S5Dewey

Wow. I'm a huge JBJ fan but I'd have to think about that. Slide Beni to CF, put Puig in RF, and we've given up a little defense but gained the power we need.

My ST tickets have been ordered and they're on their way to me. Right now it looks like I'm going to have one extra ticket available for most games and two tickets for the first three games (Northeastern/Boston College, Minnesota, Tampa Bay). If anyone is going to be in the Ft. Myers area and wants to get to a game, speak up. First $30/ticket gets them! That's face value.

This has been lurking in the back of my mind for some time, too. With WC sports usually decided by a game or two and the Sox playing an improved Yankees team 19 times it's going to be that much harder to get a WC spot.

I never understood what happened there. Bard was a respectable reliever but then insisted that he wanted to be a starter and screwed up his career. I'm not sure whether to blame it on poor management or Bard's stubbornness.

IMO it's not that DD thinks that they've plateaued. It's more that trading JBJ might be necessary to make a trade and JBJ is the most expendable of our outfielders. (I agree with everything I said there but I still hope they don't break up this outfield). Bogaerts could be dangled if we traded for Machado (UGHHH!) because XBo has been less than hoped for on both sides of the ball and trading him frees up a defensive spot for MM. Just thinking of this makes me want to insert a picture of Brian Griffin puking, but I lack the skills to do that.

If that's really someone's name you have to admit that at least his parents had a sense of humor.

Ya. That was me a few pages ago when I was facetiously demonstrating how the word "probably" could be used to imply something that the speaker doesn't have knowledge of its truth - but is possible. I think everyone got that at the time.

Yes. And it's why I believe Curt Flood should be in the HOF. Not as a player, but as someone who changed the entire face of the makeup of teams. (and I know someone [Notin?] is going to chime in here with the player who came before Flood, but whose name I can't think of at the moment).

My daughter taught in a school district in Florida for several years without a raise in pay. Every year the teachers would negotiate for - and get - an agreement giving them a raise. However, the City Council refused to fund it in the school budget so the raise(s) never materialized. What the Council did was to play the teachers against the students in the public eye. The teachers were told that if they wanted those raises the money for the raises would come from educational materials, enrichment programs, etc. so if the teachers wanted that raise it would be at the expense of the students. The teachers opted not to take the raises.

Very, very true. Unfortunately we're "hooked". We've got a "habit".

Or "Perhaps" the reason people who could be outstanding teachers aren't going into the field is because they can make more money elsewhere. The reason they can make more money elsewhere is because teacher's pay is tied to something we have little control over - taxation, while what we choose to spend watching baseball is a choice. Given a choice between spending money to encourage and educate better teachers we instead choose to spend our money watching baseball. It's a sad commentary on our society but it's the way it is, and until we have an uprising demanding better pay for teachers that's the way it's going to be.

I think that horse has now left the barn. There is no good solution to it. As you say, owners have found out how much people will pay to watch baseball and they're going to charge it. I believe we got this way through an unintended collusion between the players and the owners. IMO neither of them believed how badly the escalating salaries would spin out of control nor did they believe how much J.Q. Public would pay to see baseball. They got involved in a salary-based game of Chicken and neither side backed down. That's how we got where we are. Someone (Notin?) mentioned a couple of days ago that someday this bubble may burst, and when it does there will be some owners who are responsible for more salaries than they can afford to pay. Of course that won't happen as long as I'm willing to pay $75-$100 per seat and pay for my NESN subscription. See? I'm a part of it too.

Ahhh... yes. The old argument that always pops up when everything else fails. "If you don't like it here, move out." There are other more constructive options like recognizing what's wrong with something. Recognizing something is the first step toward changing it.

IMO the "solution" is somewhere in between. While some make too little others make too much, and I'm basing "too little/too much" on how much what they do contributes to society. As I've said here before, if a researcher today came up with a single cure for every type of cancer he/she wouldn't make as much money in his lifetime as David Price will.

No. That just proves that Oprah is overpaid too.

But my favorite "unethical" pitcher will always be Ryan Dempster.

All fine, but it does nothing to refute what I said. No, I'm not a lawyer, but I understand English. To take a part of your point #3, " A lawyer may refuse to offer evidence, other than the testimony of a defendant in a criminal matter, that the lawyer reasonably believes is false". At no point does it say that a lawyer WILL refuse to offer that evidence... It only says that he MAY, which leaves open the option of the lawyer's own discretion. I'm friends with several lawyers and they all say the same thing regarding defending people. THEY DON'T WANT TO KNOW if someone is guilty or not. As one of them told me, "I don't care if my client is guilty or not and I certainly don't want him to tell me if he is. I'm charged with making sure the State has enough evidence to convict him." This absolves them of the canon of ethics.

This is what I meant in a previous post about listening and taking things literally. This is another "lawyer word" - "PERHAPS". Perhaps not, too. Perhaps Bora$$ uses totally unethical methods to rape ethical front offices but this sentence, "perhaps players flock to Scott Boras because he ethically keeps unethical front offices in check is intended to plant a seed of doubt without any real substance.

Yep. What's going on now is great for everyone... except the fans who'd like to take their families to more than a couple of games a year. We've taken a bunch of people, many of whom have no skills other than being able to hit a baseball, and turned them into millionaires while millions of Americans are trying to eek out a middle-class life for themselves and their families. What you say may be true, that agents and the like are "good for baseball" but it's a sad commentary on American priorities when good teachers are making $50,000 a year and the worst MLB players are making half a million.

Those two things go hand in hand. If you commit a crime your lawyer's secondary goal is to get you the lightest sentence possible. His primary goal is to get your acquitted. The ethics of having a guilty person going free isn't something a good attorney is worried about. It's the same with Scott Bora$$. His only worry is getting the best deal he can for his client. He's not worried about the ethics of how he gets that deal. At least not beyond the damage he can do to his own reputation with the owners.

I felt the same way about Sale when we got him. I believed that a rotation with Price, and Porcillo at the top of it was going to be good enough to get the job done. However, what happened to the Sox points out why you can't have too much pitching. Now I have to look back and ask myself where we would have been without Sale, regardless of who we had to part with to get him.

I'm afraid I don't share your opinion of Mr. Bora$$, or even lawyers in general, although I have to admit that I've never met one I didn't like personally. Lawyers are hired to do one thing - represent their client's best interests - and Bora$$ has usually done that very well. Good ones are very good at raising doubt by saying things like 'I can't divulge what other teams have offered but there may be other teams with deep pockets making offers to my client'. Notice that he didn't say there ARE.. he said there "might be" which could be followed by "or there might not be". In the case of Bora$$, he gets paid by his clients to represent them and he's very good at what he does but that doesn't mean he's the epitome of forthrightness. My guess is that he doesn't have a great reputation among owners but they respect him for what does and how he does it. But that doesn't mean they trust him. I was involved in a few labor negotiations in my lifetime and something I learned was to listen to the exact phraseology that's used and to infer nothing. Take everything a lawyer says literally and exactly at face value, then try to pin them down as to exactly what they meant. That's usually a lot like trying to nail Jello to a wall.

As has been said, if you want someone to find an orange three-toed elephant on line then Harmony's your man, even if he has to go back ten years to do it.

Even thinking that is just plain wrong. :-(

I don't know where they'll come from. The next time you're in Fenway park take a few minutes and count the number of ads you see. I've sat in just about every area of the park and I can always count about 100 of them.