Transmogrified Tiger

Holy Crap. I think Penn State just won in Champaign.

MSU holds on by 11. Wisconsin down 16 in Purdue with 10+ mins remaining. They're almost at Mizzou-level freefall. U of I up 13 early at home over Penn St.

Is UCLA the only tourney team out there? Can Cal get in? Despite losing to Wazzou today, it's hard to see Washington missing the tourney.

Just saw an update with a clip of the skirmish. Didn't look like something deserving of a double tech to me, and I guess the coach coming on the floor to break it up is an automatic T. MSU up 12 at the 16 min. timeout.

I missed the beginning of Bilas's bit, but he went off on how the end of the BC game was a bad call, but that it was isolated. He was getting kinda upset, with the "unless someone can step forward with empirical evidence or a coach steps up" bit, even though I'm pretty sure there is said evidence that Duke gets calls. Vitale blabbered about how they get all the good players, which makes no sense. He also said that they always slash and attack the basket, which to my brief knowledge appears wrong as well. Phelps hardly said anything.

Gameday with the topic "Does Duke get favorable treatment from officials", and Vitale and Bilas are two of the three analysts. I think Digger is stunned at what he's hearing to the point of speechelessness(it's a word).

What happened that spurred the double + one technical Jon? No TV here. 5 of the 8 players to see time for MSU so far with 2 fouls at the half. Zoiks.

Completely agree, I don't see EPatt as a 2B option until late '07 or Spring '08 unless he goes nuts at a level, which I don't see happening(partially because of the aforementioned K rate).

The K% are not that far apart though, 18.8% for Eric to 17% for Corey.

Nothing should save him at this point. I'm not a Snyder hater, in fact I really like him. I think the recruiting violations really messed him up. However at this point I think you have to start over. Memories are short. People on the edge of the argument got pushed into the Fire Snyder camp after the Illinois fiasco(helped by lackluster performances against Davidson and Sam Houston St.), but were back on his bandwagon after the strong start to the B12 season. Not that I'm saying it's at all likely that we do any of that, but winning the tourney and making it to the second weekend of the Big Dance would probably cement his job for next year.

This is what he said: First of all, avoiding arbitration is much much much easier than fielding a winning team. How many players go to arbitration? Maybe about 10 of the 115 eligible this year? How many consistently winning teams are there? 1 out of every 4, maybe? Secondly, there's no proof of a lack of a commitment to building a winner. Lack of correct philosophy maybe, but that's a different argument.

I suppose that depends on whether one is satisfied that the additions of Jacque Jones, Scott Eyre, Juan Pierre, John Mabry and Bob Howry was worthy enough of an improvement to be a playoff caliber team. I suppose it also depends on whether having more than 40m to spend this offseason, lots of trade commodity, and plenty of available players on the market to improve the team and the moves that were made met your satisfaction. I don't think any member of our community that isn't happy with the moves made this offseason really deserves the catch phrase "faulty logic". I don't think anyone who wishes to be optimistic about this offseason deserves it either. Since 2003, this team has taken a step backwards. They did win a game or two more in 2004, but the team was more poorly run than the team that took the field in 2003. They were clearly more talented, also. But, 2004 did not feature playoffs like 2003 did, so yes, 2004 was a step backwards. 2005 was a horrible year to be a Cub fan. Not all blame should be pointed at management. Injuries did factor in. As far as I was concerned, the stars were all in alignment this offseason. A big splash could have been made to improve this team. They had the resources to make a big impact improving this team. Instead, they went with a modest approach. Whether an argument could be made that players could have been attained or not is not what I am going to debate. We do know that many talented players were available this offseason and maybe no other team outside of the LA Dodgers had more money to spend this offseason than the Cubs. I think this offseason was filled with mistakes right out of the gate. Sending Nomar packing was not a good idea. He would have been fairly cheap to bring back and he seemed to have a chip on his shoulder to do Chicago right. I'd much rather have seen Nomar's bat in RF this coming season than Jacque Jones. Well, I'd rather have seen his bat at the plate behind Lee and Aramis anyway, but you get my point. I would have much rather seen him have a healthy season with the Cubs than with the Dodgers. That does remain to be seen, but it was a gamble worth taking. With Cedeno and Perez, SS had 3 capable players. Nomar could have moved to RF and he also would have been a nice replacement at 3b if Aramis got hurt. If he misses most of 2006 due to injury, then I deserve a heaping helping of crow. But, I think he's going to have a healthy season and many of us will regret that we didn't hang onto him. Especially when he's ouproducing Jacque Jones by a healthy margin. I do think this team is better than last year. But, I don't think it's enough. The whole season is riding on the starting staff. Based on past history, not a good idea. When I look at the list of players that could have been obtained this offseason, and then I see a line up that features Jacque Jones in it, it makes me ill. To see that he's probably the best option to hit 5th makes me very ill. I do like Juan Pierre. I would have much rather seen a guy like Coco Crisp, and I would have liked to seen less spent to acquire a guy in the final year of a contract, but lead off HAD to be addressed. I've been screaming for that for quite some time. All in all, I'm not happy with the offseason. I don't think this team is playoff caliber. I hope I'm wrong. I'll cheer for them anyway and hope I'm proven wrong. But, if I see Neifi Perez hitting 2nd in the order, I'm turning off the tv. I will not pour salt into the wound that was opened up last year when Dusty consistently gave Perez top of the order at bats. I don't trust him to not do it this year. My best remedy is to just not watch when that happens. I'm tired of watching mediocre baseball from an organization that has no excuse to field mediocre teams. I'm frustrated that what was once an organization with a strong farm system, with plenty of resources and a positive direction nose dived as quickly as they did. None of this has anything to do with avoiding arbitration. The only way the original point has any validity if the Cubs didn't improve the team in lieu of not going to arbitration, which doesn't make any sense.

