UGH. Stop saying "timing is not the White Sox' for-tay." It's pronounced "fort." The musical dynamic is for-tay, from Italian. One's strong suit is "fort," from French. Personal bugbear.

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This is where the modern SABRmetric fan gets confused and doesn't even realize his confusion. On the one hand, SABRmetrics suggests you should objectively analyze performance. Based on performance, the White Sox are sixth in all of baseball in scoring runs. Yet, in his confusion li'l danny bernstein screams, "you can't have the lowest WAR guys at short and second!!!!!!!" And why exactly is that? And who does he want to replace them with? Oh yeah, that elusive "replacement player". As if there is a holding tank of 0 WAR players being warehoused for those times when a team needs a "replacement player". Obviously the White Sox are scoring more than 24 teams who have a keystone combo with higher WAR. This must be the same type of precise analysis that led danny to conclude that Alejandro De Aza was "bad at baseball".

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I'm a grammar peenus and I didn't even know that. I think most people get that wrong.

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Kid Cairo's Boers & Bernstein YouTube Channel

Kid Cairo: 2013 March Madness Tournament Winner!

"Cowabunga? Cowa fucking piece of dog shit! This game is diarrhea coming out of my dick!"

The hypothetical "replacement player" is where sabermetrics loses me. I need to work with actual data and actual players, not what some imaginary construct did or could do.

And yeah, OKC, that one does trip people up. There's a terrific book I have called An Incomplete Education, of which the lexicon chapter is my favorite. Really helped me with misused word pairs (comprise/compose, uninterested/disinterested), and words whose mispronunciations have become so common that the correct ones are lost ("fort" for strong suit, "skizz-em" for split, which always surprises me because we have no trouble with schizophrenia. Same morpheme).

EDIT: It also taught me a lot about opera!

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*SIGH* Look, and again, I, I, I, I, uh, in my baseball world and it's a world that goes way back to the halcyon days of Baker and Banks breaking the color line at Wrigley Field, but uh, uh, eh, look, every team has strengths and weaknesses, uh, eh, eh, Miguel Cabrera and Doug Fister, eh, eh, those strengths are tough to beat, but, eh, uh, uh, again, I've always heard it pronounced 'for-tay' like the Bears running back, eh, eh, uh, he had a hell of a game the other night but it's just the preseason and it doesn't mean a damn thing, for the love of God, but, uh, eh, I've heard 'for-tay' and, uh, I, I, I, I'm gonna stick with that rather than get my pronunciations and etymologies from some pantsless cretin on a message board where the walking rectums using the damn thing can't even keep a fantasy football league a secret. That's alls I'm sayin'. That's alls I'm sayin'.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I agree with your point about the Secret Fantasy League, but why is Terry Boers defending Matt Rodewald?

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I just assumed the Bloom graduate was the one who said it.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Except it is considered proper in modern language.

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“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”- JD Vance
“My god, what an !diot.”- JD Vance tweet on Trump
“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy”- JD Vance

Unzippy for pindick.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Yeah, and I bet some dictionary says "irregardless" is a word now, too. Rules are to be followed, bub. Take your lily-livered descriptivism elsewhere.

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(I got nothin' on that forte shit either though .... and I'll keep saying it wrong because I'm much bigger than you ....)

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

All of those things are true.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

I was checking out FanGraphs from the Ramirez/Beckham debate and stumbled across this tidbit regarding a certain Cubs player. According to FanGraphs Chris Volstad is a .7 WAR player, good enough for 3rd best on the current pitching staff excluding Dempster & Maholm. A guy who hasn't won in 24 starts and has had a total of 3 quality starts in 13 starts is a .7 WAR player. How can Volstad almost be a 1 WAR player considering all of that? If there ever was an argument against the SABR head, this is it.

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?p ... &players=0

bernstein also declared DeWayne Wise to be "out of magic" and "hardly a big league player" on today's show. If I were as wrong about a subject as often as bernstein is wrong about baseball, I'd probably shut up about it. #chonefiggins #can'tblockmeheremotherfucker

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Agreed with that statement as well...Forte was in the perfect system for the back to pile up meaningless yards those days are over......@Kwood ..Bernstein is a bitch..he is so dismissive with callers, sometimes I switch to music for background noise..He says some very dumb shit like Quade will be a great hire or Bobby Valentine was a good hire..he doesn't know shit! ..but he is quick to cut a guy off mid sentence and call him a moron..granted ..most of the callers are morons (on purpose) Goff is instructed to put through the dumbest of the dumb.

