GAME05

San Diego just picked up Adrian Gonzalez's option. shocking.

nah, in 2025 Counsell will still look like he is 17.

i don't know, nobody really seems to complain about the NBA Finals even though that only features the same few teams every year. baseball would lose billions of dollars if the World Series featured the Royals and the Brewers.

can Ron Roenicke pitch?

i keep re-reading the information on James as if i've just missed the information on why Oakland would actually get rid of this kid.

he has a decent background like the rest of the applicants, so i can't complain. it sounds like he'll run a lot more, which is a strength of the team. maybe not a good thing for disciples of Beane, but it'll at least make the games more exciting than someone sitting down at First and waiting for the HR. definitely don't care that he doesn't know the NL Central that well. he's got six months to figure it out. i'm guessing Valentine just wanted too much money. for a guy who's been out of the Majors for 16 years, he doesn't seem to want to come back that bad. hopefully this will be one of those situations where we don't get the guy we initially wanted but the replacement turns out to be even better.

McGehee simply doesn't hit well enough to justify moving him to 1B. There's not really a reason to justify a defensive position based on a guy's offensive output--two different things.

hasn't Valentine been around baseball for more years than LaRussa? that would mean he knows more about 'class' than St. Louis does.

lets just bring Jerry Royster back. if managers shouldn't be paid much then we won't be getting the best ones. or, if they truly don't make much of a difference, wouldn't we therefore have no right to criticize Yost or Macha for any moves they make?

i think the whole idea is terrible. Selig throws out the notion that the NBA and NFL would still have fewer playoff teams than an expanded baseball playoffs, which ignores all that baseball has been built on. and is baseball truly just like every other big-market sport that we should start emulating them? 162 games is an incredibly long season, based on which teams can endure the ups and downs and come out ahead. to expand the playoffs in any fashion is a big middle finger to the idea of building a team for the long haul. lets have baseball until Thanksgiving! yeah, the season isn't already long enough! A Wildcard single-game playoff? you're making teams play 162 games and then building a system that would have everything come down to a single game?? that's a joke. all the statheads on this site understand that over a long season, numbers play out, regardless of if a player has a good or a bad game one night. but a super-short playoff entry completely contradicts that, suddenly basing everything on luck. we seriously need even more teams in the playoffs? count me in for no longer caring about the regular season if that happens. for people to care about the 56th game played in the season, the game has to have importance. the more teams that get to the playoffs, the less that individual regular-season games matter. i hate this whole idea.

i'm a Lawrie fan (who isn't?), and certainly he's playing great at advanced levels for his age, but what about him says that he's a sure-fire All-Star like Jeter was when he was coming up with the Yankees? is he better than LaPorta was with us? LaPorta looked to have figured things out the second half of this season, but he didn't figure it out immediately. we're saying 6.5 years of cheap production, but the reality is probably 2 years starting a struggling player, 2 years as a good player and 2 years as a great player. not that a trade would just be Lawrie, but we'd be trading two years of greatness for two years of greatness in Greinke without putting up with the struggles that new players have.

http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif Mark Newfield, Vinny Rottino, Ben Hendrickson.... going with "he's untested" of course finds you the gems like Hart and Weeks, but also gets you scrubs that will be out of baseball in a year. "test" everybody and you end up like the Pirates, who had Jason Bay and nobody else.

Dana Eveland was untested, too.

so basically Valentine is awesome when the team is doing well and a megalomaniac when the team is losing? that kinda sounds like everybody.

where the Giants succeeded, others failed. maybe this motivates other teams to add more offense than they otherwise would have. Fielder just seems rife for a three-way trade.

it seemed like a lot of people passed Hart when he was playing 1b in the minors, and certainly not because of Hart's offense. it's hard to think that if he couldn't stick to that position in the minors, that they'd suddenly give him a shot there in the Majors. plus that's all an already-bad defense needs is Hart at 1st. guh. and it's not like we've got superstar corner outfielders waiting in the wings to take Hart's spot in RF. the cure for a poor defense screams bringing in a veteran at the position. i see a veteran at 1st as the perfect fit on defense. we wouldn't desperately need Gamel to immediately hit well as a starter and Gamel could be an often-used reserve at both corners (since a veteran would need some time off to rest). plus Gamel as a backup means that Counsel (provided he's resigned) isn't thrust into a full-time role if there were some injury emergency (no offense to the REAL CC). i just don't like the idea of Gamel as a starter right now until he can show that he can hit from a backup role (i know it's harder to do that blah blah). losing Fielder is a big hit to our offense and i'd much rather see a veteran in there who (theoretically) would be able to put up a steadier performance than a pseudo-rookie could. here are the potential/available ML FAs for 1b; a pretty ugly list: Lance Berkman NYY * Russell Branyan SEA Adam Dunn WAS Jason Giambi COL Troy Glaus ATL Aubrey Huff SF Nick Johnson NYY * Paul Konerko CWS Mark Kotsay CWS Derrek Lee ATL Adam LaRoche ARZ Mike Lowell BOS David Ortiz BOS * Lyle Overbay TOR Carlos Pena TB Mike Sweeney PHI Jim Thome MIN Ty Wigginton BAL edit: oh, sorry. i guess the question was specifically about preferences for internal candidates. uh, Gamel, i guess:)

maybe a little premature on Gooden? Jennings shot 51% from the field in October of 2009.

