imb

man, no bradford for likely a month, no gresh for the whole season... this is a nightmare. Cubs are 11 games out of first. Kevin Durant will probably die in a car wreck. Let's just fastforward to 2010 please.

I think it's safe to say that Zach Duke has nothing today.

Oooh, I forgot Ole Miss played today. I've always kind of sided with the whole Jevan Snead is a better pro prospect than Bradford crowd anyway.

Actually, my mom is having surgery that day. can't she postpone it

I TAKE BACK EVERYTHING I SAID ABOUT ENJOYING COLLEGE FOOTBALL SEASON

no one knows 4-star recruit out of HS. Has a really awful beard.

well [expletive]

i always forget just how awesome college football saturdays are got hot dogs and burgers on the grill, a fridge full of beer, a big huge bowl of cajun shrimp, friends over, games on... good times

Hahahaha, clutch

oh my god this is hilarious

I don't see how anybody can reasonably call that beautiful. It's hideous. i do like the old-school traditional stadiums better, but man, if you're going to do a stadium like jerry world, you might as well go all out.

18 hours until OU-BYU, can't wait. The BYU cheerleaders have infested Dallas. http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/2133/79346870839861921712198.jpg

Uh he said Soriano has no business playing right now. I'm guessing he hasn't listened to Brenly during a Cubs game this year. Soriano has to be one of Brenly's least favorite players. I applaud Brenly for calling it how it is, although he picked a strange time to pile on Bradley. Lets face it, Bradley isn't the reason the Cubs have been losing all season. Even when he was struggling early on in the year, he was still getting on base pretty regularly. While it is obvious that Bradley is a head case and loves to play up the victim role, he still has two years left on his contract and could be a real asset to the team. The team needs to figure out a way for Bradley to keep his mouth shut and not be overly sensitive. I've been watching and listening. I'm just pointing out that Brenly has been talking about Soriano sucking because Truffle said, "how about saying that soriano and miles have been a joke this season? no let's pick on bradley." he was agreeing with you, dude

take a breath, freak I suppose you're in the "let him make $18 million to OPS .720" crowd. Let's hope Tom Ricketts can see a sunk cost a bit better. No, god, I'd dump him for a bag of balls if it was possible. I'm taking about the "LET'S MAKE HIM MISERABLE" garbage. Understood, but the way I figure is that despite playing through injuries, has Soriano really worked as hard as possible to make the team better? Why give him the satisfaction of even being able to play? Let him earn his money that he's getting paid for a few seasons 5 years ago while at least feeling guilty for stealing the money. You're taking an injured baseball player's struggles personally. I don't think I need to explain why this is weird.

take a breath, freak I suppose you're in the "let him make $18 million to OPS .720" crowd. Let's hope Tom Ricketts can see a sunk cost a bit better. No, god, I'd dump him for a bag of balls if it was possible. I'm taking about the "LET'S MAKE HIM MISERABLE" garbage.

take a breath, freak

what team are you

I might agree with that if the difference wasn't nearly a whole R/G after 120 games. Perhaps there's something more at work here, like the confidence level of the pitchers ?? You still can't draw anything of note from the R/G totals by themselves. You could guess, and you might be right, but there's no way of knowing. For instance, look at this stat CUBS' Runs scored per game when Soto starts 3.93.... when K Hill starts 5.15 Why are the Cubs scoring over a R/G more when Hill hits even though he's been worse statistically than Soto? Because there are lots of other variables involved. Try to focus now, IMB. You're all over the place. We started out talking about the effect of a catcher on the teams' ability to prevent runs; basically CERA. The only conclusion that I came to was that I don't think the difference can be completely explained away as white noise because it's too large. I didn't, as you said, "draw anything" from the R/G totals by themselves. I was speaking of the difference in the pitchers' ERA with the two catchers, and for the record, I wasn't basing my remarks on just 3/4 of a season; although I didn't reveal it, K Hill smoked Soto in this department last year by an even bigger margin...... 2.46 to 3.88. Now you want throw in the offensive R/G stats into a discussion of the defensive effect of a catcher ??? How is that relevant ?? Sure, I know I posted it, but it's really unrelated to our discussion. It's nothing more than an interesting anomaly. I drew no conclusions from it, and probably shouldn't have posted it. I didn't mean that you specifically had drawn a conclusion from it, just that it wasn't a good idea. The offensive stats I postsed were just an example of how useless something like this is on its own. The offense has performed much better with Hill in the lineup rather than Soto even though Hill has been statistically worse. Does that mean that we should start Hill because of his effect on the Cubs offense? Of course not, so we throw that out. Maybe Hill is a better game caller and understands pitching better than Soto, it's definitely possible, but you just can't tell from a sample of 200-300 games. Maybe he's caught games against worse opponents, or maybe he's caught better pitchers or maybe he's caught more games when the wind was blowing in, I mean, who knows? That's the point, you can't see that from just looking at straight numbers, and unless you feel like doing extra research, the stats are nothing more than something interesting to theorize about.

I might agree with that if the difference wasn't nearly a whole R/G after 120 games. Perhaps there's something more at work here, like the confidence level of the pitchers ?? You still can't draw anything of note from the R/G totals by themselves. You could guess, and you might be right, but there's no way of knowing. For instance, look at this stat CUBS' Runs scored per game when Soto starts 3.93.... when K Hill starts 5.15 Why are the Cubs scoring over a R/G more when Hill hits even though he's been worse statistically than Soto? Because there are lots of other variables involved.

i can definitely buy that a catcher, by virtue of understanding opponents' tendencies and pitching strategy in general, could have an effect on a pitchers' ERA. I don't think that requires much of a leap. I don't think that you can just take two catches in a one-year span (or in this case, 3/4 season span) and make a judgement that one is a better-game caller than another. Seems like it would be impossible to separate the noise in this case.

roast, it's still funny, shutup go be unfunny in some stupid thread no one cares about

he's been like that all year, have you even been watching the games edit: day, year, whatever

this is an interesting strategy you've developed, you may want to start talking to baseball coaches and see if they'll incorporate this "backing up" idea

oh man, that was VICIOUS

Hahahaha