than three-year contracts with pitchers, and i think Suppan would have cemented that opinion. since the Yankees' new strategy seems to be offering up super-long contracts to free agents, it's hard to figure Melvin would want to match that and be paying a 40-year-old $20M per season. the Rangers have home-field advantage and the Yankees can print their own money, so it's hard to figure what the Brewers could possibly offer that would best any offer that Lee could get from one of them.

can't believe that Norm wasn't a first guest. the jam with Jack White was awesome, though. the whole show reminded me of what he was like on his late-night gig and a lot less hampered like he was on the Tonight Show. he didn't need to reinvent himself to be funny, so i'm glad he seems back to his usual self.

Getting on the bus and almost going to Mexico was a pretty big stretch, even for him, though. eh, i thought it fit. it set up the idea that he was getting sick of putting off his dream of getting married or just doing something else with his life, and that he'd be willing to give up Dunder-Mifflin to achieve it. it makes his eventual departure all the more plausible.

definitely time for this series to be concluded. the ancillary characters have all reached the height of what they can add, and all that's left is the secretary romance that's exactly identical to the jim/pam storyline they had before. even the passive manager is just Roy v.2. the season finale is going to have to include some major development from the side characters to keep any interest going, and i'm sure we'll all protest the changes, even though there's no other way to keep any interest up. was Michael getting on the bus and quitting his job supposed to be a tease? for me, the only thing it sets up is that he's willing to quit his job to pursue his bigger dreams. i'm still predicting that it means quitting for a mostly-hopeless trip to try and win Holly back. i could see the last episode ending in Michael getting in his car to go after talking to Holly. she pretty clearly says no, but Michael misunderstands, and we see him driving off in that hopeless pursuit, never quite knowing whether he wins or not. Dwight has become mostly just a jerk, but i'm rooting for Michael more than i was in the beginning now that we know there is a method to his madness.

no more regular season at all, but a complete playoff system to determine the World Series Champion. every team plays in a best-of-33 tournament bracket, first team to win 17 in the round moves on. seeding will be determined by team payroll. There will also be a loser's bracket to determine the order for draft picks.

ha! just like Joe Morgan to ignore statistics and go with a gut feeling. my mute will get a lot less work now.

i think of Lee and i see a guy who's numbers are falling off pretty quickly, yet he's put up good numbers in the recent past. that says to me that he's going to be a guy that will demand pretty big money but won't put up the numbers that people will be expecting. i think i'd rather see someone like LaRoche or an internal candidate over Lee. Narveson is already Washburn but with an upside and 1/5 the price.

it's not that i'm of the "Rogers is untouchable" mindset, only that i have a hard time grasping the idea of trading ML-ready starting pitching for ML starting pitching. obviously adding Grienke to the rotation would be huge, but a playoff team also needs to have an up-and-coming starter from the 4/5 spot too, and we have two legitimate shots at it with Rogers and Jeffress.

There is, completely a reason to justify it. Supply and Demand. There is a much larger crop of guys who can play 1B than 3B at the MLB level and the majority of them will outhit McGehee. If he can't play 3B, then he's just not nearly as valuable a commodity. i agree in that you're talking about it as a league average, but not based on what's available to us next season. all that's available in free agency are basically McGehee clones, so there is no supply of better people available.

Hopefully the next sports editor won't use the post as an excuse to get his photo taken with Tiger Woods and high five Ray Allen kind of off-topic, but that reminds me of an editor i had once. he once had the opportunity to get his picture taken with Hank Aaron. and even though our magazine was about buses and commuter rail, he somehow managed to tie a baseball metaphor into his editorial for the sole purpose of being able to insert his Hank Aaron photo into the magazine. it was classic. I didn't even know it was still around, honestly. heck, sometimes i forget that the Journal-Sentinel is still around.

