jersey cubs fan

I assume that means Sandberg will be the new Phillies manager. Hurray for them.

that's like a tweet specifically designed to get Paul Sullivan to retweet it

WTF are the Texans doing? The Cowboys Jumbotron is already ridiculously large and their new one will dwarf it. When you go to a game at Cowboys Stadium (now AT&T Stadium, I guess) you end up watching on the Jumbotron because it is too distracting. It's an amazing piece of technology but it detracts from the game. There is a very strong sense that fans are being drawn away from the stadium to watch games, and teams are desperate to find gimmicks to keep them in attendance.

Why is strategy in quotes? I don't see how you can possibly deny that there is additional strategy involved in managing an NL lineup. You don't have to enjoy it, but it shouldn't be hard to understand why someone else might prefer the less cookie-cutter flow of NL games where teams are forced to make trade-offs between pitching and hitting. It's called strategy just so olde timey folk and managers can justify their hard on for history and their job, respectively. It's not meaningful strategy. It's like switching lanes on a highway during bumper to bumper traffic. You look like you're doing something, but you aren't.

There was one play, a TD run, where the announcers praised Long while Mills had the much more impressive and important block. Long basically let a guy who was moving sideways take himself out of the play, while Garza made the initial block and Mills stood up a LB in the hole and drove him into the endzone. Long did show a ton of upside in that game though.

they have a lot more than 6 prospects in the system that could end up becoming great. the system is a lot deeper than that. how much would you like to bet that less than 6 of the cubs prospects end up being great? But they could man, and really, what is baseball than a game of what could happen?

Another series or two isn't going to make much of a difference, and it does open him up to injury. This is going to last into the regular season, there is no way around it.

Fair or not, this is true. I follow a lot of the sports radio guys on twitter, and it's funny. Bernstein last night was laughing at the overreactions to a preseason game last night, but then goes on to criticize Cutler for the one int, despite a 98.3 rating. Mully has already called Cutler "Jeff George" this morning on the radio. I know I'm a Cutler apologist, and he wasn't perfect last night, but for a guy in his umpteenth offense, I was happy with what I saw last night. He needs to obviously find some other guys besides Marshall to throw too, but it's hard to know if that's on Cutler, or if it's on the WR's for not getting seperation. I'm thinking it's probably time to put more of that on Cutler at this point...but still hard to tell. The pick was frustrating, and that was all on Jay..no doubt. But he's gonna throw his share of picks. As long as they're in areas of the field that don't hurt too much, I think we just have to accept that. The amount of obsession over that pick is astonishing. He's an INT prone QB in the preseason with a hodgepodge line and WR group in his 5th new offense with the team, again, in preseason. QBs throw picks. Picks often look bad. It was like his 5th drive ever under this system, in preseason.

ESZM

But he will be a BASEBALL LIFER by then.

i like those guys a lot, but don't you have to sort of just think this franchise is in serious trouble? there's just no way all of the top guys pan out, and even from the top four, aren't you realistically doing well if you get a very good (though non-star) player and a couple acceptable starters out of that group? I've said something similar before, but to expand a bit, the near term Cubs will rise or fall with Castro, Rizzo, Samardzija, Baez, and maybe Bryant/Soler. If they aren't getting star level production from several of those guys, then their chances of being a great team go way down. How that colors your opinion of the Front Office is a bit of a different question. Personally, I think that if Castro and Samardzija aren't ending up more than complementary guys, that truly underscores the atrocious level of talent in the organization when Theo and Jed took over. They can also take at least some responsibility for player development, because that's what we were relying on them to fix along with better talent selection, but in terms of the whole picture, Castro and Samardzija flat-lining puts a cherry on top of Hendry's crap sundae more than indicts them for relying on those players while adding pieces around them. Those two guys who were actually good and getting better suddenly falling off the cliff would have to put at least as much blame on the development side than on the talent side. The talent was there. That much is obvious.

Yeah, it's pretty difficult to be a living former baseball executive who is actually shunned from all of baseball. There is going to be a certain segment that wouldn't hire him out of fear that he'd be taking their job eventually. And a few organizations that probably scoff at his resume. But I'd bet at least a dozen would be all over trying to hire him.

http://thestacks.deadspin.com/the-time-a-baseball-player-sent-a-rat-to-a-female-sport-1148830047 Soooo, Dave Kingman was a douchebag mama's boy who hated women.

Because it's expensive and destroys your entire Sunday. My friend had 7 tickets to Jets games at the meadowlands. He trimmed that to 4 in the new stadium but gave them up 2 years ago. Partially because of cost (you can't get rid of preseason tix), partially because the stadium and tailgate now sucks, and partially because of having kids. But it is only 8 days a year. "destroying your Sunday" doesn't really hold up at all.

Given my limited exposure to Seattle over the past decade, I could see it. I first went there to visit friends right around the time that Seattle had emerged as a good baseball team. It must have been a few years after they beat the Yankees in that famous series. But I don't recall there being much of a noticeable passion for the team. The Seahawks might as well have been non existent then. Seattle is kind of like Atlanta, in that it has so many people who are not from there. Except there are no black people, and a hell of a lot of 25 year old meth/heroin addicts living on the streets. It doesn't seem like a huge pro sports supporting town. I was last there a year ago and don't recall much passion for any team among the people I ran across. From what I've read it does sound like that MLS team is at least competing for attention with the Seahawks. And given their very recent PR win, they could easily own the short-term interests of the fans. Although if Russell Wilson and the Seahawks build on last season, they will probably own what part of the city that cares.

it costs as much as a share of google? Damn.

We're talking about it being inexcusable to not compete for a playoff spot until 2015, not what their record was last year.

i don't get how this could be. even if they didn't play a disparate amount of games, you don't think the seahawks would outdraw the soccer team? Based solely on attendance? What a flawed way to measure. But yes the seahawks sell out every game. Of course the sounders draw over 40k which is almost double the next-highest MLS team. They play twice as many games as an NFL team and they aren't all Sunday afternoon when attendance is easy. and how much do they cost?

If you pour all your efforts into that farm system while most other teams are actually trying to keep fans interested in their big league team it is not at all hard to make that system good. Again, what would you have done differently? again, go back and look at the thousands of pages on this site devoted to the different things they could have done to get better since they took control. it's not on me to make them better, it's on the supergroup of highly compensated geniuses. Their job isn't to vault to the top of baseball america rankings, their job is to make the big league team win lots of baseball games.

If you pour all your efforts into that farm system while most other teams are actually trying to keep fans interested in their big league team it is not at all hard to make that system good.

Screw that. The specifics have been thrown out thousands of times. Don't come with this nonsensical "there is nothing they can do about their situation" rhetoric. It's their job to make it happen. They are the highly compensated super group already 2 years into their tenure. If they can't figure out a way to make the team competitive 3 seasons in they really did a poor job.

It might be, but that would have to only be by choice. Because it could open next year if they wanted to try and open it. How do you think they should do that? Actually try this year and stop crying poor. Do stuff along the lines of what was said above.

It might be, but that would have to only be by choice. Because it could open next year if they wanted to try and open it.

It is not the NFL, but it is closer to the NFL in terms of ease of making the playoffs than any of the other major sports. 33.3% - 37.5%, compared to more than 50% in the NBA and NHL. The NFL starts every year with 4-5 teams that have no chance 4-5 teams that are close to locks and a whole bunch in between. MLB is similar. You can't overhaul an entire roster as quickly as you can in the NFL, but the NFL also requires you put together a much bigger roster, plus injuries are a much bigger problem, plus coaches and their respective strategies also matter.