And That

To give credit where it's due... it's not just Bill Hall. It's also Ryan Freel. Founding fathers. What a bizarre quote.

http://branding20.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/target-dog.jpg That might hit a little too close to home.

The interview was conducted at the end of the Arizona Fall League season. Rivera was still employed by the Brewers at that point.

Amongst the Best Picture Nominees, I saw Up, District 9 and The Hurt Locker... I guess I thought The Hurt Locker was the 3rd best of those 3 movies. The slow-motion shots of whatever were kind of tacky, IMO. Oh well.

I have 4 jars of cumin in my cupboard. I don't remember buying any of them.

And while Fielder has improved defensively, Gamel would be vastly superior there with a little work. Maybe not in 2010, but Gamel would be an above-average first baseman in a few years, IMO. The average 1B hit .277/.362/.483. That's well within Gamel's range. That said, there may be value to Fielder being on this team that doesn't come up on the balance sheet. Showing that we're willing to commit to a big time player might, for other baseball players' intelligence or lack thereof, be a sign that the organization has turned a corner, and that might be a lure for guys to come here (even in so far as waiving a no-trade clause). Fielder's presence on the roster will always make acquiring offense that much less of a priority. I also think he'd be a rock in the clubhouse, for however much you count or discount chemistry's effect on the game.

Gamel has a vaguely-described foot problem coming in to camp that had been "resolved" according to Macha... perhaps whatever the foot problem was, it flared back up.

I find it sad and amusing that our first game of the spring, our first baseball of 2010, our first foray into battle... is being started by Jeff Suppan.

Biblioburro. Fantastic.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41IHnZo15yL._SL500_AA280_.jpg The best album released last year. Yes it looks like 70's soft rock. Dawes - "North Hills" Perfect, if somewhat innocent, folk rock recalling The Band and Wilco. These guys are all in their late teens/early 20's and have a wonderful future ahead of them. The instrumentation is simplistic but effective and the lyrics are solid. They used to be kind of a California power punk band and it comes out in their live concerts, which need a bit of refinement. There's just a charm to this. I'd recommend downloading at least a few of the tracks.

One of the better hours of TV I've seen in quite some time. While I don't believe that a lot of questions were answered outright, I got the sense that it is setting up the final conflict. Speaking of, did anyone else notice Katey Sagal's black nail polish? Did fake Locke get off the island?

Finally. This was a long time coming. Many here, myself included, have long thought it's weird that they didn't have a "Milwaukee" road jersey. Looks good. The first comment on the tweet is pretty epic: "I don't like that it doesnt say Brewers on the jersey."

I think that bolded statement is overwhelming hyperbole. If you have a study to the back up your point, I'd like to see it. For my money, baseball is just about as popular and diverse as it ever has been. In the last decade, we've had 8 different World Series winners, and 14 of the last 20 World Series participants have been different teams... that's almost half of baseball that's been to the World Series in the last ten years. That's pretty phenomenal.

The Brewers are stretched really thin on payroll. With Hart eating up a few $100k more than they thought, they might not have another $2 mil to simply give to Lopez. If Weeks goes down/is ineffective, they might just go with McGehee/Counsell/Inglett. They have plenty of options behind Weeks as long ad there isn't a spate of other injuries.

Please don't post in all caps. Thank you.

CNN just told me that by the end of the day there will be snow on the ground in 49 of the 50 states. I don't know for sure who the holdout is, but I'm looking at you Alaska.

It's buried a little, but this already came up in the prospect list thread in the minor league forum.

Lofgren would have to be offered back to the Indians if he doesn't make the major league squad out of spring training. If we wanted to keep Lofgren and send him to AAA, we'd probably have to trade someone (maybe someone along the lines of Dan Merklinger or Casey Baron) to the Indians to do it.

In order to be sent to the minor leagues without going through waivers, you need to have an option year remaining. Narveson does not. His service time doesn't matter in this case. And since Narveson has already been designated for assignment off of the 40-man roster once in his career (actually more than once), if he isn't claimed on waivers, he would have the option of either accepting the assignment or becoming a free agent. When the Brewers DFA'd him last year, he accepted the assignment to AAA even though he didn't have to. He did accept the assignment, I think, because the Brewers promised him he would start. I don't know if he'd accept the AAA assignment again. As a comparison, recently DFA'd Tim Dillard didn't have the option to accept the AAA assignment or become a free agent. It was his first time being DFA'd. Where the 5 year thing comes in to play is if the player does have an option, but can refuse to be demoted if he has more than 5 years of MLB service time.

If OPEC moves to the euro, they're nuts, but in the long run it may help the US if you believe that sometime in the next 100 years, the mass transportation fuel of choice will no longer be petroleum. I have doubts about the long-term efficacy of the Euro anyway, and wouldn't be surprised to see that collapse first. When you have that many separate independent interests all involved with trying to hold together one currency... it seems difficult to me to see it sticking around longer than the dollar. One of the best things that happened to the US since the US came into existence was that it convinced the world that our currency is best. Most people still believe it. Without some significant and dynamic change, China and Japan will not allow our currency to collapse. They can't afford it. Most of the world can't afford it. The dollar is in no danger of collapsing soon, or later. Good hedges, such as gold, are an important part of any portfolio. Just don't believe the hype/propaganda of Goldline, or anyone whose business it is to sell you gold. If you want an objective look at gold, go to Morningstar, the Wall Street Journal, or anyone who doesn't have a business or ideological interest in selling it. Most people - even that Motley Fool article linked above (and the Motley Fool method is about as anti-gold as it gets) - will tell you to buy it, just buy in extreme moderation.

