jersey cubs fan

I just can't see that happening. Someone will offer him a deal. FWIW, everyday I hear stories about what free agents the Mets and Yankees are after, two teams in need of bullpen help, and Wood's name never comes up.

You mean d-men? In order of their quality of play: Keith Campbell Barker Seabrook Johnson Walker Sopel And then there's Wiz. Sopel needs to go in any deal. But it's a bigger problem than that. The cap being what it is, you simply cannot have that much money tied up in goalies. We knew this when they signed Huet and nothing has changed. One of them has to go. Simple as that. I assumed he meant in the minors ready to play goal. Isn't Crawford still around? We can say you can't have that much money tied into goalies, but the fact is, they do have that much right now and they are a playoff caliber team with that arrangement. I think you can have that much tied up in the short-term, just not for multiple seasons. If they can get a haul, go for it. But if they are just trading him to make way for Huet, just keep the guy and see if he can carry you in the playoffs.

1/5th of the way through the season and I can't complain. The smart move is still to trade Khabi for the best package before the deadline. But on a team that needs to make the playoffs and probably advance to really build on this momentum, I'm not sure I want to see them go to Huet for that stretch run.

NOT!!!!!

Baseball also has a season (roughly) twice as long as the other bigs. There should be significantly less teams. I'd bet a lot of money that in my lifetime there will be playoff expansion. I'll argue against it every step of the way. It's a six month season, so is hockey and basketball. So what though? As things stand now, there is little benefit to having the best record over 162 games. If you add another WC team in each league, and have them play a one game playoff against the other WC, that makes the regular season that much more important because you definitely want to win your division and it would be great to host the wild card teams.

I don't think there is any sort of arm age discussion, unless you are talking about a 19 year old that just started pitching having a young arm. Dempster is an old pitcher with lots of miles under his belt. He's been seriously injured and had surgery, plus his workload increased tremendously this past year.

I've always been against letting more teams into the playoffs. It's not even really the playoffs, its a play in game. I guess I'm just a traditionalist but I feel like a division winner should be at an advantage over the WC winner. The thing is, the WC team can sneak into the playoffs and ride an ace or two to the championship, and I don't like that. I'm sure there are people that feel the other way though. But you're giving 10 teams a chance at the title after the regular season is over. Unless those 2 aces pitch the last day of the regular season and the 1 game playoff, you're still getting 3 starts out of them in a 5 game series. You are giving 10 teams a chance, but making it easier for the best teams and harder for the lesser teams. I've been in favor of 1-game play-ins myself.

Don't waste a question on the cliche "what's it like to pitch at Wrigley" or how do you handle the pressure of crowds question. How many times can we hear the same stock answer?

If shootouts are going to exists, I think that if you lose in OT you get zero points. If it gets to the SO than each team gets a point, like it's a tie and then the SO is for the extra point. This might give more incentive to try to win in OT (not saying teams stall to get to the SO, but I would assume it happens). No, I think it would do the opposite. If you got zero points for losing in OT, everyone would hang back and not take any chances because they would just try to get into the SO to make sure they got that point. That's actually why they set it up the way they did, to try to get teams to take chances and make the OT exciting. Same reason it's 4-on-4. Basically since there is arguements both ways about teams slacking off to get that 1 point, I think thats case enough that the OT/SO system is flawed. 2 points for a win, 1 for a tie, 0 for a loss. Just do it. Except that goes back to the problem people mentioned where nobody is going to risk losing in OT, and losing that point.

If shootouts are going to exists, I think that if you lose in OT you get zero points. If it gets to the SO than each team gets a point, like it's a tie and then the SO is for the extra point. This might give more incentive to try to win in OT (not saying teams stall to get to the SO, but I would assume it happens). Part of the reason they gave a point for reaching OT was because of the concern that teams would play far too conservatively in OT so they don't risk out on getting that one point.

My wife asks to go to a game every year specifically so she can watch football where it's meant to be played.

I can't see how he can even try to say that. because he's right Not really. Killing your wife and trying to buy a team are not connected on the surface, but committing a crime can easily derail your bid. Insider trading may be less serious than murder, but committing unethical and/or illegal business practices are actually much closer related to trying to buy a baseball team.

I still think they should beat New Orleans at home. But you are right, this wasn't a one weak stumbling block, they haven't played all that well for over a month. They need to destroy STL to make me think they have a chance of winning 9 this year.

If the guy was already a Cub, I might see the point in trying to look on the bright side of things. But I don't see the reason why you'd want to pretend a bad trade target is better than he is.

He hasn't even hit his prime years yet. Perhaps he could benefit from Gerald Perry's advice? I don't know, I'm not big on acquiring him either, I'm just trying to be optimistic. He turned 27 this fall. Most agree prime years are generally somewhere between 26-29. If a hitter isn't capable of producing by the time he's 26/27, I'm not sure how much realistic hope there is for him to produce in his later 20's.

I don't see the point.

What the hell, I guess we should talk about it. Bears are favored by 8. If they can't beat STL, they should probably kiss their playoff hopes goodbye. Minny and GB are at Jax and NO.

