danzig6767

I'm a bigger football fan, but one thing i do prefer about baseball is attending games in person. Maybe it's just the terrible weather aspect in Wisconsin for me, but i absolutely love attending a baseball game on a hot summer day. First spending a few hours tailgating while baking in the sun, drinking and eating with some friends. Then going into the ballpark and all the wonderful smells that always remind of going to games as a kid entering County Stadium. Finally the game itself. Baseball lends itself more for people to casually watch the game and thus you can feel laid back and converse with whoever you're attending the game with. Football is a much more intense event to attend in person, unless say it's a baseball game late in the year with a ton on the line. At football games, the crowd is expected to be up and loud often to effect the other team. While that is fun and all, it's usually cold at Packer games and i like a bit more the slower pace casual aspect of being at a baseball game on a beautiful day.

Here i just thought my dog had this weird habit His dog bowl is in the kitchen, but he fills his mouth with say 5-6-7 pieces of dog food, takes it to the frontroom and drops it on the carpet before then eating it.

The salary cap in football helps lower revenue teams more than you imply, but the real difference in the two sports that allows for the majority of teams to compete financially on a relatively fair scale is by far the amount of revenue sharing in the NFL. For the most part, all TV revenue is shared among the NFL teams. Because of this, you don't see these wide gulfs in the revenues for broadcasting rights like you see in baseball. Teams like the Red Sox and Yankees get more cash for just their local broadcasting rights than many other teams bring in combined revenues from both broadcasting right and money from attendance. This allows smaller market NFL teams to have the incoming revenues to pay most of their own high quality players so long as the franchise is run well vs having to let them walk for the big market teams to sign like what happens to often in baseball. The Packers, Titans, Vikings, etc etc and their fans in the NFL don't have to constantly fret that if they draft/develop great young talents, are we going to have to trade them before they reach free agency? On the flip side, teams like Dallas or Washington actually pay for mistake signings because there is a cap. A rich owner can't just say, i'll try to buy my way out of poor decisions. Those poor decisions in the NFL come with tougher consequences than w see in baseball to wealthy franchises. There are advantages in baseball by not having a cap, it allows for more trade flexibility. Plus, splitting TV revenue money is easier in a sport like football compared to baseball. They are different sports in many ways, fans can't just expect similar economic systems. I like football better, but i'm not stressing for baseball to get a cap. More revenue sharing would be the main thing i'd like to see, so long as owners getting that extra revenue sharing money aren't allowed to just pocket it.

It's a strange situation because the defenseman are very skilled offensively and is part of the reason for more goal scoring this year, but they also need to be more solid in their main job of playing defense. That said, i just don't care for Connelly, he lets in to many soft goals.

Q: How do you beat the Badgers? A: Let them get a multiple goal lead. No kidding. Normally, if you get a 2-3 goal lead in hockey, you'll win 80-90 percent of the time. When the Badgers get these kinds of leads, i just wait for the impending doom.

When i was a little kid and there were only three channels to watch, i loved Fantasy Island and as Robert mentioned, Ricardo was great in Star Trek II.

IMO, what we are seeing with Jefferson is that Jason Kidd made RJ look better than he was by getting all those easy fast break dunks, layups, and easy hoops on cuts to the rim. Now he's no longer playing with a HOF PG in his prime and instead Luke Ridnour, he gets far fewer easy baskets by just running the wing on fast breaks. Plus, his athletic ability without question has declined to where he's now mainly just a jump shooter and not an overly good jump shooter either.

so that should put an end to his return. I can't believe he would just flat out tell them that he doesn't want to come back though, especially since it doesn't seem like teams are beating down his door to sign him to a large deal.I've suspected since during last season that Sheets wasn't interested in playing in Milwaukee anymore and money wasn't the main reason

The problem i see for anyone wanting a cap is that even if the players union shocked the world by agreeing to a cap, odds are very very high that the maximum cap number would be large enough that it really only affected the Yankees a lot and maybe teams like the Mets/Red Sox a little bit. Outside of mainly teams in the AL East, it would likely do very little to prevent the gaps in payroll. I see no chance an NFL or NBA like cap would ever get through the players union, so i'm not seeing where the dramatic change in baseballs economics would come from even if a cap was passed. They aren't going to accept say a 100-120-140 million dollar maximum cap ceiling, so what's the big advantage of a cap if your team isn't in the AL East?

