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UTexasFight

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Posts posted by UTexasFight

  1. Ended up settling on a used one very similar to my 2014 gray Sierra
    This one is a 2015.
    Part of me was proud I relied on my ‘89 Silverado to get me to the dealership:

    58c07a1b8bd63705965b5897fc6413c6.jpg

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  2. To the “move him down in the lineup” crowd (for the record, I’m with Hinch on this one):

    Since being activated on Aug. 10 after missing nearly six weeks with a lower back injury, Correa entered Friday hitting just .162 with one home run in 77 plate appearances. However, Hinch said he isn't planning to take any drastic measures with the former All-Star, such as moving him down in the lineup.

    "He can work through this," Hinch said of Correa. "Every hitter has done it. I think talent wins in the end. If I need to tweak a thing or two or give him a day off, I will. But rushing to that ... might change the function of our team, and it may not change it for the better. I don't know that that's necessarily the answer."

    Hinch said he wasn't aware of any lingering physical issues with Correa, adding that he's confident the slump is poised to end.

    "Carlos is relentless in his work, and in the fundamentals of hitting," Hinch said. "The hits are coming. They're going to come in bunches. He's certainly somebody that we're going to rely on down the stretch to put up some numbers."

  3. Athletic article on James from back in May


    How a sleep apnea diagnosis led to a breakout for Astros prospect Josh James

    Explanations for velocity increases from year to year aren’t always clear. Perhaps a pitcher adjusted his mechanics. Maybe he used the offseason to work himself into better physical shape or was simply healthy after previously battling injuries. Often, it’s some combination of these factors.

    The unique story behind Josh James’ velo spike doesn’t neatly fit into any of the above categories. The 25-year-old Astros minor leaguer didn’t overhaul his delivery or drastically alter his workouts or his diet. So why does his fastball, which a couple years ago sat 89 to 93 mph, now regularly touch 98?

    James, who has quickly risen from an unheralded former 34th-round draft pick to a legitimate reliever prospect for Houston, attributes his ability to throw harder to better quality sleep. The 6-foot-3, 220-pound righthander was diagnosed with sleep apnea the offseason before last, and addressing the disorder, he says, correlates with his breakout.

    James, whose fastball now sits 94 to 96 mph, struck out 41 percent of the batters he faced in Class AA this season before the Astros promoted him Sunday to Class AAA, where he’s scheduled to debut Thursday in Fresno’s game at Las Vegas. He began throwing harder last year, his first year sleeping with the assistance of a breathing mask, but his velocity increase has been even more pronounced early in 2018. On April 29, in his final home outing for Corpus Christi, the stadium scoreboard radar gun flashed a 100.

    “I feel like I’m still brand new to throwing hard,” James said. “It’s like every day I’ll go out and I’ll throw and I’ll feel sore and I’m like, ‘Man, in this next outing, I don’t think I’ll be able to hit 95.’ And then I come out and it’s coming out pretty good. It’s definitely interesting.”

    Apparently, this is the new normal for James, an intriguing arm the Astros have developed as a starter but whose inconsistent delivery will likely result in him being a reliever. The story of how he discovered he had sleep apnea traces back to 2015, when his roommate with low-Class A, a pitcher named Ryan Thompson, complained of James’ intolerable snoring and encouraged him to get it checked out by a doctor.

    During his 2016 season in high-Class A , James felt exhausted, his velocity lagged into the high 80s and he began to gain weight. As a result, James decided to see a sleep specialist in his offseason hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He underwent a sleep study that he said revealed he was waking up almost 30 times a night when lying on his back and another 15 or so when on his side.

    “It wasn’t necessarily eyes open,” James said. “It was just I wasn’t getting into my REM sleep.”


    (Photo: Charlie Blalock)
    Though surgery to repair his deviated septum was suggested, James opted to try sleeping with the assistance of a CPAP machine (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure), a common means of therapy for sleep apnea that features a mask. He wears the mask to bed every night, he said, and tried to use it even on the long overnight bus rides in the Texas League.

    Vastly improved, mostly uninterrupted sleep has James much more energized and in better moods, he said, and also has eliminated his previous need to nap during the day. The CPAP machine is attached to an app that generates a report on his sleeping, and James said now he wakes up maybe only once or twice a night.

    “I just wanted to stop snoring and see if I could get some better sleep and not feel as bad,” he said. “(I’m) unbelievably energized. Even sleeping four or five hours with the machine is 10 times better than sleeping 10 hours without it.”

    While acknowledging it’s difficult to draw a straight line from treating sleep apnea to throwing harder, multiple sleep experts vouched for the viability of James’ explanation.

