GAME05

the transcript of the interview is just as funny to read as it is to listen to. it was like he was on drugs, hung over, eating, tired and a non-native English speaker all at the same time. i think at the end he said he wouldn't accept a minor-league deal if Atlanta offered it to him. If he sticks to his mumbled word, i presume that means he's done with baseball. if so, i don't think there would be any dishonour if he just came out and said 'you know, i've been playing this game all my life and i just don't want to play anymore.' sad, though, that if he would have tried, he would have been a Hall of Famer.

but for the most part, teams that keep their player payroll low also tend to offer the cheapest prices to attend a baseball game. so then creating a cap and a floor you'd think would then increase the price of attendance. maybe the fans in Kansas City and Milwaukee and Pittsburgh would like more of a financial balance, but would they also be willing to pay 30% more (or whatever) to attend a ballgame?

thing is, if the Brewers go and trade away our best prospects now for Peavy, in three years we'll end up with just the opposite problem we have now. We'll have good pitching depth but we'll suddenly be clamoring for good infielders.

forget the review board or ratings system. Why not make the compensation based on the average annual salary a FA is signed for? say, 15x average annual baseball salary=Type A and 8x= Type B.

it won't be until New York wins three World Series' in a row before there's any significant conversation on creating further parity in baseball. a little hard to complain about New York taking advantage of everyone else after they miss the playoffs.

of course we still don't know if Sheets will end up coming back for a season. if he does, i think we have a better team than last year pre-CC. it's been said on here before, but JJ was about the only player who exceeded expectations last year, so I'm fully expecting the offense to improve. Braun should continue to improve, I think Fielder should hit more HRs this coming season, and I think Hall has more talent than to completely duplicate last year's performance. Parra's tired arm down the stretch doesn't concern me one bit. Milwaukee has been increasing his innings for a few years now and I think this year he should be more accustomed to pitching 180 innings. I also like Bush's potential that if he concentrated a bit more and cut down on the HR balls, that he could be a very excellent pitcher and find his way to 15 wins.

i think there might be an overestimation of just how bad he would be in the clubhouse. it'd just be for the year (or so), plus he'd know that if he caused even the slightest problem that he'd be kicked off the team--he's just no longer in a position that his abilities would be so great that a team would have to keep him on despite him being a jerk. I think Manny is a good example. The same issues followed him to Los Angeles, but by all accounts, everyone on that team liked him. I'm really not sure how Bonds would fit on any NL team, though. Offensively, he fits best as a late-game pinch-hitter, but his defense is so bad that it would cancel out whatever offensive production he provided. although i don't think i'd boo him if he played for Milwaukee. but i guess mostly because i hate that Milwaukee is starting to turn into that kind of city where anyone would get booed if they had an 0-4 night a week before.

i don't see how there'd be any guarantee that a FA signing would automatically follow a trade such as Cameron for Melky. maybe MA just wants to cut payroll for next year, or maybe Melvin was thinking about the trade because it would have brought us a long-term solution to CF.

every GM needs to be able to find those guys whose bad year/s were an aberration, but nothing about Pedro Martinez says that his regression is about anything other than age and past injuries. what would make it even harder about signing Pedro is that he's not a McClung type, that if he bombed out as a starter, he's really not the sort of pitcher that you could slot into the bullpen.

i guess i'm more of the opinion that the HOF should be for the truly elite players of the game, and that middling HOFers like Rice shouldn't really make it. being one of the best in the game for a five-year stint doesn't really seem like enough of an accomplishment to me. same goes with players whose biggest credential is that they pitched in and won a big game. i immediately presumed the writer who actually voted for Orosco is using his vote to set up some nostalgic Orosco article in his local paper next week. otherwise, is Orosco a member of the BBWAA? I'd also love to read the rationale of the 5% who didn't vote for Henderson? should have stolen more bases? One time he went 0-5?

i was always under the impression that DM was slow to talk with Kapler because he felt that Kapler would be able to get more playing time on another team, and it seems like he will with the Rays. obviously i'm not going to pretend that Gwynn is better than Kapler, but there has to be a point where you either trade the guy or give him an opportunity, and next season is the best time for it, which is why i have no big problem with Kapler leaving.

i think we can expect some ebb and flow with the team, that for every year we trade a great prospect away, we'll have a year when we trade FOR a prospect. i think the A's are a good example, that they've been able to do both for a lot of years. no doubt in the future we'll have an Overbay/Fielder situation again that we can still add prospects through trade.

i think we can expect some ebb and flow with the team, that for every year we trade a great prospect away, we'll have a year when we trade FOR a prospect. i think the A's are a good example, that they've been able to do both for a lot of years. no doubt in the future we'll have an Overbay/Fielder situation again that we can still add prospects through trade.

the only reason i don't think we'd go after Manny is because he's right-handed. otherwise i'm not totally sure we'd have quite that strong a dropoff defensively with him in LF. yeah, he's terrible, but you'd think the quality of Cameron in CF would make up for some of that with his range.

that's like me being in the shower and sometimes forgetting whether or not i'd just washed my hair.