If every single team went into every season exactly even in talent and the games were basically won or loss by a coin flip I'd absolutely hate the game. Football is a lot like this now. Team gets a few lucky bounces and they go from a 7-9 quality team to a playoff team. Aren't you the one constantly saying that so and so player or baseball team had a lucky year and that it played a huge role in their success? As for a salary cap in baseball, it seems to me that people are going crazy over what the Yankees did, but they are only one team. Unless a cap number was low enough to effect most larger market teams spending, which i can't see happening, what's the point to get a cap that mainly curtails only one team?

The Cubs not long ago had teams that really struggled to get on base, that is no longer the case and they just added another who gets on base very well. I sure hope that Bradley continues to struggle with his health.

I'd much rather see Villanueva in a less rigid role than closer where he'd be limited to only one inning stints in the 9th inning

Oh come on, of course the NFL would look quite a bit different without their salary cap and it does inhibit guys like Jerry Jones from adding talent to his team. Yea NFL teams can get around the cap for awhile by using the big signing bonus route, but eventually that will catch up to a team given how bonus money is prorated and dead money builds up. Then once that happens, the team can find itself not only being unable to sign free agents, they might not have the cap room to keep some of their own players either. Every single signing of any significance by an NFL team has to be evaluated by that team from both a talent/fit perspective, but also the state of their cap situation. For rich teams in baseball though, all they have to consider with outside free agents or their own soon to be free agents is, does my owner want to spend this much money? That's a sizable difference. The Yankees can simply brush off trainwreck signings like Pavano because they have the cash to pay for mistakes, in NFL, a few bad mistakes will get a team in cap hell. Obviously the much higher levels of revenue sharing in the NFL compared to baseball also plays a key factor in allowing small market teams like the Packers/Vikings to compete financially reasonably well with the big market teams. As i said before though, the sports are so different on multiple levels that it's hard to compare things. Baseball is such a simple game compared to football which is far more complex and team based, baseball is largely an individual sport wrapped into a team game. A good pitcher is a good pitcher for the most part, regardless of how any manager likes to play things, just get hitters out. Manny or Teixeira don't need to be in the right scheme to hit to their fullest. In the NFL, a quality player often leaves his team in free agency and doesn't do as well with his new team because the different system doesn't fit as well. Look at Corey Williams with the Packers. He excelled at rushing the passer as a DT and after the Browns traded for him and played Corey at DE in a 3-4 scheme, he was miscast and struggled. Football is also a much much more dangerous game to it's players, so when offered good money in an extension by their original team, the younger players are more inclined to take it vs waiting to be a free agent because suffering a bad injury in football can happen so easily. Boras can advise clients like say Teixeira to not sign extensions and wait the six years until free agency because odds are he'll stay pretty healthy. In the NFL, that's a far more risky plan to take given how violent the sport is.

Nice catch Haas on Rivera, i had never even heard of the guy until your post

Every single year dozens of players leave their teams because there just wasn't cap room. There is way more financial movement of players in football than baseball, it isn't comperable at all. Generally it's just the pretty good or pretty mediocre players that leave their team in free agency. For the most part, the better players stay with their teams unless a player just doesn't want to play with that team anymore for whatever reason. Plus, you also have to factor in that football is a much more complex sport while baseball is simple. Both sports change managers/head coaches a lot each offseason. If a baseball team hires a new manager, he may have some minor different philosophies, but if a player can hit and field, he can play anywhere. If say the Packers fire their head coach, they could switch schemes on both offense/defense. Switching from a 4-3 to a 3-4 defense suddenly makes multiple players a poor or lesser fit. Switching a running game from a ZBS to a power scheme can make some lineman and the running back a poor fit. In baseball, it's see pitch hit pitch. See ground ball, field/throw ball. It's a pretty simple game. When Macha got hired, he didn't have to figure out if say Hardy fits a scheme. A quality pitcher can fit anywhere, just get batters out. It's largely an individual sport within a team framework, while football takes all 11 guys on each play to do their job for that play to succeed. Thus any coaching change usually leads to large roster changes. Premium free agents still chase the money in the NFL just like any sport, especially given the violent nature of football. It's just that in the NFL, the premium free agents don't just go mainly to the same handful of teams as we see in baseball. The guys who leave bad teams in the NFL to sign for less with contenders are almost always aging players on the downside of their careers who have already had their big paydays, not the upper level players. Offhand i can't think of a single in their prime free agent who took significantly less money to sign with the Patriots. Two years ago they signed Adalius Thomas from the Ravens, but the Pats gave him a ton of money, that's the only premium free agent i remember them signing the last 3-4 years. It's been aging vets like say Junior Seau that have signed there cheap, as what happened with the Packers in the 90's when aging vets like Seth Joyner came here chasing a ring. We see that in baseball though to, older players who will take less to play for a contender vs chasing every last penny. Same happens in the NBA. Easy to see why that happens, those guys are already rich and now winning is the main reason they keep playing.

