metsmarathon

yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. oh yes.

the biggest problem for me was always that once i fell behind, i felt like i could never catch up. leaving hte games open for 2 weeks will help me a lot. now i just need to figure out a better way to conduct my personal tabulations. time to up my excel game.

I... I like the k zone. Love it in fact, and demand it in all my baseball viewings.

But sheesh. Let's beat these jerks!

I gotta say, those royals unis with the metallic gold are pretty fuckin sweet

did he catch his dick in his zipper? it's mysterious, and not terribly serious, so that leads us naturally to conclude that it's got to do with his pants.

gossage strikes me as someone who has an astroturf lawn. yeah, the game was better when the players all played like professionals - cold, calculating mercenaries with ice in their veins - playing not for love of the game, but for the honor of their underpaying overlords and the glory not only of victory, but of trudging steadily towards it with workmanlike ethic, never cracking a smile, or forcing a frown for fear of showing weakness or humanity; a veneer so thin and fragile that it crumbles at the mere hint of one's feelings being hurt by their opponent such that a slight modification in pace or tempo or sightlines following a homerun should result in unbridled rage and outright contempt, and the potential forfeiture of the batter's (or next batter's) livelihood in the form of a fastball to the temple, or a rolling tackling blocking slide into a base that rends ligaments and shatters bones. because these things are completely in proportion to each other. gossage is a ranting raving probably-racist loon. and he's wrong. well, except about ryan braun, maybe. but he's wrong about that too, because back in his day, peds were a thing too.

did we send them handy andy, or did he get there through some roundabout ways? uh, nevermind. he was a nat, not a philly. just ignore me.

so... uh... did our commish forget to re-up his team?

Centerfield wrote: I love that Cespedes's cars have caused me to do some self-reflection. I've found myself wondering what kind of car I would drive if I were suddenly in my 20's and a superstar ballplayer. I'm pretty sure I would drive a restored '67 Camaro. Though I can see myself going the super-douchy rap star giant black SUV route too. With spinning rims. Any car I drive would have neon blue underlighting. i always liked the '69 better. but if I were to go down that route, I would have two choices: 1. fully restored AMC AMX, 1970, in glorious red white and blue. 2. resto-modded AMC Eagle Wagon, preferably an '83 (but they were nigh identical from 80-88) - the original Subaru outback - with a fully upgraded powertrain and suspension, and gloriously modernized interior replete with blue plaid seats.

Centerfield wrote: I don't like it. Once in a while is ok. This is overkill. Let them create their own history. shut up, I love it. more racing stripes! MORE!!!

a rainbow-colored mets hat would be freakin' sweet...

the remnants of a soundly defeated german empire took a mere two decades to rebound into one hell of a formidable military machine following the great war. the first order is on the outskirts of the known galaxy, with access to a vast frontier far distant from the new republic - and all of its attendant resources - and is made up from the most ardent among the empire's survivors. it could've been explained away a bit better. but did we really want them to get into more history lessons, treaty negotiations, and discussions of the intricacies of galactic economics?

Mex's complaint was about the fabric, not the aesthetic, iirc. I'm assuming the fabric will be up to modern coolbase-y standards. And if not... Eh, they're still freaking awesome.

I absolutely unequivocally love love love love this. They're just the coolest uniforms ever.

it looks like I might be doing a florida trip in late march, but towards the Disney complex. i'll probably miss out on the mets, unfortunately..

Nymr83 wrote: one possible explanation is that the DH does cause AL teams to allocate more of their payroll towards a 9th position player while paying the bench guys (who pinch-hit less with no pitcher in the lineup) less. Should the union care if this is the case? are they HURTING some of their lower-paid players to help out thew guys making the big bucks? this is my expectation. the only reason the DH would drive up payroll is if DH drives up revenue. (otherwise it's just reallocating the same amount of payroll, right?) using attendance as a surrogate value for revenue, the NL has better attendance last year, therefore the DH is bad for baseball.

