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champaignchris

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Everything posted by champaignchris

  1. champaignchris
    What’s he going to say? “My boss ambushed me?” But then, if the financial handcuffs were a surprise, I don’t see why Theo wouldn’t just walk.
  2. champaignchris
    Turns out he wasn't actually tipping his pitches. He was tipping his pitches in that he was nodding when he agreed with the catcher’s signal.
  3. champaignchris
    Hopefully their tight assness keeps them from adding him. They’re paying $103MM to six players all over 31 years old this year. I don’t think it’s their tight-assedness that is going to keep them from trading for Arenado.
  4. champaignchris
    The Cubs are doing a solid impression of the Hawks trajectory, minus two championships. The highlight of my sports year was the 6-7 Illini Football team. The basketball is 10-5 and has a solid chance of making the NIT.
  5. champaignchris
    Exactly, the CBA has been in place for 3 years, the consequences of spending from that perspective are not a surprise. So either we have to believe that Theo was confident that the team would be so good that they'd be fine just taking an offseason to trim payroll(even as late as *this June* when he committed 37 million to Kimbrel), or ownership pulled the rug out from under them. I strongly lean it was a kept in the dark/rug pulled out situation and/or business side horsefeathering up so bad with renovations and TV deal they didn’t or couldn’t keep money promises on future payrolls. I don’t believe he would’ve put himself in a spot to entirely sit out offseasons that included Manny, Bryce, Kershaw, Cole, Strasburg, Rendon, Arenado and some of these other clearly elite players. This seems like the most likely course of events. The only thing that makes me wonder about this possibility is that if ownership wasn’t being straight with Theo, there really wasn’t much reason for Theo to stick around after the 2018 season, when we presume the news came down that the purse strings were tightening. He could have said, “I did what I came here to do,” had a great retirement ceremony, gotten a laurel and hearty handshake from the owner, and then within a year walked into pretty much any new project he could conceive of taking on. No one would have blinked at that.
  6. champaignchris
    Trading him now so that they don't have to look cheap for not paying him in 2 years. Also some nonsense about how they tried really hard to get him to sign an extension but they couldn't so they had to try to make the team better by trading their best player. Yeah that's the part I'm mad about to. But this whole league wide collusion thing...I assume the team that would trade for him is planning on paying him, right? League-wide collusion except for the Yankees, who are some $50MM over the threshold. But then the Yankees have been a useful bogeyman for the small-market teams for nearly 30 years.
  7. champaignchris
    idk...the heyman tweet makes it seem like the door might at least be somewhat open (he mentioned him for a reason) if the nationals don't get donaldson. it also is almost literally saying nothing, like most of his tweets, so whatever. i wouldn't call it a giant hole, tho. bryant makes them better the next two years. then they're stuck with worse-hitter-than-Albert-Almora in CF barring other major moves The solution is obviously to include Almora in the trade!
  8. champaignchris
    You can almost squint and see a way in which a Robles-centered deal makes some sort of baseball sense.
  9. champaignchris
    Oh I agree it was insane what Himes did and should've kept Maddux. I know how good he really was with the advanced metrics as a Cubs, but those stats weren't available or didn't exist back then like they are now so you can really compare or evaluate players these days. I was more curious on how he viewed in those days since all you went by were the numbers/stats which doesn't tell the whole story as we all know. If people (scouts/reporters/players/etc) were saying like what jersey said, then yeah it looked as bad as it did. I was just curious if anybody threw out the whole "contract year", "he wasn't as good as what '92 suggested", etc like I was saying at the end of my post. Fair enough. He was coming off 18, 19, 15, 15, and 20 win seasons on mostly terrible teams... So I'm pretty sure he was viewed quite favorably. I was 19 years old and remember it quite clearly. Maddux was considered the best starter in the NL at the time and the Cubs’ handling of his free agency was considered an unmitigated disaster. I remember Peter Gammons reporting on it on ESPN, completely agape at what was going on.