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It isn't just baseball...
any hockey thought
some of his football thoughts are brutal (back-up qbs don't matter, injured urlacher won't make or break this year)
nba

I don't really understand the WAR and some other stats. ..the replacement player is whom? random scrub from AAA or mlb bench player?..Volstad does not belong in the major leagues.

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It's just a theoretical baseline. Not an actual player. But that's why danny doesn't really understand what he's talking about. He acts as if a guy like Beckham can just be replaced by anyone, i.e. "a replacement level player". That isn't really the case in the actual world.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

How did the Sox possibly throw up 9 runs and beat the Mighty Yankees with a middle infield of two icky bad wOBA guys and a barely major leaguer like Wise in center?

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I have a hard time comparing Beckham to an "unknown player" but Beckham is above average defense/below avg offense..which is doable if he hits 8 or 9..Alexi is above avg defense and average offensively.

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Are you counting yourself there?

As much as you point out the flaws of SABRmetrics, you follow a lot of the stuff and quote it.

I think you hold it to too high a standard. They're just numbers that are supposed to help indicate what will happen in the future. I understand Bernstein presents it like its indisputable fact but most SABR guys dont do that.

I think I take the numbers for what they are- a useful tool. But something is being lost when we start to value indicators of possible future performance over real established performance itself. That's the mistake bernstein made with De Aza. He saw that last year De Aza had an inordinately high BABIP. He assumed that would fall off and declared the man "bad at baseball". Of course it did fall off from .400, but remained well higher than average. Perhaps De Aza is simply a player who has a high BABIP and will continue to do so. There are reasons for that. But bernstein was more interested in what he mistakenly saw as a "smarter fan" narrative.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Alexi is far above the average shortstop offensively. Just one indicator, I believe he has led all MLB SS in HR over the past five years.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

The problem with Dan is, because he doesn't prepare for a show, he really has little context for the information he happens upon. De Aza was a highly touted prospect with the Marlins who had some bad luck with non recurring type injuries. When he finally got healthy, they had a wealth of young OF who were already establishing themselves and he was out of the mix. It's not like De Aza came out of nowhere and so his production should be considered anomolous.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

That's not the narrative, dolphin! Don't you know anything about meatball baiting? On the one hand home runs are very important, on the other we take a relatively small sample of Ramirez' career to declare him "bad". By the way, I'm pretty sure only a couple AL second basemen have more homers than Beckham this season.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Well it's hard for Bernsy to be corrected when all dissenting texters/tweeters are blocked and e-mails not sent by Jalen from Rosemont or Amir go unread.

I like Alexi..and think he is a good player...Troy tulo has to have more homeruns than Alexi.

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maybe it was AL

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

What you have to understand is that bernstein has patented a brand of attack radio wherein one of the primary objectives of the show is to paint the caller as a complete moron. It really has very little to do with bernstein's actual positions on anything, if he even has a position. This style has spread and become pervasive throughout the Score with a few significant exceptions.

It's why I find it difficult to take Rongey's defenses of Thornton seriously. I've made some mild defenses of Thornton myself in this forum, simply stating that every team has guys like him and they all have to get by. But I'm not sure if Rongey is sincere or if he's indulging in the kind of baiting he learned from bernstein & company. It seems rather aggressive and silly to attack a Sox fan for disliking Thornton a half hour after he blew a game in the most painful way possible.

danny is always going to take the position he views as negative. He thinks people like Tebow and Armstrong, he's going to attack them. He thinks people hate LeBron and Carmelo, he's going to elevate them. Dewayne Wise on the White Sox is a marginal player and "bad at baseball". I'd bet anything I have that if his name had come up a month ago when he was a Yankee, the bernstein take would have been something like, "The Yankees always seem to find these guys kicking around and beat you with them."

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don