jersey cubs fan

this is a really cheasy thing

Two teams advance, right? Isn't it more important who the other two are, rather than which top seed you get?

USA is in with England.

Well it depends on how you go about fielding that old team. The Cubs were older than most and not good. If you have 32 year old stars, you have known quantities and will be good. If you have 31 year old mediocre players, you will be younger but worse. And generally, the youngest teams will be teams in transition, who had to get rid of their established players and go with a bunch of youth, much of which maybe should still be in the minors. Youth, in and of itself, is not a quality. But at the same time, neither is age. A 36 year old journeyman is a 36 year old journeyman and a 23 overmatched player is still overmatched. If you are older, but good, that's great, if you are older, and not good, that's really bad. And that's the Cubs. If you are younger and good, that is ideal, but if you are a younger and bad, at least there is room for improvement.

is this the technical emmy's or something?

google image search "charlize doesn't look as good anymore", picture a mashed up episode of deal or no deal and secret password, then just let us tell you what happens.

Yet when the Phils do it, the same folks are full of praise. Actually no, many of the folks have pointed out it was too much. But you don't care about facts you just want to cry about unfair treatment of the great Jim Hendry. There absolutely is a double standard at work here (both in this thread and on the board in general), and I don't mind pointing out the hypocrisy of it. By accusing people who have questioned this contract of praising it?

A giant red and black sun just crashed in South Africa.

On your passed out friends face?

I wouldn't like the contract or the loss of draft picks. Is he a fantastic fielder? Boston has had SS issues, right? I don't even know who the incumbent is. Is it there one weak spot?

Yet when the Phils do it, the same folks are full of praise. Actually no, many of the folks have pointed out it was too much. But you don't care about facts you just want to cry about unfair treatment of the great Jim Hendry.

Well then so be it, you tried to field the best team you could. They will just be in the same position they are in now, which is four big question marks trying to fill two spots, with that money being wasted on more mediocrity. You don't make decisions on worst case scenario only. I don't get the point in trading for an oft-injured player (while the team was for sale and payroll was in doubt), having that player perform to expectations, and then claiming you are in a sticky situation where you can't risk keeping him around. If Harden is too big of a risk to offer arbitration to, how was he not too big of a risk to trade quality prospects for when you owed him about $8m? To me this just reaks more of Hendry's zigzagging no longterm plan style. One year we need guys who catch the ball, another year we just need any offensive threat we can get, then we need innings eaters, but now we need a high risk high reward talent, but now we need left handed bats, oops, let's make that speed, and now that left handed bat who we know was a jerk needs to be gone because he's a jerk. Sign all these guys now, then pay them to play elsewhere or live with their bad contracts later. If Hendry was truly being frugal with his money, I could understand. If they were forcing him to cut payroll, I could understand. But Hendry is making this decision because he wants the freedom to waste money in other spots. The money is there, he's just choosing to spend it differently. And his haphazard style continues to waste money in the short-term and long-term.

As I posted above, Polanco is not average-to-slightly above average offensively, and a switch to 3B makes his defensive value uncertain. Whatever control issues Grabow may have have not prevented him from being effective. What is it about the fact that third basemen are more important than middle relievers that you can't understand?

I'm trying to sift through all of this Hendry-hate to find some logic in some of these posts. Hendry made a mistake in signing Miles, but now we want to criticize him for making a very good trade and dumping Miles because he sent $1 million to the A's? Is it really that complicated? Are you really that blind? I'm not criticizing him for the move. I'm also not applauding him for patching a mistake. Some people got all giddy because he improved the 2006 team, forgetting that the 2006 mess was all his doing in the first place. Some people say he had to go get Soriano because of the complete lack of outfield talent in the system, so they applaud him for that. But the lack of any talent in the outfield was his fault in the first place. Figuring out how to dump Marquis while only paying part of his salary was applauded by many who thought it would be impossible to move Marquis, but he was only in that position because he signed him in the first place. You don't get credit as a GM for putting band aids on your self inflicted wounds.

Sorry, but this is a really stupid question and scenario. A GM's job is to make good moves to improve the team. Acquiring Harden was good, until he let him go for nothing (assuming that is what eventually happens). A negative move sets the team back, partially fixing that mistake doesn't leave the team ahead, it still leaves them with a mistake, only slightly less so. You have to constantly improve your team or it will decay on its own. Good moves and bad moves don't offset each other to keep the team constant.

Hendry is the same GM he's been from Day 1. I was a big proponent of hiring him because of his role in improving the Cubs system in the 90s, even if that improvement now appears to be more on paper than in reality. But as soon as he hired Dusty Baker the writing was on the wall that Hendry was going to waste gobs of money on conventional wisdom style baseball.

None. That was MacPhail, McDonough and Kenney. And the Cubs old reputation as cheapskates wasn't all that accurate. Remember, they once signed a guy to the biggest contract in baseball before Hendry even showed up (Sandberg). And the biggest knock on the Cubs was that they paid for past their prime free agents instead of developing their own quality players. Pretty much every team out there had a reputation as being cheap, outside of the Yankees and whatever AL team was trying to compete with them that year.

Don't poo poo on Jim. I think we all should take 24 entire hours and focus on a move that actually has a bit of logic and improves our ballclub. Tomorrow we can lament at the fact that he's fixing mistakes. I just don't see the point in applauding a move that only accomplishes making a previous move less bad. Every single transaction affects other transactions and can only be judged in the big picture of the state of the franchise.

Not a bad trade on the surface, but like most of Hendry's moves, it's stained with his own stupidity. He had to pay somebody else to take another mistake off his hands. So while it saves them some money, it doesn't save them from the mistake of Miles. And when people start talking payroll everybody will forget the million he is paying for a guy not to play for the Cubs, again.

The reason is simple, Hendry didn't sign Polanco. As I've posted often, some posters criticize Hendry for every transaction he makes or doesn't make. Look at the criticism he's getting in the threads about Padilla and Ankiel, even though Bruce pointed out that the rumor about Padilla is false. And yet you'll defend every stupid thing he does, and support equating middle relievers with third baseman.

One is a starting third baseman, one is a reliever. You can't seriously be that dense that you can't see the difference. AND PHILLY WON A FREAKING WORLD SERIES AND ANOTHER NL PENNANT. The day Hendry pulls that off in back to back years is the day I won't give him crap for stupid signings.

It's not poor at all. Baseball is the easiest game around to flip back and forth and still follow. And they aren't even the biggest games, the championship series are much bigger. Plus there would barely be a need to have 2 games on at a time.

3B and 2B production is quite similar, they average nearly the same. If you are getting great production at one and less at the other, is there really a problem? Last year, Philly's 3B was as big a black hole as Chicago's 2B. Polanco in a down year was still an improvement over Feliz. I don't see this as a great use of resources, but I don't see it hurting Philly either.

What is idiotic about that? Oh, there's this quaint notion I adhere to, it's called watching the games. You can play them simultaneously and still have them on television and the viewer flip back and forth and enjoy both. It's not simultaneous that's the problem, it's breaking them up by region and making one game unavailable that is the problem.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/media/photo/2009-12/50836409.jpg Apparantly, those are the first set of bushes Tiger managed to avoid.