Brad

A little peculiar but I guess the gekko is letting his hair down.

I agree with all the sentiments here and, like Allen, my son suffers from ADD and processing issues, and all the other emotional complications that brings on. It's not always easy being a parent.

I ordered the Handy today (having nothing by him) and just got notification that it shipped today also.

They were mentioning on WFAN in NYC last night that CC might be heading for the Angels and that Pettite has contacted Torre about pitching for the Dodgers.

The following was in today's NY Times Business section. ***** A British Lesson on Auto Bailouts By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ Published: November 17, 2008 PARIS — A faltering auto giant whose brands are synonymous with the open road. Hundreds of thousands of unionized workers with powerful political backers. An urgent plea for the government to write a virtual blank check. This is not the story of Ford and General Motors, but British Leyland, a car company that went through £11 billion of inflation-adjusted British taxpayer money, or $16.5 billion, in the ’70s and ’80s before going out of business. All that is left of the company now are memories of cars like the Triumph, and a painful lesson in the limited effectiveness of bailouts. “It’s all too evocative,” said Leon Brittan, a top official in the government of Margaret Thatcher, the free-market-minded prime minister who nevertheless backed the rescue. “I’m not telling the U.S. what to do, but the lessons of the British experience is don’t throw good money after bad. British Leyland carried on for a few more years, but they’re not there now, are they?” Other experts are sounding the same alarm. “The British Leyland experience is a relevant and cautionary one,” said John Casesa, a principal in the automotive consulting firm Casesa Shapiro Group in New York. “The government got in the business of trying to make a winner out of a structurally flawed company. That’s the risk in the U.S. as well.” Though Continental automakers have fared better than British ones, Mr. Casesa argues that the long history of government support in Europe made companies like Renault and Fiat strong players in their home markets, but not worldwide. “With the exception of BMW and Mercedes, European automakers haven’t been globally successful,” he said. “Nor have they been hugely profitable.” That comparative history is receiving new attention as Congress turns its attention this week to the fate of Detroit. The British Leyland bailout remains the classic example of a futile government intervention. The tight cooperation between governments and automakers on the Continent has produced happier results. For half a century after World War II, the French government was the majority stakeholder in Renault, and Paris still holds a 15 percent stake in the company. In the 1980s, the company received a bailout equal to nearly 4 billion euros, or $5.1 billion in today’s money. Now it is highly profitable — at least compared with its American counterparts. Today, G.M.’s German subsidiary, Opel, is appealing to Berlin for help, seeking more than 1 billion euros in credit guarantees, according to Carl-Peter Forster, G.M.’s European chief. Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said her government would make a decision before Christmas. “It’s not decided yet whether these loan guarantees will become necessary,” Mrs. Merkel told reporters in Berlin after meeting with Mr. Forster and other management and labor officials. “If these guarantees become necessary, those funds should remain within Opel” in Germany, she added, echoing a concern some Americans have expressed that any United States bailout money go only to American automakers. So far, Asian companies have not complained that such a bailout would amount to an anticompetitive subsidy. But José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said last week that he thought an aid package for Detroit could be “illegal” under World Trade Organization rules. That has not stopped European automakers from seeking 40 billion euros in loans from the European Investment Bank, ostensibly to help develop cleaner cars. For Garel Rhys, head of the Center for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff University in Wales, the trajectory of General Motors is reminiscent of British Leyland not only because of the former’s decision to seek aid to avert bankruptcy, but also for its slow, seemingly inexorable loss of market share. “Both had a history of being the biggest in their market but couldn’t adapt as they lost sales,” he said. “They couldn’t get customers back.” Historically, British Leyland’s roots stretched back further than Henry Ford’s Model T. The company controlled 36 percent of the British market well into the 1970s, with mass-market brands like Austin and Morris and premium lines like MG and Jaguar. But rising competition from Japanese and German automakers, shoddy workmanship and a breakdown in labor relations brought the company to near bankruptcy by 1975, Mr. Rhys said. Michael Edwardes, who took over as British Leyland’s chief executive in November 1977, recalled that when he joined, no one even knew whether individual brands were profitable. “It was a farce — no one knew what the costs were,” he said. As it turned out, every MG the company sold in the United States resulted in a loss of $2,000 for British Leyland. Wildcat strikes consumed more than 32 million worker-hours in 1977, and the company became a symbol of labor strife, with some employees walking out the door with spark plugs in their coat pockets and engines in the trunks of their cars, Mr. Edwardes said. Mr. Edwardes immediately began reducing the company’s work force of roughly 200,000 — to 104,000 within five years — and closing 19 factories. He appealed to the Thatcher government for aid, arguing the money was needed if British Leyland was going to be able to afford to lay off workers while investing in new models. Eventually, the government put up £3.6 billion, equal to £11 billion in today’s money. But the rescue did not do much to preserve British Leyland’s labor force or market share in the long term. By the time it received its last government infusion of cash in 1988, Mr. Rhys said, British Leyland’s market share had slumped to 15 percent. British Leyland evolved into MG Rover, which was eventually acquired by BMW, then spun off, finally going bankrupt in 2005. According to Mr. Rhys, just 22,000 workers remain at British Leyland’s successor companies, about 10 percent of its work force in the mid-1970s. “It was a very poor return,” he said. “We felt collectively and nationally that we got our fingers burnt, and this was always used as a reason to avoid bailouts, both by Labor and Conservative governments in Britain.” Mr. Edwardes still defends the government aid, arguing it preserved parts of the company that remain in business now — like Jaguar and Land Rover, which were bought by Ford. Jaguar never made a profit for Ford, however, and was sold with Land Rover to Tata Motors of India earlier this year. Ford recouped only about half of what it paid to acquire the two brands, and is estimated to have poured $10 billion into Jaguar. Despite the British experience, the case of Renault, which combined fresh money and new management in the 1980s, showed that government bailouts can be beneficial. The French government help for Renault also came amid increasing losses for the company. But Mr. Rhys said that unlike British Leyland, Renault was able to use the financing to create new car models that were ultimately successful. That, along with tough cost-cutting by a newly installed chairman, cleared the road to profitability by the time the government began privatizing Renault in the 1990s. If Washington does go ahead and help Detroit, Mr. Edwardes said, it is crucial that the government overhaul the management of the Big Three. “Throwing money at them isn’t enough,” he said. “They need money and they need new management. They need both, not one or the other.” ***** I'm tired of throwing good money after bad. It won't fix their problem; they need to be restructured. When will it stop?

