The Man in Blak

The virtues of The Shield as quality television programming.

Oh, man. Overcompensate much? In the flaming folder. Let's forget your confusing dialogue about what I'm really doing with my post up there - 'cause it's exactly the same BUT DIFFERENT! - and get down to your alarming douchebaggery earlier in the thread. You're not trying to ostracize new people from the folder, but you're lecturing a long-time poster who's contributed throughout the forum, like you're some authority on internet humor. You deal out your limp-wristed garbage earlier in the thread with such a condescending tone...and then you chastise me for flame-baiting? What a goddamn idiot. And yet a "clever" one-liner got you so worked up that you just had to respond. Hoff's Place. Well, gee. If the retards around here are so interested in seeing you "school" somebody, then by all means, let me politely step aside and let everybody go to class. I just hope there are enough seats for everybody on the short bus.

If you're going to be a part of this folder, though, make sure you lecture all participants about the proper posting etiquette in here. This is Hardcore Discussion, after all.

Aw, now why did you go and edit your post like that.

Well, at least you didn't lead off with "And The Dames has COME BACK...to TSM."

One other point: the fact that Soriano has only a week and a half to learn his position is almost entirely his fault. It's not like the Nationals walked in on Monday and sprung this on him - he basically knew this from the second that he arrived in Washington.

Here's a prediction for you: Soriano made $10 million in arbitration this year. If Soriano refuses to play the outfield again, I'll bet that he won't make $10 million for the rest of his career in baseball. The Nationals have put themselves into a stupid situation but, in the end, Soriano is an employee who needs to go wherever they tell him. He can complain to the press on a daily basis, he can do whatever, but if he dogs it out in the field or outright refuses to play, then he's going to be doing a LOT of damage to his free agent value come next year. I can't believe that his agent hasn't pounded that into his skull yet.

http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/art.../303200014/1071

It may already be a steal right now. Arroyo's cheap, but it's arguable whether he's even shown a glimpse of the pitcher who threw a perfect game in Pawtucket a few years back. Furthermore, going to Cincinnati makes him a bonafide powder keg: he's a heavy flyball pitcher with a sinking strikeout rate. The Reds are insane. Pena has poor contact rate and his plate judgment leaves a lot to be desired, but he's cheap, he's young, and he has a frightening amount of power. This leaves them with an outfield of Griffey, Kearns, and either Dunn or Freel. Opening up a spot for Freel would normally be celebrated, except when you consider that he was previously blocked due to the franchise's quasi-sexual obsession with Rich Aurilia. If Dunn moves to the outfield for Scott Hatteberg to take up first base and Freel stays on the bench, then they might as well just implode the franchise.

Single-handedly saves the thread. Maybe even the entire folder.

I dunno, we've been trying for years and still haven't gotten the hang of it

Think wildpegasus, with an absurdly large VW hood ornament hooked to a big gold chain around his neck.

Stubby Clapp scored the first run for Canada. Stubby Clapp.

You can asterik stats, but you can't erase them. Baseball's a zero sum game where one success is marked as a failure of another. If we wipe out Bonds' RBIs, that messes with team totals, opponents' records, and a host of other problems in the accounting. Plus, why do we target Bonds and not anyone else? Do we erase the records of any minor leaguers or scrubs we catch? It's a shaky road to walk down. There is a precedent set for this in sports, within college basketball. Michigan had to "vacate" past victories when it was busted for booster payments in the 90's - how exactly did they tidy up the record book for that? Not that I'm saying erase Bonds' home runs entirely - I'm just curious how they dealt with Michigan in that case. Personally, I don't think baseball should erase his entire season, but baseball can choose not to recognize it (if it was achieved through illegal means) and, furthermore, they can revoke his individual awards (MVP) that year and either allow the writers to vote again or simply give them to the second place vote recipient. The latter would mean that MVPs would go to Albert Pujols, Sammy Sosa, and Adrian Beltre.

If the documented evidence in the book is as airtight as the initial impressions make it out to be, then it may have enough weight to be used for federal perjury charges against Bonds, let alone anything related to baseball.

My guess is that the publisher's lawyers felt a little more comfortable with the material than the Chronicle did. And can somebody clear up Bonds' union status? I thought he wasn't a member of the Player's Association, but that's different than the union, correct?

