Long may it bobble.

I saw Nori's last Dodger Stadium at bat back on May 4, 2005. The inning will bring back tears.
DODGERS 9TH: Ledee was called out on strikes; Phillips singled
to left; Nakamura grounded into a double play (pitcher to
shortstop to first) [Phillips out at second]; 0 R, 1 H, 0 E, 0
LOB. Nationals 5, Dodgers 2.

I think Nakamura hit the ball about 45 feet. He played the tail end of a Dodgers rout in Cincinnati two days later.

Nakamura started at third for the home opener in 2005 and doubled in his first AB. We were so hopeful.

Ahh, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

sniff, sniff...

6 - I don't think you're alone in that opinion.

Looks like a good deal to me if he can contribute and stays healthy.

I don't get it.

It seems like when you sell high on a guy, you should get more than a good reliever coming off surgery, and a guy who hasn't hit AA.

LaRoche's salary is manageable. He hits. He plays a decent first base. I can't believe that the Atlanta Braves could not get more than what the Pirates gave them.

Of course, it's always possible that this is the best deal they were offered. In that case, I'd rather hold on to him. It's a bad deal.

http://tinyurl.com/2fgfxw

Shame on you.

This was not enterprise journalism on my part. This was enterprise typing.

Supposedly hit 94 for scouts recently.

Very little downside risk in deal.

If consistent team success is the best measure of a GM, Atlanta's John Schuerholtz has been at the top, or near it, especially since Atlanta doesn't have the resources some clubs do.

Bobby Cox has to get a lot of credit, along with Stan Kasten, who hired John S., who hired Cox. Sure, the Braves faltered last year. But 14 consecutive division titles speaks for itself, even if they did yield only a single WS title.

Does anyone know where Schuerholtz stands on the oversimplified stats vs. scouts issue?

Also, a while back ESPN had fans vote to rank GMs. I never found the results.

Whatever that outcome, fan opinion is one thing. But has any baseball authority done a ranking like this lately? If so, is there a link?

As far as where Ned might rank, I doubt he's been on the job long enough for a ranking to be worth a whole lot.

But what happens in the NBA if you have just five players left because of foul outs and one of the players on the court gets injured?

There is a provision for this.

I believe that you can have someone who has fouled out play in your case, but every foul he subsequently gets is a technical foul? Something like that.

In the 1950s, the NBA used to have lots of players foul out because all non-shooting fouls were one shot only. So when you were behind, you would just hack somebody, have them take one shot and then go down and make a basket for two.

It took them several years to realize that this didn't work out well.

I agree. He's excellent.

Ms. Harkleroad now faces the #15 seed, Daniela Hantuchova
http://tinyurl.com/2gvehx

Ms. Harkleroad's profile
http://tinyurl.com/2bwaaf

Interestingly, these three players are all in a row on the WTA website.

http://www.ashley-harkleroad.com/

http://tinyurl.com/37zumw

http://tinyurl.com/yr569x

Dios Mio

Don't have kids.

Apparently, Harkleroad got divorced recently.

{taps fingers}

I'm very nurturing like that.

It worries me that this has apparently not deterred the hopeful future Mr. Harkleroad...

What?

This is the kind of sentiment we don't hear much on DodgerThoughts.

Square? Ovular? Triangular...?

Sorry if the previous statement sounded tawdry. I'm just looking for a good clay-court specialist to team up with.

expendable is probably the word i should have used.

either way, i like this movie by colletti. I like the way colletti builds a bullpen so far.

From what I can tell and know of American tennis on clay, Ashley Harkleroad is hardly a clay court specialist.

I'll make sure to invite him to the next UTLA firebombing.

I asked her why the job was called that. She said she had no idea.

Exactly what does a bridges coordinator do?

I've learned a lot about special education in the past couple of years.

In all seriousness, special education is not a job, it's a vocation. Tip of my Dodger cap to her.

She thinks I could last 15 minutes on a good day.

In seven professional seasons, Tsao has 63 2/3 Major League innings. Kuo, who has battled back from two Tommy John operations, has 65 Major League innings in the same seven years.