“It was one of my best seasons in the U.S.,” Cruz told Ballasteros, “but I wasn’t given the opportunity. I went in September and they flung me around for another month in the major leagues.” this is the line that sticks out to me most. i guess by those standards, 3/4 of our entire Nashville team should be given steady playing time in Milwaukee, just because they had their best seasons, too.

not being a big NBA viewer at all, i'd only heard the KG bashing, but i completely understand why he gets the dirty-play rep now after watching the game tonight. just amazing that he'll even raise his arms up to say "see, i'm not touching him," but in doing so, purposely throws an elbow. gotta give the Bucks a lot of credit. i finally started watching games here and there at the end of last season, and hope to see more this season. win or lose, there hasn't been one single game that i watched that wasn't exciting.

i definitely see your argument about Gomez, but what about Weeks, then? what about Hart? Braun has some speed, and i'd bet getting to hit in front of Fielder that he would have been able to take some tremendous leads off of first or get ignored and have stolen 15 more bases than he did. i also wonder if our SB% would have been higher having a manager who at least considers the SB as an option. how much did Macha really spend on teaching the players when and how to steal a base when he doesn't like stealing bases? obviously i don't know the clubhouse, but how apprehensive was Gomez this season in stealing a base if getting thrown out is made to be a tremendous sin. having 40% of your SBs come in the last two weeks of the season has to have a lot to do with that, and not merely a lack of opportunities over the course of a full season.

yeah, Mumford and Sons is my favourite new band. when I was long-distance hiking, a popular song to get stuck in everyone's heads was "Ain't nothin gonna break-a my stride. ain't nothin gonna slow me down. oh no! i've got to keep on moving!" the biggest problem with that song is that nobody really knows any words after that, so it was just those couple of lines that would be in your head. the really bad part was that to be hiking all-day every-day, there wasn't any other stimuli, so you'd have that song in your head for at least a week.

But the point is that you can only exclude people from success for so long before they stop caring. beautiful line, Obsessed. couldn't have put it any better. i'll have to break out SPSS because i'm curious what the standard deviation is in terms of payroll spending. are the Yankees significantly different than the Red Sox, or can we say that just because the Yankees spend the most, that they're statistically similar to four or five teams. we know that money makes such a difference, and i think we need all teams, big-market or small-market, being within one or two deviations of each other. how many new fans are the Pirates creating? the Marlins? the Brewers? MLB is focusing so much on the tv viewership of existing fan bases in NY and LA and they seem to really be ignoring everyone else. i still pay attention to the Brewers because i pretty much can't help it, but it's getting harder and harder to care when they may very well take another 26 years to make the playoffs again. yet look at the NFL and you have ever reason to root for the Lions because they'll be going from 0-16 to a Playoff team in maybe four years. maybe that hurts the Superbowl ratings sometimes when smaller cities make it in, but the even playing field is sure a boost to regular-season attendance. i think one problem with all the plans that are out there is that they're all designed to cut off the head of the dominant team. you're not going to make baseball better by making the Yankees worse. then crap teams would still be crap teams. the NFL wouldn't suddenly be a better overall product if Tom Brady was removed from the Patriots. the problem with baseball is one of ownership and the union, not the way that the Yankees are able to successfully use their advantages.

money isn't everything but it's sure a huge part of it. i don't even think that the Yankees are all that much smarter than other teams, maybe even worse. it's just their mistakes aren't as noticeable because they just spend money to fix the problem. the Carl Pavano contract would have sunk any other team for years, but the Yankees just signed another top FA and went on their way. what makes the Yankees so smart, anyway? Cliff Lee is as close to a can't-miss superstar as you can get, so they're going to just outbid everyone else and get him. where's the strategy in that?

the system as we know it was designed decades ago. it's not like Selig had any part in that. he hasn't made it better or worse, only maintained the status quo. and if that status quo means that the Yankees' spending buys them a playoff spot more often than other teams, then all the better for ratings and money, so why change anything?

this has been a ton of work you've done on this subject, Casey. thanks. this obviously isn't your paying gig, so we all appreciate the hours you've put on this. this has been my most annoying bug for a long time, and i rarely make the effort to do all the clickthroughs to read new posts when this problem comes up. hopefully this problem will get a lot of votes and Yuku will realize that this is a bug that effects how long Yuku visitors stay on the site.