nymr83

wait are you comparing the met fans mocking the chop to looper or to rocker? if you're comparing them to looper i agree 100%, neither what they did nor what he did is really offensive at all, and neither deserves comparison to rocker.

i dont really think anyone deserves a "rocker award" this year. the closest i can think of is Pujols for running his mouth about Glavine, but i still wouldnt give it to him

Frayed Knot wrote: ]So he's what, about 5-10 feet taller than all the other pitchers? Only 3 feet taller actually, but his arms are like 7 longer than the average man!! Makes it tough to buy shirts. i'm "only" 6'5 and pants are hard to find...another few inches and you'd be totally screwed

Edgy DC wrote: Why aren't we talking about that isolated power average of .364 that Michel Abreu is posting? sample size. if he puts that up next season i'll be talking about it more than any of you would like to hear also, isn't he a bit old for the AFL or even AA?

thats true, but i think it is ok to assume, at least on some level, that some teams hype their prospects more/less than others and so we should be more/less suprised when a hyped prospect of a given organization fails. of course with BA and the growth of statistical analysis its no longer as easy for a guy to be hyped up by his own team without any backing, but i'm sure it still happens...and if other teams are going to believe even a small fraction of the hype then its worth doing it to boost trade values

this is the logo i was thinking of (though i had forgotten the "C") it belonged to the Capital City Bombers

SteveJRogers wrote: ="seawolf17"]I'd rather what Yancy said. I want them to spend $80 million and find out he's Hideki Irabu. Or the pitching version of Hideki Matsui (Irabu at least had moments) i hope you mean KAZ matsui, because Hideki has ended up pretty good

I love how people dressed up to do everything back then, I just love it... also, they were smart enough to leave the wife and kids home and give their extra seats to their friends instead (i spotted 3 children starrig at that picture for 5 minutes)

back page of the Post today: "YENKEE" with Matsuzaka's picture... god i hope they lose the bid, i really dont care to who.

i think i accidentally linked the thumbnail or something, oh well doesnt matter

i got this when i searched for their logo...i could hage sworn i remembered an airplane being their logo...

="metirish"]If for no other reason I want this game to start so that very stupid show almost any show on FOX is not on.... i fixed your sentence for you.

yeah, those situations are pretty sad, i hadn't remembered that happening, fortunately its rare. i suppose you could have a complicated system designed to make everyone happy/happier where a player nwilling to play for a team could go elsewhere, but the team gets fair compensation (say the pick of the team that he goes to plus a sandwhich pick the following year) basically something similiar to the "restricted free agents" in the NFL. but adding more and more layers to this thing may not be the way to go either.

well i suppose an Eli manning-type ass hole comes along every now and then with his "i won't play for the Chargers" crap, but in baseball it always seemed to me that the guys who drop drop because of perceived bonus demands and that nobody has ever come out saying htey refuse to play for a team.

yeah i saw in the Post today that the union-head called additional drug-testing "unreliable" and said he'd have agreed to it if there was "reliable" testing available. I guess the olympics don't know what they are doing according to him

Willets Point wrote: Last year in Venice I saw two different people in Mets gear. somewhere in Aftica there will soon be a whole village of children wearing Mets 2006 National League Champions shirts.

even if merchandise money money is pooled (which i didn't think it was) there has to be some benefit to the Mets of having people walking around Japan with Mets hats, creating a generation of Mets fans (or at least people who can identify the Mets before they could identify the Braves/Cardinals) I have, by the way, seen a Japanese Mets hat, i think i was in Cooperstown at the time here is the hebrew one, i can't find it in Japanese online but hte idea is the same

i still don't like it. i like the draft as a means of fairly dispersing talent, but i dont like giving the owners the added leverage of being able to tell the players "take it or leave it, but if you leave it theres no loss to me." the failure to sign a pick should be a penalty to BOTH sides for their failure to agree, the owners got too much here.

Willets Point wrote: ="cooby"]Burgess would be embarrassed to know my memory of him Are we going to let this softball on a tee pass unoticed just because cooby is a woman of good reputation? yes, that was the plan.

i was actually dividing the money up over the length of the contract.

i thought Valentine had made it pretty clear he's happy in Japan?

]You can't monitor the bidding; you just have to offer the highest amount you're willing to spend. another unfortunate part of this process to be sure. how much will Zito get? i'll say 13.5 per year and 4 years. is Matsuzaka worth more or less? he might have more of an upside but i think theres also a bigger risk of crash and burn. if we say he's worth the same amount how much can we really bid? even a "modest" $10 million bid means that you can then only offer the the player 11 million a year (more than that and you'd have been better off signing Zito hypothetically) i guess my point is just that with the posting fee thrown in there i dont see signing him turning out to be the best decision.

thats fair, but i'd have to add that i think theres alot more predictability in American veterans and i think the Japanese players have so far, if they haven't "broken even", been more likely to fail to meet expectations than to exceed them. i still wouldnt touch Matsuzaka because of the posting fee, i mean theres no harm in a low bid, but if its really going to go as high as expected i wouldnt bother

]nomo was pretty good there for a while. and pretty bad there for awhile, which is why i labeled him "as expected" ]At any rate, it seems to me that it's easier to figure out how JL players will do in the majors than AAA pitchers even if thats true, you've already paid for the pitchers in your AAA system. ]You forget how much the man hated Kaz. It's perfectly logical for such a biased person to espouse opinions that have no basis in reality. are you still deluding yourself into thinking that kaz came anywhere near expectations?

now THIS is a bad idea: (fromthat same BA article) ]Teams that fail to sign a first-round pick no longer receive an extra pick after the first round as compensation, but instead a virtually identical pick the following year; for example, a team that fails to sign the No. 5 pick one year will receive the No. 6 pick the next, rather than one in the 30s or 40s. The same compensation also now exists for unsigned second-round picks, while a team that fails to sign a third-round pick will receive a sandwich pick between the third and fourth rounds. does this take effect this year or next: ? ]The major league portion of the Rule 5 draft will be affected by giving teams one extra year to protect players from it. Rather than teams being allowed three years (for players signed at age 19 or older) or four years (for players 18 and younger) before leaving them off the 40-man roster subjects them to the Rule 5 draft, those periods have been lengthened to four and five. Ownership considered this a significant boost in their efforts to operate their minor league systems more effectively. not sure what effect this will have other than letting you wait a little longer before you give up on a formerly well regarded prospect gone bad.