Rob

smashing pumpkins are my all-time favorite band, but he needs to stfu and get a better drummer and stop writing gay lyrics. Gay lyrics? have you heard any of the new stuff? Last I heard was Machina. And while that was a better album than it got credit for, it was definitely trending towards gay. "Raaaaaiiiiiinnnnn falls on everyone..." C'mon. Rain is obviously code for semen. And everyone is just the guys. "Stand inside your love"? Buttsex. The list goes on and on.

There's almost no spread at all between ~6-30. Most of the guys that fall in that range are gonna be pretty comparable to Candelario. Good tools, but haven't faced any advanced enough pitching for us to know what we've really got. Marco Hernandez, Gioskar Amaya, Dan Vogelbach, Shawon Dunston Jr., Mark Malave, etc... any one of those guys could rocket up the list with a good full season debut. (not to say they'll all get to full season ball this year).

It would be really hard to explain it properly, but basically you need (or at least I use) a combination of Total Video Converter, Photoshop CS3, and Fireworks CS4. There is a ton of trial and error involved and its taken me quite a while to get really proficient at it, but the basic steps are - convert a vid clip into a gif via TVC (you can also use Photoshop I think, but I don't use it as I think the gif it outputs is pretty heavy as far as MB go) - open the source gif in Fireworks - open a picture that has the headshot you want in Photoshop. Then use the magic wand tool to highlight your head. Click copy. Then click paste (so it makes a new layer that is just the cropped head). Then immediately save it as a .psd (should do that automatically) - open the .psd in fireworks. click on the head, copy, then paste it into your .gif that you also have opened in fireworks. Your .gif will be split into frames and you'll have to individually place each head into each frame (most gifs that I make have about 90 frames). So it's kinda time intensive sometimes. For example, I consider the one that I made for Saints Report this week to be pretty much my magnum opus of .gifs. I can't imagine I'll ever do a better one and I certainly won't ever do one that took that long to make again. It took about 4 hours to do. I didn't realize how long it was going to take me until I was about a quarter of the way into it, but once I was that far...I figured I'd go ahead and finish it regardless of how long it took. ... ... ... Wanna make some .gifs for me?

He's 22 and struggled at Daytona. I imagine plenty of folk will jump to the conclusion he's a bit fringy. Those people are probably forgetting he hasn't really focused on baseball till this year. And of course, Daytona was only 40 some games and his BABIP was around .270 (which is a good deal lower than I'd expect given his skillset). The walk rate dropping there is a bit scary, but he could have just been pressing after a slow start. At any rate so as long as he continues to do a good job of avoiding strikeouts, he should hit for average. Between that and his defensive skills and speed, I'd say the only way he's "fringy" is if there's no power. That said, the power to this point in his career has been more than adequate, and it's more likely to get better than regress.

HE'S ALIVE!!!

Seconded.

A million internet points to the man who puts Theo's and Hendry's faces in all the right spots in this:

After it's all over, there's gonna be a lottery to see who Theo gets to take with him.

Chipper Jones? Don't know if he's got that kind of power though.

Vitters walk!!! WOOOOOO

I had always just assumed that was me. I comma the [expletive] out of my posts.

Boston absolutely has reasons to let Theo go. 1.) Due to the structure of his contract, keeping him around next season will cost the Red Sox seven million dollars. That's a lot to pay to a lame duck GM. 2.) Cherington has already been told he'll be taking over as GM. Reversing that decision now would at best have an adverse affect on morale and at worst might make him more likely to leave for the Angels/Orioles job. 3.) Theo is gone after this year regardless. So, to sum up... keeping Theo around for one more year will cost them three times more salary than the next highest paid GM* and quite possibly cause them to lose the guy they've been grooming for the job for half the last decade. That's a lot to lose in negotiations. *(Cashman at ~$2.2 mil, IIRC)

Kinda surprised to have not heard any more news this evening.

I always picture him as hedonism bot http://www.oliviawaite.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/tumblr_lg7g43xeY11qb6oyt.jpg

That was reported a few pages down. That's a no-brainer. It's been by far the most likely outcome, but I hadn't seen anything yet saying there'd been official word from the bosses.

Tim Brown of Yahoo is reporting that Cherrington has been told he's gonna be the next GM of the Red Sox.

We should really bring back the hottest woman contests.

There used to be a sticky with links to other teams bigger message boards... don't know what happened to it. Might be worth reviving if we're gonna get excited about the Cubs again. It's still in the FAQ forum. I honestly didn't know there was a FAQ forum.

There used to be a sticky with links to other teams bigger message boards... don't know what happened to it. Might be worth reviving if we're gonna get excited about the Cubs again.

I think he's earned it. Don't you?

I just wasted about 3 million potential children.

Man, you're about as much fun as emphysema. Johnny Carson had emphysema. Johnny Carson was fun.

I don't think Adrian Gonzalez was in the list of worst contracts... they just had a list up top of the contracts with the most money left on them. The "these contracts are really shitty" list started a bit lower.

He's absolutely right. Or at least he is about half the time. When the wind is blowing in, our high-powered HR guys do have a very hard time doing anything. Of course, if we didn't have those guys at all, we'd lose every game where the wind is blowing out at Wrigley. For the Cubs, the right answer is probably a mix. Other teams might be able to get away building their team more towards one side of the spectrum or the other. How many guys in baseball let alone on the Cubs are HR or nothing guys. You act like there are dozens of Dave Kingmans that we need to avoid. Did I say there were? I thought I was giving the equivalent response to "you know, stats and scouting makes for a better front office than just one or the other."

He's absolutely right. Or at least he is about half the time. When the wind is blowing in, our high-powered HR guys do have a very hard time doing anything. Of course, if we didn't have those guys at all, we'd lose every game where the wind is blowing out at Wrigley. For the Cubs, the right answer is probably a mix. Other teams might be able to get away building their team more towards one side of the spectrum or the other. So the answer is to get good hitters. I was thinking 8 Jacoby Ellsburys, one of whom could play short.