TruffleShuffle

and they're doing a medley, some of which will be mimed to over a track. it's really embarrassing. they're not the same band without Keith Moon anyways. It's like when Zep plays without Bonham (granted his son is pretty damn good though). how does it really matter? bonham is a drummer and his son is talented; i doubt the difference is that great. plus why should they not be able to perform their music any more because their alcoholic drummer drank himself to death?

They replaced Piniero's 5 win season with Brad Penny, and Wainwright and Carpenter each have injury histories and each threw at least 100 innings more than they did in 2008. Offensively the Cards are extremely top heavy, so if they have injuries or ineffectiveness to Pujols or Holliday, they're hosed. Even with them, the rest of the offense is so unproven/ungood that they aren't guaranteed to take advantage of having Pujols and Holliday. Really, a fairly significant portion of the projected difference between the Cards and Cubs is defense. Problem is, all the Cardinals' plus defenders play positions where the measurement isn't very good(Pujols, Molina), or don't have the playing time to have a lot of certainty in them being 1-2 win defenders(Ryan, Rasmus). To clarify, this doesn't mean that I think the Cubs are running away with the 2010 Central. Merely, that there isn't much of a gap between the teams, and no one should be surprised if either wins or if the race goes to the wire. i don't think that's really true for their offense. ludwick is a good hitter; schumaker posts a .360 OBP from 2B, and rasmus is pretty good and should continue to improve. plus pujols and holliday have very clean injury histories and aren't likely to miss more than 10% of their games, if that. oh their pitching is horrendous, but i still think they pretty easily have a better offense than the cubs unless braun or fielder miss a lot of time.

reds aside, i have no idea how people have any degree of confidence that our pitching will be better than the cardinals, or our offense will be better than the cardinals and brewers.

the part i don't like is when news stories from the AP or CNN or whoever use reactions from twitter. then you have idiotic things like "OMG, can't believe U R gone!!!" in a news story about a death of a celebrity. otherwise i don't have a problem with it.

i would much rather pay 20 grand to watch mark prior play soft toss, sit a whirlpool, hop in an mri machine and fly to birmingham than spend 95 million to watch soriano not be good at baseball for the next five years.

nobody has voted for babel, atonement or the hours because nobody actually saw those movies.

65 is already diluted for a tournament. There's nothing ridiculous about that argument. What is ridiculous is trying to compare NCAA basketball as a league similar to NHL, NBA and NFL. Exactly. By the end of the regular season, there are rarely more than a handful of teams seriously being considered for a national title. If all these teams were on a level playing field, it'd be different, but the fact is of these 65 teams, at least half and probably more have pretty much no chance at all of winning the title. that's true, but one advantage of the current format - and even one that is expanded - is that you force a team to be consistently good in a string of games. it's true that you could pare down the field to, say, 32 teams and be confident that you have not left out the best team in the country, but i'd argue that you'd lower the confidence that the winner of the tournament actually IS the best team in the country.

this, to me, is the #1 argument for this system. but if they're making this change then they had better let in teams like whoever doesn't win the ivy league (harvard/cornell), rather than just letting in every "bcs conference" school that's over .500.

it's not even close. in baseball, the odds of getting hurt while playing at full speed are relatively small - most pitchers just get hurt in long-term stuff and a lot of position players get hurt in random hamstring pulls or getting hit by a pitch. there's no contact so basically pitchers throw the same pitches at the same speeds that they do in "regular" games and hitters try to do the same things that they do in "regular" games. the scores of mlb all-star games are very similar to scores of other baseball games - some are high-scoring, some are low-scoring, but if you take the long-term average, it's very close to the average scoring in games. nfl, nba and nhl all star games are have very little of the contact and defensive commitment that characterize "normal" games in those sports, and scoring is far higher than in regular season games.

This seems unlikely. Cairo projections look better than BPro ones but I don't see how the Cubs will be the best offense and defense. whose offense and pitching will be better? the cardinals are likely to have a better offense than us; the brewers scored nearly half a run more per game than us last year and i don't think it's a huge deal that they've lost jason kendall, felipe lopez, mike cameron, jj hardy and bill hall. i guess the reds might be close if some of their young guys continue to improve (likely) and dusty doesn't give unproductive players 500 PAs (unlikely). as for pitching, i'd definitely take the cardinals' staff over the cubs and the reds will probably be close.

it has samardzija, silva and mitch atkins all getting a pretty good amount of playing time and doing terribly (~5.5 ERA), and projects patton to have a 6.79 ERA in 55 innings. if any of those guys are that bad, they won't get the kind of innings that PECOTA thinks they'll get, and they'll be replaced by someone (gaub, parker) who would probably do better.

officiating in this league is [expletive] horrendous. flyers scored a goal to make it 3-0; kerry fraser told roloson that the puck was behind him and in the net before scott hartnell made contact - which was completely correct. then the refs huddle up for 2 minutes, call no goal and hartnell goes to the box, isles score. WHAT THE [expletive].

amazing how guys have much worse ERAs when facing batters with runners on base.

i'd like to see the eagles trade mcnabb now. he still has pretty good value left and there are good teams that will have a need a qb. i don't think mcnabb is much better than kolb at this point though, and the eagles aren't going to win a championship with mcnabb.

Which is the only reason I can think of that caused the ref not to throw it on the low shot. He was reluctant to flag two roughing the passer's on one drive especially if he saw the INT first. I agree that the first call was weak. I think the non-call was a bigger [expletive] up than the call he made though. well i think a lot of these calls are a joke since you can't hit a quarterback high, low, after he releases the ball, lift him of the ground or put your weight on top of him. i don't really consider the "missed" call on favre a bad one because they shouldn't have called the first one, so it would've been a punt and basically the same outcome.

i'm not even going to blame hendry for this one... friggin lou.

i still argue that the first roughing the passer call (on favre's pass) was a bad one. the guy made a form tackle and favre's legs just came up off the ground as he was going back. there was no lift and plant motion by the defender.

good, dye sucks. thanks for turning it down buddy.

It's a form of dementia, and doesn more than make you forget things, including causing you to say things that seem quite stupid. i only know what i hear on tv.

alzheimer's makes you forget things, not say stupid things. maybe you wanted to go with dementia?

amen to that.

murray has looked very good. the final should be an excellent match.

+1 +2 I hope he tears it up and everyone else on the Brewers fails miserably. really? so the three of you agree, one of your favorite cubs of all time is a guy who played 85 games in a cub uniform?

this is law's top 10: 1. Starlin Castro, SS 2. Josh Vitters, 3B 3. Jay Jackson, RHP 4. Andrew Cashner, RHP 5. Brett Jackson, OF 6. Lee Hak-Ju, SS 7. Kyler Burke, OF 8. Chris Carpenter, RHP 9. Ryan Flaherty, IF 10. Brooks Raley, LHP

also, jake fox is projected to hit 30 hr's for oakland.