The huge factor with the NBA compared to MLB/NFL is in the NBA one single superstar player can have a far more dramatic effect than in the other sports. Look at LeBron James in Cleveland. He alone is easily the biggest reason they are a contender, without James they'd be a .500 team at absolute best. Look at the Spurs, Duncan alone is by far the biggest reason they've been a league force since he got drafted. In the last 20-25 years, only the Pistons have won a ring without a legit superstar. On the flip side, Texas didn't do squat when they had Arod even though he was the best player in baseball. It's just so so hard to be a real contender in the NBA without a big time franchise player. One good thing the NBA does is it allows for franchises to pay their best players more money as they reach free agency than another team offering a free agent contract. That said, if your team lacks a superstar, it won't matter much anyways because teams lacking that true star player usually get stuck in the mud of mediocrity or worse. Like i said in another post, the three leagues are different in multiple ways that cause different challenges when trying to put together labor contracts between it's teams and then the players. I think sometimes fans aren't looking at everything involved with each league when saying so and so should be done in this league like what's done in the other league. It's not that simple at all.

Yea that silly salary cap is just killing the ratings, attendance, and interest in the NFL. Regular season games draw better ratings that baseball playoffs and World Series games. Plus, the NFL has 52 man rosters, baseball has 25. Any sport with so many players will have tons of player movement, it's inevitable unless you unfairly denied players the right to free agency. The NFL is also a very violent game, between all the injuries and wear/tear on the body, teams have to make decisions on players potential decline sooner than MLB/NBA. As for the cap, that cap and revenue sharing allowed for a team like Green Bay which is by far the smallest market in pro sports to for over a decade straight to be a near constant playoff participant because they not only had no financial disadvantage that forced them to trade away most of their good players when they got expensive, the Packers were able to keep most of their good players and also get others if they chose to. The economic system in the NFL is the single biggest reason that a team like Green Bay could stay a good team for a long time. It was only when they started making poor decisions that they started to suffer for it, not because they couldn't compete financially with the big market teams. There is absolutely no comparison to the Patriots and the Yankees. The Patriots run of success wasn't built on largely financial might over other teams, it was being a very well run organization. Until recently, they rarely were players in the free agent market. Hell, one of the biggest spenders in free agency the last 3-5 years has been the Vikings and they are one of the lowest revenue teams in the NFL. It pretty rare for NFL teams to lose players because they can't compete financially, it's far more often that teams lose players because they did a poor job constructing their team and in overpaying non-productive players, thus eating up cap space that can't be spent on better ones. If say the Patriots had went into free agency like the Yankees did the last 5-6-7 years and made multiple bad big money signings that blew up in their faces, they couldn't have just said screw it, i'll simply go out and buy more players to cover for past mistakes. They'd have capped themselves out and not been able to keep their productive players who were in line for a new contract. No economic systen in pro sports is perfect and the big three leagues are different in multiple aspects that would make it quite difficult to just say, put the NFL system in baseball or the NBA system in the other two leagues. One league has 52 man rosters and plays only 16 games. One has 15 man rosters and plays 82 games. One has 25 man rosters, has minor leagues, and plays 162 games. The NFL is able to have all their games televised under large TV deals that can easily split the evenly among all teams, mainly because of the 16 game schedule and partly because football is the most popular sport in this country. Of all the sports, the NFL gives all it's teams the best chance to compete without their market size being such a big factor like baseball does, but there are vast differences between the two leagues that make it a lot easier for the NFL to have the revenue sharing that they do have which plays as big a role or even more than the cap in allowing pretty much all teams to keep and sign multiple top notch players as they free agency eligible.

I'm not saying we have to sign Cruz, but i wouldn't sweat that much losing a first round pick if Melvin really liked a free agent. Even if we only end up getting say two second rounders for CC/Sheets, we also are getting to sandwich picks. So even if we lost our first rounder, we'd still have two picks at the end of the first round and three second round picks. That leaves plenty of potential to add valuable pieces to the farm system.

