chasfh

that guy is mos def stroked out

That is the standard Ash Wednesday gospel reading. While I was still in that church, once I realized exactly what that reading was telling me, I immediately wiped the ashes off my head once I left the church, because I did not want everyone else seeing my "righteousness" to be my only reward from my Father in Heaven.

That's what Jesus told us to do, and they don't care what Jesus actually says, outside of "I'm coming back someday to kick your enemy's ass."

I think it would be amazing of any MLB Central team outside the Cubs were to get a posted top-tier Japanese player.

I agree that the Dodgers are the betting favorites, and it could be fairly argued they are a better team. But in the end, it’s a bat-and-ball game where luck has a huge hand in determining the outcome. Besides that, Toronto and LA have similar team RC+, the Jays have superior defense, and they’re getting Bo Bichette. OTOH, the Dodgers have a much better and deeper pitching staff, and I would think it’s a done deal that Shohei is pitching Game 3 next Monday (which, of course, I am going to miss watching with a rescheduled softball playoff night to play). I don’t foresee a boring blowout.

To be fair, only part of that team completely **** the bed.

I think a splurge on Cease would be very high-key, and I would approve.

I think you’re right that trading Skubal would send the wrong message to the rest of the team, which could have an impact on their psyche and thus performance afterward that can’t be calculated beforehand. These guys are not mere widgets in an OOTP sim game (although that game also has a optional mechanism in it to account for the impact of the team’s actions on player psyche as well, which is part of what makes that game so, so good). Players are human beings who to varying degrees naturally allow personal issues to affect performance, While I do agree with SoCal that the good health and luck a team experiences can help elevate them above other teams that are more talented but less lucky or healthy, an organization simply can’t plan for that circumstance to occur. Those factors have to be set aside during the planning stages as being equal among teams.

People tend to have a strong belief in self-determination, that sheer talent and hard work are all you need to succeed, so I agree that they tend to vastly underrate the impact that health and luck—which themselves are closely related—have on the final results.

I remember that guy when he was at Everett. All over the Free press even during high school. Hard not to believe in a guy like that.

It could also be said that we ended up trading Travis Fryman for the dead-end career of Willie Blair. Fryman could also be considered one of the lowest-profile, least-remembered 30+-win guys who played their entire careers between 1985 and 2005. Here’s a list of the guys around him in WAR.

And the best part is, overseeing building renovations is the only work-related part of the job he even likes.

Nothing says you're not one of us by referring to the rest of the community you're visiting as "you people". 😉

I am out of reactions at the moment, but, Thanks.

Sane here. He talks about the game precisely as a lawyer would.

Out of reactions at the moment, but Haha.

Boy, Harris sure is the anti-Avila, isn't he? That guy would blab out loud everything that ran through his head, undermining the trade value of guys he wanted to move in the process.

I have trouble envision any team trading a piece of their current rotation back to us in exchange for Skubal. Unless there is a recent precedent for that?