Kind of mkes me appreciate Ned as much as I hate to do so when he adds or keeps the likes of Tomko, Hendrickson, Wolf, Schmidt so tht he doesn't have to load the innings on his very young pitchers' arms. Or does he just like old guys?

Not that I covet players on other teams, it is more that I covet some Dodgers to be on other teams.

"Olney: Phillies built upon old-fashioned values"

Sheesh.

It's $400,000, Ned. Pay the man. If you'll thrown $45M at Pierre, what's a measly $400K for Joe Shotglass?

Or is the ugliness of arbitration part of Beimel's punishment for his issues last season? Beimel's truth issues certainly wouldn't play well in such a hearing.

"That's right buddy, I, JimDC, think you're a jerk. Remember that, pal. Name's JIM."

I haven't read the new book, but it's pretty clear that his philosophy is built on having a great farm system. Seems it is part "scout", but I don't think it means it's "anti-stats".

Taiwan and the Philippines created teams that were taken from sections of the country that were too big. There is a population limit that each time can draw from because the teams are supposed to be "kids from the neighborhood." Taiwan was taking from groups of well over a million people as was the Philippines team. No doubt that the U.S. could form a great Little League team every year if it could pick it nationwide. Or just consider a team that was an all-California or all-Florida team.

Yowza.

What if Tomko and Hendrickson are doing the ingesting?

Taiwanese leagues had been cheating in two different ways; first, their leagues had been drawing from pools of 16,000-20,000 children, as opposed to the regulation 4,000-7,000, and second, many of their players were playing on falsified birth certificates anyway -- the players were actually 14 and 15 years old. Since this was discovered, only two of nine champs have been from Taiwan, a more reasonable number.

Ouch. The Mark Hendrickson of economists.

He was the "limits to growth" guy, right? Is he an idiot for thinking there are limits to growth, or is he an idiot for being wrong about when we would run out of resources? Or is he an idiot for some other reason?

"Limits to Growth" is different as the authors of the book acknowledge that there are countless possibilities out there that would quite possibly prove their predictions in invalid. Such as the prediction that the world at current increases in usage rates would run out of oil by 1992. They acknowledged that this was only based on proven reserves in 1970 and that there was a strong possibility that there would be substantial new discoveries of oil in places that had not be explored.

But I don't remember reading any of his stuff, so you may have more basis for your evaluation than I do.

I remember one of my econ professors setting up a spectrum with Malthus et al. on one end and Julian Simon? on the other, with Malthus thinking we would run out of resources soon and Simon thinking we would never run out of resources because technology would always find substitutes. I was 100% in Simon's camp back then. I'm somewhere between the two extremes these days.

After reading that book, my opinion of him dropped signifigantly. He has zero understanding of Sabermetrics (thinks Moneyball is all about fat guys who can't play defense, etc.) and picks up players based on their attitude. He places a heavy emphasis on scouting, but doesn't say what qualities make a good major leaguer. Unless this was a complete ruse, it seems like the Braves strategy is hire Leo Mazzone, then win.

In 1950, the world population was about 2.5 billion. In 2000, it was about 6 billion. The United Nations estimates the world population will eventually level out at 11 billion people in 2150.

This was in John Schuerholz book on the topic of free agency.

I should have said in 130 that Schuerholz said this under the chapter farm system.

If one were to compile a list of current "land-wasting" activities, and arrange it in descending order, I would guess that organic farming would be low on the list. I would guess low-density development (e.g. "sprawl") is among the primary culprits.

And does he now have an obligation Eagle-Scout his look in light of the broken glass incident, as a show of penance and rectitude?

Just look at Brasil. What is the biggest threat to the rain forest, it is not low density development, it is free range cattle ranches.

Is our way of life sustainable in "the long run"? I doubt it.

Malthus 6, Kent 0

That's all? Daniel's got him beat by 12...

As Gregg Easterbrook would say, Ye Gods.

Good for you, Daniel. But don't hide your lamp under a bushel...

Also, if you hate Wal-Mart, you should see Idiocracy for Mike Judge's applicable spoofing of Costco.

See: the Dark Side of The Force

Idiocracy

Hadn't heard of it, but I'll check it out.