Can someone explain to me how it's not going to be in HD right from the start? It's almost 2009 and nearly every TV sold is an HD TV, it's strikes me as strange to not be HD right away. If something like the Big Ten network is in HD right away, seven billion dollar business MLB seems like it should be also for their new channel.

My greatest wish is that the Union strikes and that the owners just shut down the league for a full season. But the owners have always been gutless, spineless boys with toys who let the inmates run the asylum. That's a lot easier to say sitting behind a computer than being an actual owner. Baseball is a very big money business and a very long strike could cost the owners a ton of money. It has nothing to do with them being "gutless", it has far more to do with rich men wanting to protect their financial bottom line. We aren't talking about some potential fight on the playground over lunch money here, major league baseball is a multi-billion dollar business. When deciding to lockout players or do something that they know will likely cause a strike, owners aren't worried about getting a bloody nose, they are worried about losing many many millions of dollars in the short term and possibly many millions more if a work stoppage has protracted long term negative ramifications. They have huge contracts with corporations that broadcast the games, with advertisers, are soon to be starting their own TV station etc etc. The list is very long It's not something as simple as where they sit back and think, ok if this fight goes bad, i'll put ice on my wound and be fine a few days later. It's each owner sitting with money crunchers and analyzing how things are right now for them and how thing might end up if there was a long work stoppage them, involving money figures you and others on a message board will never have to make tough decisions on. You also have 30 different owners with 30 different financial net worths and many differing views on how the current setup effects them. Trying to get all these different owners who have varying agendas to agree on a damaging work stoppage isn't easy, baseball isn't like many other businesses who have only one main voice on the major decisions. This is the biggest reason the players have for the most part won these labor battles with the owners. It wasn't because the owners were "spinless" and afraid of the players, it was more because the differing agendas among the owner eventually caused a split among themselves.

While i'm not happy about the draft pick situation, i did wonder if say the Brewers had got a first rounder for both, we'd have had 3 first round picks 2 sandwich picks 1 second round pick Would the Brewers have really ponied up the cash needed to sign all those high draft picks to at least slot value contracts? If so, would they have then just drafted lesser guys in the following rounds to save some of the money they spent on all those high draft picks?

I may be in the minority in this part of my opinion, but it would probably take 5-10 years to get things anywhere close to the "even" playing field that is present in the NFL. In addition do we start having non-guaranteed contracts similar to the NFL? Or keep the guaranteed contracts like the NBA? I think that it's hard to compare what a salary cap would look like in baseball to the one the NFL has because of the huge difference in number of home games and the way TV revenue is distributed amongst the teams. Things will never be like the NFL in baseball because the NFL plays only 16 games. This allows for nearly NFL game to be sold out, even for the bad teams and all games are broadcast under one large TV contract that spreads broadcasting revenue evenly among all the teams. What separates revenue levels for the MLB teams is largely broadcasting rights and with a 162 game schedule, each team will always control the broadcasting of their games. Very few people out there would tune into say an Oakland/Texas Rangers game in July beyond fans of those two teams, but you can put almost any two NFL teams on national TV and it will draw vastly vastly better ratings. Hell, even Monday Night Football regular season games consistently draw higher ratings than MLB playoff games. Mix in that some teams in baseball will draw way higher attendance numbers, large revenue gaps in baseball are here to stay, it's inevitable. The two sports are just different in so many ways.

I believe the labor contract was very recently extended and won't expire any time in the near future

I know few will agree with me because you're overall bigger fans of baseball than me, but beyond dropping to a 2nd round pick for CC, i don't care much that Texeria and Sabathia went to the Yankees. I care a lot about the Brewers and thus the NL, don't care much what happens in the AL and rarely ever watch AL games. I sure would prefer seeing both of those guys in the AL than the NL where during a future season either guy could say potentially block the Brewers from a Wild Card or beat us in the playoffs if we made it and had to face either guy. If we hadn't lost the first round pick, i wouldn't care who the Yankees sign. Plus, even though i don't care much about the AL, i hate the Red Sox.

Why would you care if he plays for the Yankees or Red Sox given both are in the AL, much less rather see a great player like him go to Washington where he could end up possibly blocking a Brewers Wild Card berth sometime in the future? I personally don't care much whether the Yankees load up even more, or if one of the other very rich Red Sox/Angels franchises get him so long as Teixeira stays in the AL.