Just got married about a month and a half ago. We had about 100 guests and altogether, spent under $9K. We did that by: -Doing all the invitations/decorations/anything we could make ourselves. -Going cheap on flowers, and we did some of the arranging ourselves. -Getting married on a Monday, in late December. The mansion we rented was just happy to have the business... anything they made was like a bonus to them. Getting married in winter, especially on a weekday, will save a lot of money. And visit lots of reception sites. Someone will need the business and make you a deal. -Making our own music mixes and using our reception site's in-house music system. For the wedding dance (we didn't have a dance floor except for our first dance), we just brought in our Bose Wave radio and that busted out our jam loud enough to fill the room and then some. -No booze, though with how little we ended up spending on food (see next point), we could have had beer. If you need a lot of alcohol to have fun at a wedding, that's fine, but it's going to cost you. -Buffet. We found the biggest single cost driver would be food. We limited ourselves to 100 guests (and my wife has about that many cousins), but even then, a sit-down dinner would have been a budget buster. We arranged what was basically an appetizer buffet with the caterer and once again, it was a Monday in late December - they were happy for the business. If you can, find a reception site that either has a flexible and cost-conscious in-house caterer, or find a site that allows you to bring in your own caterer, and shop around for exactly what you want. -Instead of cake, we got about 17 pies from Baker's Square. Cost under $200 bucks, and who doesn't love pie? In the age of social media, just having guests take photos makes sense. We opted to hire pros, and spent about 20% of the total price tag on them. We were happy to do that - we didn't want people to feel obligated to take photos, we wanted them to have fun. Turns out, people did take some photos and we're still getting them. There were also some tech-savvy invitees who took videos for us. My wife spent a little over $1000 on her dress, including alterations. That might be a sticking point about keeping the overall price down, but she was fully aware that we could spend the money better on say, buying a house (which we did last year) or investing. And that's why I love her.

The "Suck It" song at the end nearly had my wife and I in tears, it was so awesome. We both thought it was a good episode. The hot dog thing didn't make any sense, but that's why we thought it was funny.

In that all government-backed currencies eventually fail, yes, it will collapse. The when is almost certainly well off into the distant future. The dollar is still the world's dominant currency... more than 60% of reserves in the world's central banks are in dollars. China and Japan, our largest debt holders, need the dollar to be valuable as much as we do because they peg their currencies to the dollar. I don't think it's wise to invest in gold just because the dollar will someday collapse. I'm not going to buy a jacket due to the impending ice age. As a side note, I just spent about 20 minutes reading various websites telling me that the dollar was about to collapse, and the measures I should take to prepare myself for it. Most of the websites were trying to sell me gold, and more than one told me I needed to update my passport NOW so I can get out of dodge at a moments notice. Honestly, if the dollar collapses, where am I going? I can't afford the plane ticket.

IMO, the only good reason to have gold is to keep it as a hedge against inflation and market downturns, and if you buy any, keep it as a very small part of your portfolio, say 2-3%. As was mentioned, it's not even necessary to buy physical gold - buy a gold mutual fund or ETF. You don't have to worry about storage at home or paying someone to store it for you, which itself decreases the value of the investment. I say it's a hedge because of the following... It's true that there was a significant run on gold from 2001-2008, and there was another run in 2009. There was a big run in the late 1970's, too. It's also true that had you decided to buy gold in early 2007 (towards the end of the '01-'08 run) at around $825/oz, you would have bought gold at the same price it was in early 1980, which was the zenith of the last big gold upswing. Finally, it's true that the price of gold in late 1979 was the same as the price of gold in early 2004. That's a 0% return over almost 25 years, not even counting inflation. Check out how flat gold was during the 80's and 90's: http://goldprice.org/charts/history/gold_all_data_o_usd.png It's ok to have a 0% return as long as the stock market was taking in <0% returns, but that was not the case: http://chart.finance.yahoo.com/c/my/_/_gspc I trust the stock market about 99% more than I trust commodities, but it's a personal preference. I'm failing to find a historical bond chart that I like, but since bonds almost always have a return, their aggregate return over the same period is also >0%. If you feel the price of gold is likely to go up some more, go for it, but make sure you know why you feel that way, and please please please do not rely on Goldline (and their ridiculous commercials), or anyone else trying to sell you gold, convince you that you should buy it. They make money by selling it to you. It's like buying a car just because you saw a Ford commercial on TV. Edit: Dah, Nate beat me to it.

I feel for Kemp - I'm sure he wanted to be given more of an opportunity to catch. If the Brewers told him he'd do some catching in instructionals and they reneged on that commitment, that's a pretty shoddy way of conducting themselves. I hope Kemp reconsiders, and maybe the Brewers would reconsider moving off the catching position. FWIW, I'm very sure the Brewers didn't consider him a catcher over the long-term... I'm not sure if there was miscommunication between the Brewers and Kemp that led Kemp to believe he'd see more time behind the dish, or if they just didn't communicate that to him and he had to figure his position change out on his own. Either way, sounds like the Brewers could have handled the situation better. I get the feeling communication is somewhat of a problem in the Brewers' organization, but that's another topic for another day. All that said, I don't think the statement that I quoted holds much water. The Brewers will do what they think is best for their organization when it comes to which catchers are playing and how often they're playing. I won't fault them for playing McCraw or anyone else, at least at the outset, if they truly thought that playing them was best for the organization. As for the catchers who were riding the bench or in Arizona, players should get angry if they aren't playing - if they aren't getting angry, I don't think they're competitive enough to make it to the big leagues. However, "getting fed up with it" really isn't the answer if you want to have a shot at playing in the big leagues. Quitting drops your percentages of making is from >0% to 0%. The supply of catchers far outweighs the demand teams have for them. Kemp retiring will just open up a spot for someone else. If other catchers quit, the Brewers will have replacements for them too. There's no shortage of guys that want to catch professionally. Sorry if that sounds cold, but that's the reality.