This site reminds me of the Apple Boutique disaster. Everybody has tons of ideas and ambitions behind what they want to put on the site, but there's no quality control to be seen anywhere, nobody to edit the "ideas" as much as the output itself. Somebody has got to manage this thing. Yes, I'll take responsibility for what's out there because I did volunteer to help; the current state of the website reflects badly on everybody. However, I didn't sign up to write articles or to lead this ship into the iceberg. I signed on board to help program for the site and, shortly after I jumped on board, the layout was changed without much of a discussion at all...which should be a pretty big hint of how well this operation has been organized. I understand that you have to have low expectations - you've got internet writers working for nothing on a free website - but this is ridiculous. There's no real structure or staging ground for articles, and there's no real venue to edit these articles that are going out on the site. There have been no expectations whatsoever communicated to the staff from the leadership. How can somebody be motivated to write anything for the website when you have little or no feedback coming your way? I think that if admin or somebody - anybody - becomes more involved in the process and imposes some structure onto what we're doing here, then things could improve dramatically. We don't need to establish hard deadlines or anything like that, but I think we really need to re-evaluate how we get the articles onto the website. More feedback and collaboration from the writers wouldn't hurt either.

Kinetic? We had Matt Young, of all people, posting a MySpace for Crucifixio Jones of "TSM Fame." And he hasn't posted here since, what, 2003?

I believe there was speculation that the players weren't interested in doing it during November because it would cut into their vacation time. To me, that just means that MLB needs to sweeten the paycheck for the players that participate; if the players decline to participate, they immediately become accountable to their "country", rather than MLB for scheduling the tournament during Spring Training.

A salary cap isn't going to save teams from chronic mismanagement. The Tigers and the Royals have been two of the worst teams over the last ten years, and they've remained consistently terrible because their draft picks over that time period have been historically bad. There is no cheaper talent for an organization than talent that is home grown through their own system; even if they were higher payroll teams, both of those teams would have had to nail their free agent signings to make up for the gap in talent.

Well, I'll be damned.

Does that word mean what you think it means?

Czech, you do realize that 99% of the members on the board can't even see the folder you're talking about, right?

All right, since we're using ESPN for the MLB, let's be fair and take the ESPN attendance figures for the NFL as well (apologies in advance if this doesn't format out well): 1 Washington 8 716,999 89,624 111.9 2 NY Giants 8 628,519 78,564 99.8 3 Kansas City 8 623,325 77,915 98.1 4 NY Jets 8 619,958 77,494 98.4 5 Denver 8 608,790 76,098 100.0 6 Carolina 8 587,700 73,462 100.3 7 Cleveland 8 578,330 72,291 100.4 8 Miami 8 575,256 71,907 95.6 9 Buffalo 8 575,248 71,906 89.9 10 Atlanta 8 565,106 70,638 99.2 11 Baltimore 8 563,076 70,384 102.1 12 Green Bay 8 562,419 70,302 115.6 13 Houston 8 562,397 70,299 101.2 14 Tennessee 8 553,192 69,149 103.2 15 New England 8 550,048 68,756 101.1 16 Philadelphia 8 541,393 67,674 102.5 17 Seattle 8 532,954 66,619 99.4 18 San Diego 8 529,916 66,239 92.9 19 Cincinnati 8 526,469 65,808 100.4 20 Jacksonville 8 525,519 65,689 89.0 21 St. Louis 8 523,685 65,460 100.2 22 San Francisco 8 523,426 65,428 93.2 23 Tampa Bay 8 521,741 65,217 99.3 24 Minnesota 8 511,960 63,995 99.9 25 Pittsburgh 8 507,434 63,429 97.6 26 Dallas 8 505,258 63,157 95.9 27 Chicago 8 496,965 62,120 92.8 28 Detroit 8 492,580 61,572 94.7 29 Indianapolis 8 457,373 57,171 94.9 30 Oakland 8 418,450 52,306 83.0 31 New Orleans 8 417,270 52,158 65.4 32 Arizona 7 297,568 42,509 57.8 Even though there is clearly a divide between the more popular teams and the sadsacks like Arizona, the divide is not quite as great as it is in the MLB. I believe part of that comes from more effective national marketing from the NFL, and part of that comes from the fact that there's only eight home games to accrue such a divide. The difference in MLB is wider, but there are almost ten times as many home games in the schedule to build the gap. Not take this too far off the track...but are you serious? This thread is all of two pages. You make it sound like we're deadlocked in some interminable slugfest, when we've just barely got all the facts on the table.