David

I'll donate more money if we put up Logan's graphics

Guess I'll do this for once... A: Bryce Harper B: Paul Goldschmidt, Giancarlo Stanton C: Carlos Correa, Andrew McCutchen, Kyle Schwarber D: Addison Russell, Jason Heyward, Yasiel Puig, Maikel Franco, Alex Gordon WC: PM'd

there you go, UM

http://m.mlb.com/video/topic/69972428/v555743683/chckc-almoras-spectacular-diving-catch-in-center/?query=cubs

FWIW:

I bet his ERA right now is infinity

Yep. I'm the biggest spring training is meaningless guy and the combination of how terrible he's been plus the high leverage innings he'll be getting has me worried.

Jesus Christ. I retract my retraction of the bad parent comment.

I don't see the White Sox looking like bad guys at all. I see LaRoche looking like a kinda crappy parent, though. an overly attached parent. If the kid was there every day during the summer that would make some sense, but the fact that they pull him out of school to hang out in a locker room is kind of creepy. fair enough way to put it.

I don't see the White Sox looking like bad guys at all. I see LaRoche looking like a kinda crappy parent, though.

These guys go 3 weeks at a time without seeing their families, I fail to see how the kid being in the club house is hurting anyone. Not to mention a 14 year old now knows that the White Sox didn't want himn around and his Dad left baseball because of it. Yeah, I'm sure none of the other players have any problem with a 14 year old running around their clubhouse and one (terrible) player being allowed to do it.

Home schooling? apparently they pull him out of school for weeks at a time and load up on homework, but goes back home when the team is on the road. Seems like a really good setup for him.

this kid was there for 100% of the games? does he go to school?

also, this makes me smile hard [tweet] [/tweet]

Sounds like the White Sox didn't want his kid in the locker room anymore. Guess he had him around all the time with his own locker and stuff. He's 14.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/ct-wrigley-field-opening-day-cubs-20160315-story.html Not much news, but the marquee will be back up in 10 days, according to Crane.

Not that I've seen, but guys looked way late on the FB. I'd love to have 2014 Ramirez back on this team.

Any reports on velo?

Yep. If we take basically the same roster as 2015 into this year, then we are exemplary of the plexiglass principle: Big jump in wins, thanks, in large part, to luck and variance. It's not like we were the Astros last year, that got an unexpected early superstar arrival in Carlos Correa (I mean, you could include Russell in this category, but he was thought of as more likely to make an impact in 2015, before the season started. And Russell didn't have quite the same impact, anyway). We also weren't the Royals, who exceeded expectations because of a unique roster construction. We won 97 games because: 1. #weargood and 2. We had incredible luck in one-run and extra-innings games. We had a lot of walk-off victories. It was just a lucky year. We didn't even really have many guys over-perform expectations too much. Some of the young guys were better than you would have imagined. But, there was a lot of luck there, and we were likely to be plexiglassed this year. That is: Until we added Jason [expletive] Heyward, John Lackey, Ben Zobrist, Adam Warren, et al. Generally, the plexiglass principle is probably going to be right more often than not. But, generally, teams aren't loaded with great, young position players all over the place, depth out the ass, no major departing players, and tons of money to spend. General rules don't apply to us. We are of a different color. This issue was an overlaying theme when Theo spoke at the Convention. He essentially said that we weren't really a true-talent level 97-win team last year, but now he thinks we are. He's spot on. It doesn't really matter that we made that big jump last year, thanks to some variance, because this year we don't need it. We might not win as many games as last year, but we are certainly better. Completely disagree. The 2014 roster was drastically different from the 2016 roster (and 2015). It is not a good reference point for anything and it has little to no bearing on anything. The biggest reason for the jump in wins wasn't luck and variance (and as tree pointed out, if you take sequencing into account, there wasn't THAT much good luck, anyway). It was a drastically different roster than 2014. You can bring this stuff up when a fairly similar roster overachieves one year after being bad or something like that, but that's not at all what the 2015 Cubs were. The fact that we then considerably added to the 2016 team just makes it dumber.

Candy with an RBI 2 to score Heyward...advances Schwarber to 3rd

[tweet] [/tweet] Holy crap

he picked off vogelbach earlier!

sounds like the cubs are forcing the issue in Lester's simulated game and making him make pickoff throws as much as possible

Why is that more made up than any other sport? Because it's newer? newer and douchier and stupider I'm OK with this. MMA and all that stuff seems to be all of that.

Anyway, I don't have strong feelings about either sport nor do I have much interest. The point was basically I thought Rousey was this unbeatable behemoth in a female sport. Then she lost and I actually went from being completely uninterested to being mildly interested in the next event. As far as I know, Serena is an unbeatable behemoth (by tennis standards), so I'd probably be more interested in watching a match if I thought she were actually being challenged. The comparisons beyond that don't really matter. Analogies aren't about the similarities in the things themselves but in the relationships between the things. So, again, not a great analogy, but my point was, yes, I agree, if Serena had a legit challenger I'd probably become more interested as an outsider who presently has zero interest, just like happened when I heard about Rousey getting her ass kicked and losing on extremely long odds.