  10. champaignchris
    Was it Maddon making the best roster he could? Or was it Maddon making a “You put this crap on my roster” type of statement by leading off the position player with the worst OBP on the team? Do we know where the organizational Almora fetish comes from? Do we know why there’s been a... shall we say... disparate treatment of Almora’s and Happ’s development?
  11. champaignchris
    Uhm... That's not capitalism. That's the opposite of capitalism. That's why baseball needs the Federal anti-trust exemption in order to get away with it. When Tech companies - Apple, Google, Intel and others - got together and tried to suppress wages, they got sued by the Federal government and later settled a class action lawsuit with $435MM in damages to the companies' employees.
  12. champaignchris
    Do the statheads on this site prefer fSWAG or bSWAG?
  13. champaignchris
    Effingham also has a fantastic record store called America’s Groove. It’s in the middle of an otherwise abandoned shopping mall. It’s surreal it’s like you’re in the middle of a post-apocalyptic zombie movie and then suddenly transported to a John Cusack movie.
  14. champaignchris
  15. champaignchris
    Went to Parkland College. A Champaign kid!!!
  16. champaignchris
    I would much rather have Yu at his remaining 4 year $81MM contract than Wheeler at 5 and $118MM.
  17. champaignchris
    It would be adding a CF and trading Schwarber (or somehow Heyward) that would do it.
  18. champaignchris
    I'm on a University of Illinois message board - cleverly disguising myself by using the exact same user name - and there's one guy who is talking about how great it is that Kendrick Nunn (former U of I basketball player, kicked off the team after pleading guilty to domestic battery) is getting a shot in the NBA, while simultaneously saying in a different thread that Kaepernick should never be in the NFL again. Sample size of one I know, but those people are out there.
  19. champaignchris
    I was a little surprised the Twins QO’d Odorizzi. He’s smart to take it. He’ll make more this year than he would have during the first year of any multi-year, and then he’ll be able to get more as a free agent next year with no draft pick attached assuming he’s basically same pitcher in 2020 that he’s been for the last 5 or 6 years.
  20. champaignchris
    Quirky, swaggy Yu is the best Yu.
  21. champaignchris
    I had to check... Gutierrez, Harris and Ward were never actually Cubs teammates. I could have sworn otherwise.
  22. champaignchris
    I don't think he's going to get a second bite. But no GM (whether Pace or someone else) is going to get a chance to draft a franchise QB for the Bears in 2020 because there aren't the draft picks there to do it. I think the Bears are going to give Pace 2020 to prove to them that he deserves a chance to make the next first round draft pick for the Bears in 2021. No real point in bringing in a different GM when that GM is going to be completely hamstrung by the lack of picks. NFL teams don't tend to hold a fire sale for draft picks, but I'd think the Bears would be awfully tempted to give it a shot. Even if you're only getting 5th and 6th round picks, if you stock pile a few, you might be able to trade back up into the 2nd or 3rd round.
  23. champaignchris
    I didn’t realize that Nats-Astros was only the second expansion team vs expansion team World Series and that the first one was only as recent as Royals-Mets in 2015. That seems pretty crazy but speaks to how little post-season success some of the expansion franchises have had.
  24. champaignchris
    I wonder if David Ross is the choice, why they haven’t announced it yet. Yesterday would have been the perfect day to do it with the playoff game postponed. It wouldn’t have overshadowed a game. I suppose it could just be a contract negotiation thing. But the longer this drags out, the more it looks like Espada is the choice.
  25. champaignchris
    My grandparents lived in Arizona my entire childhood until they passed while I was in college. We visited them every summer and often on X-Mas break. We went hiking all the time. My grandpa’s property backed up to a big stretch of state park and we’d go quartz hunting. He eventually had a whole garden lined with quartz. That entire time, I never once saw a scorpion. Maybe we were just in the wrong part of the state. And I have a ton of experience with real estate disputes. I absolutely guarantee that the landlord’s complaints are trumped up so that he doesn’t have to pay the security deposit back. That’s pretty much SOP for some (scummy) landlords - don’t return the deposit, if anyone complains, counter with an exaggerated list of damage to the property.
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