While my wife and I was driving Route 66, we stopped in Oklahoma City, and while driving around, I saw the same things I've seen in a lot of smaller cities, especially out west: unhoused people sprawled on many of the streets, setting up camp right on sidewalks in the open; tons of garbage strewn about all over the streets and sidewalks; and, of course, nobody walking around the streets after dark anywhere, not even downtown. Nothing like Chicago at all. While we were there, we went to the Jim Thorpe museum, which is connected to the AAA baseball stadium. The guy on staff was a white man, maybe 70-ish. We came in making nice small talk telling him how we found ourselves in OKC, and he asked, "where you folks from"? My wife answered, "Chicago". And he replied, "Oh, sorry, ha ha ha." I knew where he was coming from. I didn't answer him in the moment, but after checking out the museum and the ballpark for maybe 15 minutes, as we were leaving, he was near the door on the way out, and I said to him, "Oh, by the way? Chicago? Is a way, way better city than Oklahoma City." And he replied, "Well, I can't imagine." And I said, "Well, you should come visit. You'll see what I mean. You'd love it." And he had nothing more to say than, "Well, heh heh heh." And it was in that moment the thought occurred to me: probably a big reason so many red hats are so freaked out about Chicago is that they believe it's just a bigger and far worse version of their own cities, or at least the close cities they get their TV from. So many of those cities have been allowed to simply go to seed. (Perhaps in part because their Republican state legislatures starve them of state money they could use to help clean things up? That's what Illinois' R governors and legislators have been trying to do to Chicago ever since I've been here.) So this guy from the museum sees what's happening in his town, Oklahoma City, watches Fox and Newsmax and OAN talk about Chicago—and, most importantly, hears "his" president talk about Chicago—and can't conceive of the idea that it could not possibly be anything but a filthier and infinitely more dangerous version of Oklahoma City. He assumes Chicago is basically the equivalent of Gaza right now. Of course, if you look at the violent crime stats for 2024—courtesy of the Trump FBI—for every decent-sized town along Route 66, you can see that Chicago ranks pretty low in overall violent crime: TBF, it's not the lowest crime rate along the route. Kingman, Normal, Joliet, Rolla, Flagstaff, all lower. But to hear the red hats talk about it, it would be impossible that Chicago would not be the highest violent crime rate in the country. By the way, you can download your own copy of the FBI 2024 crime data right here.

Says you.

Tell you what I'd love to see for Game 1, which we sometimes see during Stanley Cup playoff games: Rather than [RecordCompanyName] recording artist [ArtsitName] singing the Canadian national anthem while the crowd respectfully stands at attention, I hope the the stadium AV folks considers cuing up the song for the crowd and then letting them belt it out unaccompanied by music. Can you imagine 40,000+ people lustily belting out "O Canada" at the top of their lungs and then erupting afterwards with the biggest cheer you've ever heard? Man, I get chills just imagining it.

I think one of the safest bets of the offseason is that everyone here is going to hate Scott Harris even more come March 25. I wonder whether FanKings or DraftDuel can come up with odds for that?? 😉

I think we owe it to ourselves to give Harris a chance to constitute the team next year around Skubal that can and will compete for the ring, keeping up our forward momentum, instead of giving up on the idea that he could ever succeed at it and advocating shipping off what is far and away our most valuable piece, and essentially quitting on the idea of winning 2026. At least that's the way it looks to me—unless Harris can pull off the magic trick of trading Skubal while more than making up for the wins he would have provided us next year, through the trade return, other trades, free agent signings, and propitious promotions of our top talent. If Harris could do that—boy, he'd be a lock for Executive of the Year, would he not?

But wait—there's more: If we trade Skubal to a team whose goal in picking him up is winning a ring in 2026, then wouldn't that get directly in our way, blocking our own goal of a ring in 2026? Especially if we were to trade him to an AL team like Seattle. Would Harris really load up a direct competitor with Tarik Skubal in order to wipe us out of the playoffs? So, if Harris does trade Skubal, then by default logic, he is giving up on winning a ring in 2026 for the promise of a vague and indeterminate future ring in who knows what season. And that would be kneecapping our momentum toward steadily improving this team in the hopes of winning a ring in, yes, 2026. And if Harris did that, he owuld be endlessly hammered for screwing up that momentum and our chances, regardless of how promising those future prospects are. This is why I have to conclude that there is no way on god's green earth Scott Harris trades Tarik Skubal unless the trade makes our team better in 2026, specifically—and I have trouble envisioning any way any other team would make a trade like that.

Pursuant to this point: I would find it really surprising if a team were willing to give up the impact MLB-level batter or pitcher we here covet in return for Skubal. After all, that team would be getting Skubal for a single year, 2026, so their goal, obviously, would be to win a ring in 2026. So it makes no sense—to me anyway—that they would hamper their chances of that by switching out multiple wins at one position in exchange for the wins Skubal brings them on the mound. That seems to me to be close to treading water on their part. Or am I missing something here? The only way I see it is they trade us a 2+ win guy who's blocking a top-100 prospect at the AAA level.