    “Particularly if you’re affected during your slow-wave sleep (also known as deep sleep), that’s when your growth hormone gets released, so your ability to gain strength can be affected. Your ability to stay focused is going to be affected. Your ability to do things like repeat mechanics, locate — all of that’s affected because essentially you’re just chronically sleep deprived,” said Dr. Scott Kutscher of the Stanford Sleep Medicine Center. “So while there is very little research on the effects of sleep apnea directly on things like performance (in baseball), we know based off what happens with sleep deprivation that there is certainly a significant impact on performance.”

    Dr. Christopher Winter of Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine in Virginia echoed a similar sentiment. “Performance is not only being able to perform and throw hard,” he said, “but it’s also being able to get your body ready over the next couple days to throw hard again.” He added he believes sleep apnea is underdiagnosed among baseball players.

    “I’ve seen the reverse several times — I know other doctors have, too — where a young pitcher is slowly losing velocity and nobody can really figure out why,” Winter said. “Sleep apnea is one of those things where it kind of slowly creeps up on you.”

    James’ velocity spike last year caught him by surprise. His new-found ability to blow a fastball by hitters has changed everything. When he’s throwing strikes, his mid-80s slider and his mid-80s changeup are more effective than before. Repeating his delivery has long been the biggest deficiency for James. His consistency in that area has improved but remains a work in progress.


    Photo by Charlie Blalock
    Drafted in 2014 out of Western Oklahoma State College, James is an example of what Astros officials have termed “a Jim Stevenson special.” Stevenson, the team’s amateur scout for north and west Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kansas, has advocated for a number of under-the-radar players at Oklahoma junior colleges the Astros have drafted in recent years. Outfielder Ramon Laureano and righthander Dean Deetz (Northeast Oklahoma A&M) and third baseman Abraham Toro (Seminole State College) are among the most notable in addition to James.

    As a 34th-round pick, James received only a $15,000 signing bonus. A native of Hollywood, Fla. who also spent a lot of his childhood in the Virgin Islands, his parents’ birthplace, James first enrolled at Division II Barry University in Miami. After pitching only five innings in his year there (he allowed six earned runs), he left to go the JuCo route. A former summer ball coach of his in the Virgin Islands connected him with Western Oklahoma State College coach Kurt Russell. Stevenson saw James pitch only a few times there in his draft year but liked the pitcher’s durable, athletic build and fast arm enough to encourage the Astros to take a late-round flier.

    James has a 3.66 ERA in 364 professional innings dating to June 2014. He spent full seasons in low-Class A in 2015 and high-Class A in 2016 before last year reaching Class AA, where he had a 4.38 ERA and was limited by injuries to only 76 innings. He had a 2.49 ERA in 21 2/3 innings for Corpus Christi to begin this season before the Astros bumped him to Class AAA.

    Even though his snoring issue has dissipated, James’ reputation has proved difficult to shed. Before the start of the minor league season, he had to assure his Class AA teammates it was okay to room with him on road trips. Eventually, he recruited fellow righthander Brock Dykxhoorn and later righthander Akeem Bostick.

    “It took some convincing,” James said, “to get that done.”

  4. His high K rate with a 3.23 ERA makes me wonder about his control. But he evidently has a gun. Have any of you seen him pitch? 

    Saw him in Round Rock earlier this year when Fresno came through.

    I remember running in to a co-worker at the game who commented on being distracted early in the game chasing around his kids but then hearing this “pop” over and over and wondering “who is THAT?”

     

    He has MLB stuff but the question on him has always been can he control it.

    I posted earlier this month when his name came up as a possible LMJ rotation replacement that he’s the kind of guy that can take a no-hitter in to the 6th inning every time out...or not make it out of the first inning.

     

    they’ll talk about it tomorrow, I’m sure, but he had a career re-birth after getting treatment for sleep apnea a year or so ago which he credits with adding 3-4 mphs to his fastball as a result of getting better sleep

  5. Watched Brewers vs Reds yesterday.  Brewers batter got hit in the FACE with a pitch and the Brewer's announcer remarked that was only a slider.  "Just think if that would have been a fastball."   It was an 85 mph slider....why don't you go stand down there and take an 85 mph slider off the face, asshole.  
    They were literally spraying a chemical in the batter's box where he'd left blood behind, and the Brewer's announcer just keeps repeating how it was 'only a slider'.   He must have said it 4 or 5 times.  

    Counterpoint:

    It was only a slider
  6. It's time to move Carlos Correa down in the order.

     

     

     

    Or time to trade him for Trout

     

    Trout? I’m about ready to settle for a trade for Groot.

