David

LOL, perfect team botches the kickoff.

Gloat about what? I'm not a Pats fan. I just have money on them. OK, gotcha. Don't blame you then. Come on OMC, don't you remember us going at it in the NFC Championship thread last year? You should know where my true loyalties lie.

Wish I had bet jaydee. :cry:

In fact, I made a lot of money this season betting against them a few games where the Pats had ridiculously huge spreads.

Gloat about what? I'm not a Pats fan. I just have money on them.

Naw, Brady's about to throw a pick. Wishful thinking if I've ever seen it... I think before two weeks ago he went like 30+ games without a red-zone pick (or something similarly ridiculous).

Wow... Robbed him of a TD.

Appreciate excellence, don't hate on it.

i bet he puts 0 points up here. I wish I had seen this before the first down. All depends on what you mean by "he" though.

Great run.

The real reverse actually looked good there.

NICE! LOL.. Brady with that kind of field position...

NE shuts them down in the red zone... Time for Brady to own.

considering with no references this is one. Oh, wow. I love this.

Did Buck just call Manning "Grossman" by accident?

Ya, remember my post in rants about posts that don't make sense? Meet perp #1.

Go Pats! Win me some money!

Dude, they have Lenny Harris over there.

I'm always gonna miss that Mark Prior. (and that Kerry, for that matter, but at least he's still here and supposedly healthy)... :cry:

I was at that Cardinal double header and the Moises Alou foul ball game. Also was at the JD Drew grand slam, Cubs comeback game.

Works much better with vol turned down and the Straight Lines (every 2007 Cubs video compilation's song) by Silverchair playing instead.

Des Plaines according to B-R. However, just because someone hails from an area doesn't necessarily mean they ever want to go back to that area. A significant part of my family still lives in the surrounding areas of Peoria, but a week long visit at Thanksgiving each year is about all I can take. I'm sure if your visit was closer to Chicago and not in the winter you'd probably mind it a bit less... :)

I'll likely be ridiculed for this, but here goes anyway... So, a message board poster has it right, and ALL of baseball has it wrong? Come on, it's really not too difficult to figure out. The reason that the 9th is a much more important role, and *usually* the best place for a closer is due to the fact that you are down to your final 3 outs, if any, by that time in the game. You give up the lead in the 7th, you still have 6 or 9 outs offensively. In the 9th, the game is over, or you have 3 outs to play with. That is INCREDIBLY different, and it's why great closers are hard to come by. Pressure is much different in that situation, and it's why guys like Farnsworth can be very good middle relievers and subpar closers. Okay, NSB groupthinkers, flame away. At what point do you think a victory is more in jeopardy and a run is more likely to score.. in the 9th, with a 1 run lead (basically the most difficult situation a closer will face), nobody on, and nobody out... or, say, in the 7th with a 1 run lead with runners on first and third and one out? Extremely myopic point of view. At what point are we more likely to score a run or two and take the lead? In a game where we have 3 innings (and therefore, an at bat for everyone in the lineup) or in the 9th inning alone? Coming back at that point in the game is highly unlikely anyway. I'd rather use the best possible protection for my lead when it's in greatest jeopardy than to sacrifice some of that certainty (i.e. using a lesser pitcher) because I'd have a better chance of coming back if I blew it that early. That's completely backwards and makes so little sense to me that it is making my head hurt. I'm pretty sure the numbers would back me up, too.

Why would he walk a lot more? The additional number of at bats he would get over a season would seemingly mitigate the number of times he leads off an inning. Furthermore, I would assume that pitchers would be much more likely to pitch to him if he lead off an inning than if there were runners on, assuming that the worst damage he could do would be a single run. I don't see how, over a the course of 600 ABs, the difference would be statistically significant. As far as I know, the only long-term study of the batting order issue was done by Baseball America, and I believe it was found that batting order is relatively insignificant. From what I remember, they basically advocated putting the players in order of OBP from highest to lowest, but seemed to say that in the grand scheme of things, there wasn't a significant difference regardless. Someone else could probably fill in the details better than me here. As long as you aren't doing something extreme and completely stupid like going from worst hitter to best. I just want to point that out before people start to nitpick and question it.

I'll likely be ridiculed for this, but here goes anyway... So, a message board poster has it right, and ALL of baseball has it wrong? Come on, it's really not too difficult to figure out. The reason that the 9th is a much more important role, and *usually* the best place for a closer is due to the fact that you are down to your final 3 outs, if any, by that time in the game. You give up the lead in the 7th, you still have 6 or 9 outs offensively. In the 9th, the game is over, or you have 3 outs to play with. That is INCREDIBLY different, and it's why great closers are hard to come by. Pressure is much different in that situation, and it's why guys like Farnsworth can be very good middle relievers and subpar closers. Okay, NSB groupthinkers, flame away. At what point do you think a victory is more in jeopardy and a run is more likely to score.. in the 9th, with a 1 run lead (basically the most difficult situation a closer will face), nobody on, and nobody out... or, say, in the 7th with a 1 run lead with runners on first and third and one out?