My friends and I played Techmo Bowl a lot in college. I only played to join in, but I never understood the love for that game. I've never played Tyson's P-O because I had a Sega, but one glorious day I'll never forget, I got to play Super DodgeBall on the NES, which is still the greatest video game I've ever played.

Clock motors aren't near strong enough to hold even the lightest of paper carousels. ----- Continued from: viewtopic.php?p=472991#p472991 Original Lead: viewtopic.php?f=67&t=8540

i think to a good degree, people would lose interest in baseball if the Yankees didn't exist (as big spenders, that is). there is definitely something exciting to seasons when we get to watch Darth Steinbrenner get knocked out. heck, we've got a four-page discussion going about how to basically slow the Yankees down. if there were a total balance of power, who would we have left to hate but the Cubs? if there's to be any movement on a measure to add more competitive balance, i think it's going to have to start with the Players Union first, as odd as that may seem. First it would take the Yankees winning three or four in a row and everyone getting sick of that. Then we could hope that players from other teams get sick of it, too, and become more responsive to that sort of talk. for that reason, if the Brewers can't win it, I always strangely hope that the Yankees do.

just like the past three years, what the Cubs do or don't do hasn't really mattered to us making or missing the playoffs. in the short-term, they've got a powerhouse team. but in the long-run, they could have some serious issues with their players getting older and slower, egos in the clubhouse and and wasteland of a farm system. i think to worry that the Brewers haven't done anything yet is still somewhat premature. either MA can't add payroll or DM is trying to catch some last-minute bargains. heck, a month ago Giambi and Abreu were looking at three-year contracts, and now the talk is that they'd take a one-year deal. plus maybe some of our players will be worth more in trades once the remaining FAs are off the market.

"Jamie Quirk believes Willy got away from his game plan. He needs to bunt more and keep the ball on the ground and get some infield hits. I don't know if he tried to hit home runs, or what, but Jamie think he changed his approach and that we can get him back on track." interesting quote. it sounds like Jocketty saying "hey, if he stinks, don't blame me. blame Jamie Quirk."

What I've always thought about is with a cap, to resign a player on the team, 20% of his salary won't count against that cap, therefore there still is a slight advantage to New York or LA or teams that do have extra money to spend. It's great for fans when players stick with the same team, and big-money teams would still have an advantage, just a smaller one. It's a little ironic with the draft-pick compensation now that small-market teams are kind of discouraged from signing big-name players, just because they lose that draft pick. and maybe instead of the current draft compensation scheme, each FA would be assigned a draft-pick slot, say CC at #8 and Tex at #6. Then the team that loses the player would be slotted into that number for their extra draft pick. That way no team loses a pick and the better the player you lose, the better pick you get, versus what happened to us with CC. The only thing I would add to any salary-cap plan is that the cap should be discontinued after May, just so then any team can move beyond the cap to make mid-season trades. Otherwise you'd have teams like the Crew just not able to pick up someone like CC just because he'd move the team over the cap, and we shouldn't be hampering those sort of trades.

it seems to me one advantage of having a cap in the NFL is that if you spend under it, the fans know it and they can rebel. they did that for a good while before the Bengals finally started paying for players. it's obvious the player's union would strike over a salary cap, and certainly baseball owners wouldn't want to go through that again. there would have to be some way that the Union could see that creating a salary floor would increase revenue overall to go along with a cap. but in the Union's defense, until baseball owners open their books, it's impossible to know what they can afford and what they can't. i don't believe Selig and Co. have been totally honest about budgets, either, evidenced by his claiming that a team was close to bouncing payroll checks once. plus what would happen to teams like the Marlins or the Devil Rays, whose good players are still young? what happens if they end up below the salary floor? should they be forced to put money into a player they don't want? ...although i'm honestly rooting for the Yankees to sign Manny, just because i think that would be one big nail in the "we gotta do something" coffin. although i thought it was ironic that Torii Hunter was railing against the overspending Yankees when he's on a team with the payroll of the Angels. plus as a friend of mine brought up to me, what would happen with mid-season trades? if the Brewers were near the salary ceiling before CC, they wouldn't have been able to pick him up. the salary/trade system in the NBA is already pretty well messed up.

i had my Christmas dinner at Hooters today. i sincerely hope that doesn't become a tradition.

i've read that the grocery department in the big Wal-Marts are actually money-losers, but it's enough to get you in the store to shop around and buy other stuff. sorta like bread and milk in regular grocery stores, but they just do it for everything. probably why it also takes 45 minutes to get your oil change there. i'd love to be a mechanic at that place, the motto being "take however long you want."

maybe join a gym and watch their TVs?