     

     

    (Sarcasm... he sucks right now but I can see him single handedly carrying us for an entire week. 2nd week in September would nice up in Boston)

  7. Congrats on achieving maximum wrongness.  

    I’m not crazy about Blum but he’s better than Stanton
    Stanton would probably be decent if his word count wasn’t at least double any other color guy in the game.
    Dude just need to shut up every now and then
  8. On the topic of the TV network discussion earlier today, thought this was timely.
    That Cubs negotiation should be interesting to watch

    How to Build a Perfect Regional Sports Network

    If you’re a sports franchise in 2018, you’re staring down an uncompromising reality: that you’re only as good as your TV deal. As live TV audiences are dwindling, live sports might be the last great battleground. If you need proof that television rights contracts have become the primary needle-mover in the business of sports, look no further than FIFA’s World Cup pact with Comcast and Fox or the NBA’s current deal with Turner and ESPN.

    Both contracts included such earth-shattering figures that their conditions changed the entire structure of the sports involved. For world soccer, FIFA’s massive deal coincided with plans to progressively increase the World Cup field. (The deal also more than likely had something to do with North America getting handed the World Cup in 2026). For pro basketball, the flood of television money spilling into the league — which jumped from $930 million annually to $2.6 billion annually as a result of their rights deal with Turner and ESPN — was so drastic that it led to a record-breaking, league-altering spending spree as soon as the NBA’s old TV deal expired in 2016.

    Next up in the revolution? Major League Baseball. And all eyes are on one franchise in particular — the Chicago Cubs, who, as reported yesterday, will be ending their agreement with NBC Sports as soon as it expires in 2019 to build their own network.

    Since the advent of Regional Sports Networks — or “RSNs” — many of baseball’s richest teams haven’t stayed on top solely by fielding a pennant-contending product or installing European beer halls into their state-of-the-art stadiums. They’ve added financial value to their franchises by investing in media companies and building a distribution pipeline together.

    Generally speaking, MLB teams take one of two paths. Many are content to sell their broadcast rights for a fixed fee and let the network — like Fox or NBC — supply all of the network’s production, marketing and distribution resources. However, teams in major baseball markets like Boston and New York have opted to invest in their own networks (NESN and YES Network) and hold that equity themselves instead of getting a flat, fixed fee annually. These networks have become behemoths: In two transactions in 2012 and 2014, Fox bought 80% of YES Network, a company now valued at $3.8 billion. (The Yankees now reportedly plan to buy it back, according to Forbes.)

    While building your own network is a lot more work, and while, depending on the market, the equity piece could still be less valuable than a fixed fee, when a team owns their own distribution, ownership is in much more direct control of monetizing and marketing their team.

    However, this is exactly what makes the business of RSNs going forward a complicated issue. Putting together an RSN takes resources and a media partner, and a team going forward with this strategy absorbs the risk. Teams may be content to use the threat of building their own RSN as leverage — take, for instance, the St. Louis Cardinals’ Fox deal, where the team negotiated a minority stake — and negotiating for the highest rights fee possible from an already established national network.

    There’s lots of money out there. But it’s up to the teams themselves to capitalize on the best possible situation.

    In his engrossing 2007 baseball economics book Diamond Dollars, MLB consultant and NYU Tisch Institute for Sports Management dean Vince Gennaro wrote:

    “Depending on the size of the market and popularity of the team, the Fox Sports-type arrangement would net a team a steady revenue stream of anywhere from $5 million to $50 million in straight rights fees. With an RSN, a team has a variable revenue flow that is more closely linked to their on-field performance and popularity, an asset that can be worth anywhere from $100 million (for the newest as well as upstart RSNs) to nearly $2 billion (for mega RSNs like YES Network).”

    Keep in mind that Major League Baseball is a much more lucrative business now than it was when Gennaro’s book came out. League revenues have increased rapidly even though attendance has decreased. Every new TV deal struck by a team seems to break the record set by the previous broadcast deal, with the Dodgers’ 2013 $8.35 billion, 25-year pact with Time Warner being the latest example of a negotiation in a large market. (A TV deal that just so happens to ice out more than half of the population of Los Angeles).

    Now that Disney-Fox is planning to auction off the RSNs in order to comply with anti-monopoly restrictions, the Chicago Cubs had wondered aloud about the value of their own partnership with NBC Sports Chicago, a distribution network that also holds rights to White Sox, Blackhawks and Bulls broadcasts. That deal expires after next season, and while the Cubs — whose single World Series championship is still fairly fresh and demand for the team’s programming near its peak — could have certainly commanded a record rights fee, the prospect of building an RSN and potentially increasing the franchise value by hundreds of millions appears to have been irresistible.

    “The value of RSNs is stronger than ever,” wrote Bill Bridgen, the current President of NBC Sports’ regional networks, in an email to The Athletic. “Live sports is one of the most coveted properties in all media. The success of the Cubs on NBC Sports Chicago and how we are optimizing their popularity on a daily basis via our linear, digital, and social outlets continues to be a focal point for us.”

    Writing to me a few weeks ago, Bridgen seemed to anticipate the Cubs’ decision. In a league with no salary cap restriction, and the revenue-sharing concept of the luxury tax becoming an increasingly minor financial concern for baseball’s richest teams — any luxury tax concern is easily offset by revenue the network generates — there’s never been more incentive for teams like the Cubs to take the wheel themselves, partner with a media company, and build a network together.