some of the copying of plot points is due to the nature of the galaxy they're in. the empire likes to make big round powerful weapons, with trenches. it's what they do. it's their thing. they also like impossibly large space ships shaped like triangles. do they need to start branching out stylistically? do they maybe need to find a different defense contractor? yes, clearly. this time, instead of building a moon, they built their weapon into a planet, through it's core, however improbable that it. I guess they could've lopped off a couple sides of it to make it a giant tetrahedron. or cube it. maybe have the gun hang off the side like a big angry Q...? I'm okay with it. the trench? I guess. sure. need to pop some hard right angles into these things instead of all the straight runs. but it took more of a ROTJ-style attack to defeat it than a single lucky shot from luke. and if there wasn't a weak spot, it would become a very sad movie where the bad guys win easily, or the good guys have to win by slowly punching away at the diamond wall. attrition is really hard to do cinematically. so. desert planet. ok fine. they should mix up a little more effectively where they source their protagonists from. beyond that, "hey look, our hero is a happy, well-to do kid with a robust, full family and lots of friends." doesn't seem to have the same draw as some down on their luck dreamer whose been dealt a raw hand. though I suppose the down on their luck thing doesn't come off as effectively if the kid is on a verdant lush forest world. the thing that I took away from the movie was that, yes, these points were taken from the original, but how they got there was different, and unique, and served, to me, to show how cyclical the star wars universe is. I also feel as if the remixing of these elements was viewed as necessary (and I agree that it was) to establish that, 'hey, this really is an actual star wars movie' and not just some other piece of fan fic using some of the same characters. it was safe, sure, but for me, it worked, and worked fantastically well. will it hold up as well on a second viewing? I think so. also, I look at it like I look at the terminator and T2. a lot of the same things happen, and there are frequent callbacks throughout. and in the terminator series, it makes sense as to the inevitability of the future, whereas in star wars it's about the cyclity of it all.

NL TeamProjected 2015 PayrollAL TeamProjected 2015 PayrollLos Angeles Dodgers$272,789,040New York Yankees$219,282,196San Francisco Giants$172,672,111Boston Red Sox$187,407,202Washington Nationals$164,920,505Detroit Tigers$173,813,750Philadelphia Phillies$135,827,500Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim$150,933,083St. Louis Cardinals$120,869,458Texas Rangers$142,140,873Chicago Cubs$119,006,885Toronto Blue Jays$122,506,600Cincinnati Reds$117,197,072Seattle Mariners$119,798,060Milwaukee Brewers$105,002,536Chicago White Sox$115,238,678Colorado Rockies$102,006,130Kansas City Royals$113,618,650New York Mets$101,409,244Baltimore Orioles$110,146,097San Diego Padres$100,675,896Minnesota Twins$108,945,000Atlanta Braves$97,578,565Cleveland Indians$86,091,175Arizona Diamondbacks$91,518,833Oakland A's$86,086,667Pittsburgh Pirates$88,278,500Tampa Bay Rays$76,061,707Miami Marlins$68,479,000Houston Astros$70,910,100Sum:$1,858,231,275 Sum:$1,882,979,838 Mean:$123,882,085 Mean:$125,531,989 I think what batmags is saying is that the trend he's citing doesn't affect the outliers as much. If you look at the side by side comparisons, if you exclude the top 2 teams and the bottom 2 teams, 9 of 11 AL clubs outspend their counterpart. I kinda lost the point of what you guys were arguing, and I have no idea if it makes sense to artificially exclude the teams on both ends. the charts would look a lot more comparable, cross-wise, if you scooch the mets up to a $185M-ish payroll where they fuckin' belong.

ok, I finally saw it, and I fuckin' loved it. it has flaws, sure, and borrows a bit much from the original, but I'm thus far okay with it. I simply cannot wait until I can watch it again. unfortunately, it was altogether too much for minimm. part of the problem may have been that we were seated in the friggin' second row, under a massive screen, but he was curled up into a ball almost from the get-go. he left with mrs.mm before the assault on starkiller base. he agrees that perhaps the cinematic experience saturated him, and is not averse to trying to see it again, on a smaller screen at home, in the future. poor kid. I liked what was done with the original cast - it all felt authentic. as far as rehashing star wars plot points, rotj already had another death star, and the phantom menace had Anakin fly into a large space station and destroy it (accidentally) by blowing up it's weakest design flaw. I thought they offered up a fairly new take on it all, and in remixing in a lot of what felt familiar from the original trilogy, they established that with the force, in this universe, it's all cyclical. and I think that such a pattern has already been established as canon. besides, there's really only two ways to take out massively powerful superweapns - critical flaw, or attrition, and attrition is a lot less exciting to watch in a movie.

For one, it rewards anyone dedicated, we, stoopid, enough to stay up till the end of the draft for the slim pickins that remain. And two, there are a bunch of teams in desperate need of roster overhauls that could benefit from such dreg-rankings. And three, who's to say we'd be all the way down to those players of such inconsequence that most of the league has no interest in trying to obtain them by the time the time limit kicked in? And finally, if the players are of such trivial nature than it shouldn't matter if the harder working owners get them, should it? The only real argument for it is that someone willing to foolishly put more time into their team might be at as light competitive advantage. But isn't that kindof the point...?

I disapprove of the hard end cap

We really need to have this done before the keeper deadline. Do we need to find a different replacement owner?

the pretty much unanimous opinion on the MLBradio station on the satellites is that this is a terrible, and terribly offensive signing if it indeed marks the culmination of the metly off season free agency activity. I'm holding out unrealistic hope that I will not be channeling µmmL's hulk-rage as spring approaches.

so... ownership straightened out yet...?