.350 is a pretty lofty goal for any team. The only NL teams the last 4 years to reach it are the 2003 Cardinals at exactly .350 and the '04 Giants(helped no doubt by Bonds' .609 OBP) at .357

But there's no connection there. It's not like avoiding arbitration is the thing that's keeping them from creating a winner.

I'll go down as saying there's no way either of them put up those numbers. I'll agree that Murton won't get the .318 BA and .378 OBP, but I'd say he gets 13 HRs and 53 RBI. I don't think there's any point in projecting RBI's, and I guess he might get the HR, that part being accurate is almost irrelevent to me in light of the total production.

Mizzou humiliates themselves in the first half, falling down 22 at the intermission. Gardner gets benched in the second half, and the lead gets cut to 8 before they run out of steam. Not looking good at all. If they drop the Baylor game, I don't think anything short of a sweep of the B12 tourney with a Sweet Sixteen would save Snyder.

I'll go down as saying there's no way either of them put up those numbers.

Who cares about the World Series? First team to sign all their players to guaranteed contracts wins! I'm with ya, dude. You are? Give me any example of how going to arbitration with a player instead of signing him before the hearing would have helped the Cubs go to the World Series. Agreed. MacPhail and Co. want to win, they're just really bad at it. The Tribune has provided the resources necessary to win, MacPhail and Co. have misused them. This seems a really unusual analogy to make.

Wasn't that the game where he gave up a grand slam to maybe J.D. Drew? If I remember correctly, the Cubs were down big and came back and won that game. You're thinking of Felix Sanchez on September 3, 2003. One of the most exciting regular season Cubs game I've ever seen. Or rather, would have seen if I didn't chuck my hat at the TV before turning it off. I listened in over the internet as they won 8-7. A little off topic but, what ever happened to Felix Sanchez? I honestly dont remember, traded prolly. To the Tigers, we got Jon Connolly back. He took a step back this year, pitching in A ball.

Someone didn't do to well on the analogies portion of standardized tests. Is that referring to your disagreement with Cards fan is to awesome as Cubs fan is to... or is the date of some significance? I have no idea if the date is significant.

Someone didn't do to well on the analogies portion of standardized tests.

If the only thing you can do to motivate a guy is to not protect him, you probably aren't any good at motivating people. Or Sisco is unresponsive to that type of motivation.

There is a very, very, very large difference between thinking a guy could at some time make it in the bigs, and keeping him on your roster every day of the season. If somebody drafted Ronny, he never would have had the improved year at AA, because he would have been a bench guy in the majors doing nothing. Ronny 2006 is not Ronny 2006 if he had to spend the year on a bench. He needed that time to develop in the minors. I agree they did a great job apparantly predicting his improvement. But then again, it could have easily been more to do with no other worthy candidates than them insisting on putting him on the roster. That point is also relevant to the Sisco situation, like I kinda referenced earlier. If he is protected, he never gets mad at not being protected and work himself into shape, and isn't Sisco 2005 that we saw this past year.

Lugo charged Lugo cleared after Wife says she exaggerated

Part of the appeal of people wanting Jones is that he didn't cost anything in players to acquire. Just because a couple teams were rumored to be interested in Jones doesn't guarantee any sort of market for him later.