Sammy Sofa

Because he was always so absurd. There's this weird misconception that Colbert was baffling massive amounts of conservatives into thinking he was one of them, like he somehow tricked his way into something like hosting the Correspondents Dinner, and that simply wasn't the case. When you're peppering every episode with things like your obsessive hatred of bears, you're making it pretty damn obvious that the whole thing is a bit.

I'm not really pulling for either team, but will enjoy watching the series and hope it'll at least be entertaining.

AKA The South Park Conundrum

Yeah..."awesome"...

I would love a super boring Cubs WS season and postseason.

yep, but because I don't think he has the pitch recognition skills, I don't mind it from him. Yeah, if he can make it work, great. It just cracks me up how it seems like most of the time when he actually takes a pitch it seems like he made the decision to do so, like, 10 minutes before he even stepped to the plate.

Baez is the guess-iest guess-hitter who ever guessed.

This thread could use some attention. Happy posting!

I keep coming back here to help try and pass a dreary workday, but the most active threads mostly tend to be Bears or Bulls-related. Please fix. Thanks.

It would be so ESPN to try and scramble to fix this by doing something amazingly stupid like hiring Clay Travis.

Nobody at ESPN has any horsefeathering clue what they're doing as they die the slowest of deaths.

Having a business plan centered around accumulating newspaper writers seems about as sound as some dude in the 70's thinking his sweet collection of Pet Rocks is only going to appreciate in value.

John Fox is pretty crafty pulling out the ol' Tebow-era Broncos win today.

He looks even creepier without it.

Wasn't he just responding to the nonsense questions about a "traditional" leadoff hitter? Obviously they want someone who can get on base at a decent clip ahead of the 2-4 guys.

:-k And then followed up by a dude talking about how much he can't stand NSBB, yet can't stop himself from coming back, who thinks the guy bragging about smart and successful he is is the one being "bullied."

How much can a player really change their approach from a 162 game regular season to the post season? They're probably used to making minor adjustments during the season, mostly because of pitcher they're facing that day. But I can't imagine it'd be a drastic change for playoff games. Agreed; I took what Theo said as more of somehow tapping into or focusing on something they've been able to do over the course of the regular season as opposed to having some kind of separate, mythical "playoff mode."

Right, and the safe money would be that the guy you would assume has been a big part of the regular season success could be a key part of helping shape a still young team. Again, this isn't a Bosio-type situation, where you had sustained regular season flaws then carry over into the postseason. The big hurdle is putting together a team that can have an offense this good in the regular season; what happens in the postseason is then just gravy. And the last thing you want to do in who you hire is doing so thinking that how they perform in the small sample size of the postseason is the focus as opposed to the regular season. Theo is saying it himself in what you quoted: "How we get to those runs we created in the regular season that makes us more vulnerable to the type of pitching and the type of preparation and advance scouting you see in the postseason? It’s virtually impossible to answer except to say you’re safer assuming there is some element that you can control.” Basically, "how do get what we're doing so well in the regular season to work in the postseason?" Well, Mallee is, presumably, a key reason why things work so well in the regular season. Why scrap that for the crapshoot of finding someone who who can handle things as well as he does regarding the regular season in the remote hopes he is also some kind of playoff savant? You're already 90% of the way there with Mallee. Work with the guy who has gotten you this far to see what could be changed or improved instead of starting over.

Oh, I wasn't talking about his baseball decisions at all. it was a cardinals are drunks joke I am genuinely sorry I didn't realize that.

Gonna have to update this.

Changeups are just hard to mimic in a training setting especially MLB caliber ones. Yeah, I just don't know what he thinks a new hitting coach would be able to do so much differently.

Harping on Bryant's hangup sometimes when it comes to changeups like it's something that a different hitting coach would address makes no sense. Like, it seems to be complaining like the Cubs haven't noticed this, or likely haven't tried any number of approaches to improve Bryant's approach in that regard. How does that seem logical at all? Sometimes these things just take time for a young player to finally adjust to. Sometimes good players just have holes in their approach. If teams want to try simply challenging him with changeups, hey, got nuts; he'll still annihilate the mistakes.

Well, the Cubs' player development has been very good.