we don't necessarily have to move anyone to First. i'm rooting for the return of Lyle Overbay.

i don't think the situation fits to say that it's an attitude of overpaying for everything. if there were 24 other managers on the team, then i might have problems with overpaying for one single manager. but when you've only got one guy in charge then a team shouldn't be hesitant to spend a little more for a top guy. $700,000 more to pay a top manager is a great investment when that one guy could represent 2-3 extra wins.

it's amazing to remember all the vitriol that Yost and Macha got during their tenures, but when we're about to hire a new guy the feeling is "oh, who the particular manager is doesn't really matter." well if that's the case, then let me manage. i would do it for $12.50 an hour--that's way less than $3.3M/year. shouldn't the attitude be reverse of this, that it matters who we hire, but then we can accept them once they arrive? i'm not too concerned with whatever money the new manager gets. sure an extra $1M takes something out of the team's operating budget, but at the same time i don't think Melvin or Attanasio have ever said "Boy, we really want this guy, but it's just $1M more than we have right now." it's also really nitpicky to think that success or failure is going to come down to whether we spent that $1M extra or not, and not overall drafting/FA/waiver philosophies. I agree with most that a manager's in-game decisions have little effect on a team's record. However, I think their most important job is clubhouse leader. that's why Ned Yost was a good manager, and i'm only being 20% sarcastic. ok, 28%.

if it weren't for this thread and the knowledgeable basketball fans on here, i wouldn't be an NBA fan at all. although it's still a little tough knowing the NBA is rigged and doesn't want the Bucks in the finals over a LeBron/Bryant matchup. still, i've come to learn the players on the Bucks and be somewhat excited about the season opening tonight and what the team can do. plus, it seems like fans in Wisconsin hibernate until a winner shows up, then they start coming out in droves, and that would be fun to see.

i'm looking forward to this very thread getting the Blank Page of Death.

i've never heard that hotels tip, thanks. i think i'll end up trying those out toward the end of the week. today was some applying at Subway Restaurants. now that i've been turned down for a stocking job at a grocery store, i need to apply to anything and everything i can find. the glimmer of hope right now is that i've kind of made a contact in the Parks field (an Aunt living here knows him). and he's no ordinary contact--you could probably say that his direct bosses are senators. he doesn't know me from Adam and certainly doesn't deal in entry-level stuff, but i'll just cross my fingers that he has a chance to call and might have some ideas for me that i haven't thought of yet.

earlier this summer, i left with my brother and drove up to Whitehorse, Yukon Territories, with the intention of kayaking the entire Yukon River. The day that we left, we snail-mailed some food to a friend of a friend in Anchorage, who was going to forward them to us when we got halfway. but get this...word has come to me that the guy in Anchorage heard about us from people there before he even got our packages. apparently word was getting around of "There is this 7-footer and some other guy who just put their kayaks into the river and took off." even more than that, i guess people around seemingly-empty Lake Lebarge had been keeping an eye out on us because we'd just showed up, and wanted to be sure that we were safe. word got around that it took four days for us to paddle the lake, which is a bit longer than normal. *it should be noted that the lake is 32 miles long and 40 degrees, so if we spilled, we would have gotten hypothermic very quickly and likely died. i don't want to make this sound like they were spying or being nosy or anything, because the impression i got was that everyone was truly concerned for us, certainly a little curious, but that everyone was looking out for us. it's just amazing to me that what i would think is a non-event ends up traveling almost 1,000 miles to Anchorage, and then as big of a city as Anchorage is, gets to the ears of the guy who was going to send us our food. just amazing, but also a testament to how everyone up there looks out for even strangers. and for anyone who hasn't been way up there before, i can't begin to describe just how beautiful the area is.

i'm definitely sorry you feel that way. i think i can speak for the vast majority of people on this site to say how nice it is to have fans of other teams on here (though we know you're a Brewers fan, too). at some point or another, everyone here has been guilty of homerism, so i think it's nice to have people who also support other teams be on here to give us that proverbial slap to the back of the head. i know the Yankees are the baseball equivalent of Darth Vader, but i respect anyone who grew up rooting for even a populist team like the Yankees or even Cubs.