The Cubs are already paying most of the cost of those backloaded deals as of this year. Our free agency players (excluding the arbitration players) received 16.15 million in raises from 08 to 09 (I'm counting each signing bonus in the first year, both in the past and with Dempster's contract). Those same players next year? (now counting Dempster) 4.225 million in raises. A huge difference. Between 2010 and 2011, the players under contract then actually go down by .15 million overall. So as you can see, most of the damage from backloading has already been paid. So unless another several hugely backloaded contracts come around, the Cubs payroll situation isn't really going to get much worse than it is right now, which the Cubs seem able to absorb at the moment. Most teams are going to see the value of players under contract in future years be less than it is this year. The damage does not necessarily occur when those payments rise. The damage comes when you have people like Soriano or Fukudome not performing and you have to replace them, and when you have guys like Marmol or Soto, who you can count on for cheap performance, needing a big raise. In other words, the damages have not yet been paid. The damage will be bigger in 2010 and 2011, when guys are performing at lower levels, still receiving higher payments and new big contracts will need to be offered. But that's not backloading that's the problem there. That's signing bad/mediocre players to too much money for too much time. Those are really seperate issues. Backloading by itself isn't a bad thing. I'm not saying it is. But this isn't backloading by itself, it's backloading contracts to less than stellar players for absurd amounts. It's covering up your mistakes from earlier this decade by overpaying for pretty good players who clearly won't be worth what they are going to get in the future.

The Cubs are already paying most of the cost of those backloaded deals as of this year. Our free agency players (excluding the arbitration players) received 16.15 million in raises from 08 to 09 (I'm counting each signing bonus in the first year, both in the past and with Dempster's contract). Those same players next year? (now counting Dempster) 4.225 million in raises. A huge difference. Between 2010 and 2011, the players under contract then actually go down by .15 million overall. So as you can see, most of the damage from backloading has already been paid. So unless another several hugely backloaded contracts come around, the Cubs payroll situation isn't really going to get much worse than it is right now, which the Cubs seem able to absorb at the moment. Most teams are going to see the value of players under contract in future years be less than it is this year. The damage does not necessarily occur when those payments rise. The damage comes when you have people like Soriano or Fukudome not performing and you have to replace them, and when you have guys like Marmol or Soto, who you can count on for cheap performance, needing a big raise. In other words, the damages have not yet been paid. The damage will be bigger in 2010 and 2011, when guys are performing at lower levels, still receiving higher payments and new big contracts will need to be offered.

Backloading is way smarter than frontloading. Explain Essentially, it's much better for the team to be able to pay a 5 year $50 contract with payments of $1m, $1m, $1m, $1m, $46m than 10/10/10/10/10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp The problem comes up when a team does this irresponsibly, and/or when ownership is changing. Arizona through out a bunch of backloaded deals that won them a World Series, but nearly bankrupted the team.

This sentence is the exact opposite of logical. If he was young and his talent was catching up with him, the likelihood of last year being a fluke would be lowered. The fact that he is older and has been around is a negative.

I've got to wonder how much his bed crapping in the playoffs cost him. Soto not holding onto that tip might have cost Dempster 10 million dollars this offseason (not blaming Soto..just stating a possibility). The perception is completely different if that changed. But I think he might have gotten the same offer from the Cubs anyway..he just might have had to leave even more money on the table from another club. Teams evaluating him on one playoff game are pretty dumb. By the same measuere, Sabathia has been absolute garbage in the playoffs. It's not a matter of evaluating him on one playoff game. But this happens in sports all the time, a guy who comes up big in the playoffs during a contract year is going to draw huge interest, which creates bidding wars and higher contracts. Dempster's knock going into this season was control. He appeared to fix that issue this season, but then reverted in the playoffs. Teams noticed.

Then again, I would not be the least bit surprised to hear that Lee has spent more time on dealing with his daughter's illness in recent offseasons and hasn't had the time to practice as hard. Guys tend to regress, but is that 100% natural aging or is some of that influenced by older financially comfortable players not having the same level of dedication to their training? We hear all the time about guys changing their workout habits to right the ship. That's a pretty strong indication that in some of their off years that dedication isn't there and there is less effort.

It's probably to put pressure on Atlanta to up their offer. The scary part of these Dempster rumors is that Atlanta had Dempster on their radar. If the Cubs sign Dempster, Atlanta could up their offer, especially considering some of the other FA pitchers Atlanta is looking at are likely to sign elsewhere. If I'm Towers, I prefer the packages Atlanta can put together over just about anything the Cubs would reasonably offer. Yeah, there's that and that's what Towers wants, but once again Peavy doesn't want to go to Atlanta. Today. But if this drags on for a long time, perhaps Towers is trying to pressure Peavy to open up the list of acceptable destinations.

Why do people always want to think that when a baseball player struggles, it's because of effort? Frankly, if I'm looking for reasons for the decline in Derrek Lee's numbers the last few years, effort is the last thing I'd try to attribute it to. It's not just on field effort though. It can be the effort in preperation. The guy can still try just as hard, but is there the same incentive to kill yourself in the training room all winter? Certainly contract years can lead to more work than non-contract, years, which can contribute to discrepency in performance. That being said, my concern with Dempster isn't really effort related, it's just that he's never did what he did last year and I have very little reason to believe he'll do it again. But he can be a decent pitcher for 4 more years.