Fox sabatoged Idiocracy, only showing it in 6 cities (not including New York), with no press whatsoever. Moreover, they reshot parts of the movie after removing Judge and refused to prescreen it or run it in festivals. Pretty messed up. It is a funny movie though.

I just wrote about it on my blog:
http://tinyurl.com/2xunpw

Your blog has been bookmarked.

(safe for work)

Only the greatest overcome it.

Receiving no response to my narrowly directed, charming, folksy even, emails, I've switched to broadcast mode. Today, every Carver Middle School employee with a surname beginning with an A or B got an email from me. Let's see if anybody at that school checks his/her email.

And on top of it, I tried to buy tickets for the Oregon-SC game on the 3rd of Feb. and its sold out. Stubhub is trying to sell them for a hundred bucks. Crazy! Its at 12:30 on a Saturday in L.A., people must have other options.

Dodger Thoughts, Baseballtoaster, and all those affiliated with each or both bear no responsibility for the actions of known miscreant and public menace "Andrew Shimmin." His IP addresses and known aliases are available by request, no warrant necessary. DT and Baseballtoaster regret that their services have been abused by Mr. Shimmin, and will gladly, vigorously assist, in any way possible, all efforts to bring his reign of terror to an end. Hey, we don't even care about the hula hoops--it's totally cool with us if you want to keep your hula hoop carrying secrets to yourself. None of our business, right? We dig.

--The Management

It's up to Stanford to restore order.

UCLA's is #1
Zona's is #2

Saturday is going to be fun.

BTW, please hire a good OC Karl.

FFCGG

Oregon is:

FGGGG

I call that a "4G negative dive"

A "4D negative dive"

Easy like finding a needle in a haystack or easy as in Paris Hilton. Not that I ever get anything from Wal Mart or Paris.

The more I think about, Paris and WalMart are a good match. In so many ways.

The character Alan Shore in Boston Legal said last night that if he could change one thing about the worls he would get rid of all stores ending in Mart. Good start.

It may be implied but because of the score I have to ask, did the UCLA women's team play the ASU men.

Hmmm...Making a tourney run to save your job. I think I've heard that basketball tune before...

I have also heard other disturbing things about her.

That being said, I'm assuming Zona will play mostly zone, meaning they'll have to rotate well to defend the three, something they've improved on slightly as the year has gone on. Offensively I'm not too worried about them although Radenovic has been slumping lately.

Basically, there are only a couply gimme games in the Pac-10 this year, so you have to bring your "A" game just about every night.

I should add I also love the matchup of Westbrook against their backup guards. He will torch them.

And yes, Budinger's defense is that bad. He stands almost completely straight up and has terrible lateral movement. His only advantages are that he is tall, a good leaper, and fairly quick at recovering. While Arizona is usually known more as an offensive team than defensive, Lute has developed some very good defenders from Salim Stoudamire to Jason Terry. I don't think Chase will be around long enough to benefit from his tutelage though.

I do not have $8,000 to fool around with.

Or to shag

Just filling my niche.

I'm having a hard time believing that Herb Sendek and I are that close in age. Sendek looks older than Lute Olson.

How dare they want to win a game.

Alas.

Expected Lineup:
Pierre-Furcal-Nomar-Kent-Gonzo-Ethier-Betemit-Martin-Pitcher (781.9 Runs)

Worst Possible Lineup:
Pitcher-Gonzo-Nomar-Pierre-Betemit-Martin-Furcal-Ethier-Kent (747.2)

... back to the bball.
vr, Xei

I was surprised that people were not talking about the Office at Screen Jam.

Purely off the top of my head and I could easily be wrong.

Luis Gonzalez and Juan Pierre are a fair trade for Kenny Lofton and J.D. Drew at almost exactly the same price ($70 million plus, counting Drew's new contract, not his old one)

I guess it's a fair trade, except for the fact that

Lofton > Pierre
Drew > Gonzalez

http://tinyurl.com/2zu9e7

A small straw used for coffee works great!

Oregon (1) vs. UW/OSU/ASU
UCLA (2) vs. Stan/UW/OSU
Washington State (3) vs. Arizona (6)
USC (4) vs. Cal (5)