treebird

out of heroin? no time for such silliness

i'm going to shoot myself in the face

jesus christ i wish more players would just wipe catchers the f out when they do that. run that on sportscenter for a few weeks and the whole "blocking the plate without the ball" thing would just go away. also edmonds is real slow.

i want in on that, i hope i'm on the right mailing lists.

thanks ryan. this is just a first step, but it's really hard to make the second step without this one. go rich. we need you.

something we can agree on.

Hire him as Rich Hill's personal coach. it's completely insane when you compare how much teams spend on players to how much they spend on guys who could potentially immensely help players. would you spend 3 million dollars to get good rich hill if he were a free agent? then why wouldn't you spend a third of that to get a guy who could bring him about, while also potentially helping several other players along?

it's going to be really hard for samardzija to throw a no-hitter while striking out 2 and giving up 25 groundballs over 9 innings.

i vote diet dr pepper in the absence of diet cherry vanilla dr pepper, which is the true champion. also, i drink all soft drinks warm. no ice. much more flavor.

a fun september would BE a boring september. lots of laughs at eric patterson letting guys score from first on a single and the like.

in the interest of full disclosure, i went to hardball times so i could come back and tell everyone all about how hit-lucky theriot has been and how he's sure to start sucking soon. while the latter may still be true, the former simply isn't. theriot's got a 22.6 line drive percentage, and a .337 babip. if anything, that's low for a guy with his speed. more power to ryan.* *i mean that literally, it's still not okay that 85% of his hits have been singles

same here. poor guy.

you guysssssssssssss :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x

i wish we could have rick peterson

guys who bat left and throw right are really rare too, but that doesn't mean they're all that special. it'd be nice if we had a two-headed pinch-hitter, but it's not exactly a huge loss that he didn't work out.

what's this about? you'd think it'd either be a big enough deal that he goes and nobody questions it, or it's not important enough for him to leave over.

i was at the chiefs game last night. in the bottom of the ninth inning, after the chiefs scored to tie it, they had runners on the corners with one out. the pitcher then did the "fake to third, throw to first" move and picked the runner off of first base. everyone booed a lot, and after it quieted down, i screamed "go back to boise" and everyone in my section who knew much about the cubs thought it was hilarious and everyone who didn't gave me a weird look.

No, they almost definitely wouldn't. they'd lose like three jerk fans who didn't like the team that much anyway and they'd gain thousands in attendance.

it's not really fair for lou or anyone to get mad about eric's arm. he's a second baseman, and everyone should have known it was going to be lousy from the beginning. if the arm of the left fielder is a priority, patterson is not a good option to play there. i'm sure he wishes it was better too, but it's not, and it's not going to change significantly in the short term.

yay fixed

i guess i'm a bad fan, but i'd never actually seen the cub fan/bud man commercial before. harry caray was really weird.

oh no carlos is going to try to have sex with a woman on the mound

what's the matter with him? are we still thinking this is a fluke? is he hurt? can we start calling him a headcase or something?

AH! Its Rothschild's fault. I just knew it couldn't be the beloved wunderkind Hill. How about maybe the previous year and a half were more of an aberration and the league figured him out? One good pitch, one average pitch and he wasn't able to be aggressive anymore. The league didn't figure him out, he was walking everyone because Rothschild changed his mechanics. MLB hitters were hitting .191 with a .683 OPS off him when he was sent down. Lots of assumptions going on here. Did Hill's arm slot change because Rothschild changed his mechanics? Or did Rothschild see his arm slot changed at the beginning of ST, so he tried to change his mechanics to get his arm back in the right slot? I'm certainly not going to give LR a free pass on it, but I'm not going to put the blame squarely on his shoulders quite yet either, because I don't know which is the true case. They said they changed it so Hill would be quicker to the plate, it wasn't a response to a new problem. Agreed, and I think it would be hard to argue that Rothschild didn't at least delay this process. However, I have to look at what Hill has been saying first. So far, he has repeatedly said three things. 1) The problems have been there since the very first time he showed up at Spring Training, 2) It's mechanical, and 3) He doesn't know where it came from. That certainly doesn't sound like he would come even close to believing that the tinkering from the coaching staff was the problem (considering they tinkered with him after he showed up at Spring Training, and he certainly would remember those changes). I have a hard time attributing the blame to the coaching staff when he clearly doesn't, especially since the basis for blaming the coaching staff is based on a 1-2 sentence blurb in a newspaper that was very vague IIRC. "i was great but then my major league coaches ruined me and now i am bad." - rich hill, in the universe in which you can state your true feelings about your employers and higher-ups and they won't hold it against you it's pretty unreasonable to say that, since hill himself has not blamed rothschild, it means it can't be larry's fault.

hope it was worth it, although i suppose not everyone could cut it at the weather channel anyway.