    But there’s also never been more pressure to stick the landing.

    Crane Kenney, the Cubs’ president of business operations, hasn’t commented on the matter recently, though he did speak to reporters about it back in January, saying at the time that “we have a big passion for controlling our own destiny… I’d say [bulls/White Sox chairman] Jerry [Reinsdorf] has been a great and amazing partner, as has Comcast. It’s been a very successful thing. If it made the ultimate sense to stay together, we would. But I’d say at the moment, we’re probably 80 percent inclined to do it on our own.”

    “It’s a great time to be us,” he added.

    While a successful venture is easy to visualize for the Cubs, not every market has the leverage of media markets like Chicago, where cable companies are more likely to pay an RSN’s subscription fee due to demand. Building an RSN is a resource-intensive process — if demand were to plummet, so do subscriptions from cable companies and ad revenue. This is why some teams are content to come to a fixed rights agreement, and then let the network do the hard work.

    Still, building an RSN from the ground up can also represent an irresistible opportunity.

    “The RSN business has been a great business for decades,” Bridgen wrote.

    If building an in-house network is sound philosophy, it does not always work out in execution. In 2003, the Kansas City Royals launched their own RSN, Royals Sports and Television Network (RSTN), with a local cable company called Metro Sports. Distributors balked. Regional cable providers decided the fees weren’t the upside, and satellite companies refused to pick up the station at all. What seemed to be a savvy move in theory turned out to be a bust.

    Riding an improvement in the team’s on-field success in 2007, RSTN was able to broker a deal with Fox to redistribute Royals games on Fox’s network. By the conclusion of the 2007 season, RSTN was closed for good. Now, the Royals’ deal with Fox, who pays the team $20 million a year for broadcast rights, is estimated to be about $30-$50 million less than what they could be getting in a straight fixed rights deal.

    Another element complicating every television contract going forward is the changing dynamic of how people watch the game. Viewing habits have shifted to more on-the-go streaming, and any contract worth its salt must continue to prioritize mobile viewing. Some but not all RSNs currently in place offer the ability to stream games on your phone.

    “Our job right now is to look beyond the way RSNs have traditionally delivered their content to fans and the digital space is key for us on many fronts,” wrote Bridgen. “The delivery of our networks on streaming services, such as YouTube TV, DIRECTV Now, and other virtual or over-the-top operators, has certainly helped combat cord-cutters by offering an alternative viewing option for consumers on a different delivery platform.”

    “I would also add that the introduction of legalized sports wagering will be a significant boost to viewership and fan affinity,” Bridgen added.

    Any good agreement also needs to include flexibility for technology on the verge. By 2020, 5G bandwidth will likely be available nationwide. Augmented reality and virtual reality, too, will likely find firmer footing.

    Gennero, who still actively consults with MLB franchises, believes that new media like VR and AR might level the playing field, as opposed to further distancing the haves from the have-nots.

    “I wonder if it’s a potential neutralizer,” Gennero says. “I wonder if a team like Royals could innovate on how they take the game to the public on their terms. I think you have to put the pedal to the floor on monetizing the digital transmissions of the games and the way that you portray them.”

    And while live attendance is down, league revenues are way, way up, which makes the forthcoming Cubs TV negotiation a fascinating sports business event, one that will likely set the market for years to come.

    A franchise’s valuation doesn’t necessarily have a clean trickle-down to an account like team payroll, but it’s not hard to imagine the teams with their own RSNs more easily justifying payroll tabs in the mid-to-high $200 million range. If you’re a fan rooting for your favorite team’s best interests, the team’s next TV contract needs to be on your radar. Your interest is in whatever deal delivers the highest annual rights fee possible, with a distribution plan that lets you watch the games however you want to watch them.

    Anything else is likely to be an anchor the team will be dragging around for years.

  9. I am in a hurry...milking the rental car game through insurance (see pics above of my now totaled 2014 Sierra) but the gig is about up and I need some normalcy and not bouncing between rental car (when I have my kids) and my ‘89 Chevy single cab (when I don’t).

     

    Think I’ve narrowed it down to a Sierra 1500 SLT or F150 Lariat

    Would be open to buying used but not sure I’m going to find exactly what I want.

     

    When do the rebates really start happening on the 2018s?

    I bought my 2014 right around this exact same time of year 4 years ago as the 2015s were starting to arrive (sept 10 to be exact)...that seemed to be a good time to balance decent selection with decent rebates.

    At this point, I need to buy something within the next 7-10 days so I guess my decision is really down to taking current rebates set to expire on Labor Day or wait and see what comes out the day after? (2014 I recall some sort of new NFL season promotion GMC was doing the week between Labor Day and first NFL Sunday)

     

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