I listened recently to NRFS (after having not listened to in at least a year) and enjoyed it. Too much of a good thing can be too much and BNs are no exception.

I hope that's a typo.

That was a hell of a defense put up by Baltimore yesterday

I was listening to WFAN today and it was mentioned in passing that Angels had offered Teixera $20 million per.

That's a pretty good argument. I would probably have given Charlie Manuel my vote although I think Garcia would have been a choice too.

He was a great one indeed. In today's Times for those who may not have known of him: **** Preacher Roe, the folksy left-hander from the Ozarks who became a star pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, featuring superb control and a spitball he belatedly confessed to throwing, died Sunday in West Plains, Mo. He was 92. The cause was complications of colon cancer, his son Thomas said. In the late 1940s and early 50s, when the Dodgers teams that became known as the Boys of Summer largely dominated the National League, Roe emerged as one of baseball’s leading pitchers. Roe led the league in winning percentage in 1949, when he was 15-6 for a mark of .714, and in 1951, when he was 22-3 for .880. He won 44 games and lost only 8 between 1951 and 1953. He pitched for three Dodger pennant winners and was an All-Star every season from 1949 to 1952. “The Preach was a master of his craft,” Carl Erskine, who teamed with Roe and Don Newcombe as the top starting pitchers for the Dodgers in the decade after World War II, once told the columnist Arthur Daley of The New York Times. “He was a smart control pitcher with a phenomenal sense of timing.” “I try to keep the hitters off balance, never giving them a decent pitch,” Roe said. “I’m always aiming for the corners, never throwing the same pitch twice or what the hitter is expecting.” It was in the summer of 1955, a year after he retired, that Roe admitted to throwing spitters, describing his technique in an article in Sports Illustrated, “The Outlawed Spitball Was My Money Pitch.” Roe told of wiping his left hand across his brow and spitting on his thumb with juice from his bubble gum, using the base of his hand as a shield. While ostensibly hitching his belt, he then transferred moisture to his index and middle fingers, gripped the baseball on a smooth spot and threw with a fastball motion, getting a sharp downward break. Roe received $2,000 for the article, but said he did not do it for the money. He maintained that he hoped to see the spitter legalized and wanted to relate how it was not necessarily a dangerous, hard-to-control delivery. “It never bothered me none throwing a spitter,” he said. “If no one is going to help the pitcher in this game, he’s got to help himself.” Elwin Charles Roe was born on Feb. 26, 1916, in Ash Flat, Ark., and grew up in Viola, Ark., population 160. As Roe told it to Cynthia J. Wilber in “The Love of the Game” (Morrow, 1992), he gained his nickname at age 3. When an uncle who had never seen the boy before asked him his name, he replied “preacher” because he was fond of a Methodist minister and his wife who took him on horse-and-buggy rides. Roe’s spindly 6-foot-2, 170-pound frame, his sharp facial features and his penchant for telling stories in backcountry tones suggested he was something of a hillbilly. But he was a college man — having graduated from Harding College in Searcy, Ark. Roe was signed by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1938. He pitched in only one game that season, then spent five years in the minors before being traded to the Pirates. Relying on his fastball, he won 13 games for Pittsburgh in 1944 and 14 in 1945 with a league-leading 148 strikeouts. But after the ’45 season, Roe sustained a fractured skull in a fight with a referee while coaching high school basketball. After Roe had a 4-15 record in 1947, Branch Rickey, the Dodgers’ general manager, who had run the Cardinals when Roe pitched for them, got him back in one of his shrewdest trades. Roe came from the Pirates with Billy Cox, a brilliant-fielding third baseman, for outfielder Dixie Walker, who was near the end of his career, and pitchers Hal Gregg and Vic Lombardi. Healthy once more, and mastering the craft of pitching — and the spitter — Roe had six straight winning seasons with the Dodgers, including a 19-11 mark in 1950 and his 22-3 record in 1951. He beat the Yankees and Vic Raschi, 1-0, in Game 2 of 1949 World Series and beat the Yanks and Ed Lopat with a complete game in Game 3 of the 1952 Series, but lost to the Yankees and Lopat in the 1953 Series. Each time, the Dodgers lost the Series. After going 3-4 for the Dodgers in 1954, Roe was sent to the Baltimore Orioles together with Cox. But he retired instead, having compiled a record of 127-84 over 12 seasons. After leaving baseball, he operated a grocery store in West Plains with his wife, Mozee, who died in 2002. In addition to his son Thomas, of West Plains, he is survived by his son Elwin Jr., of Pineville, Mo., 8 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. Although Roe achieved notice for a spitball, he had a variation that was perfectly legal — his fake spitball. One time, pitching against the Boston Braves’ Jim Russell, Roe went to his cap repeatedly. Each time Roe did that, Russell stepped out of the batter’s box. After this went on three or four times, Roe threw the ball. As he recalled it to Roger Kahn in “The Boys of Summer” (Harper & Row, 1971): “He’s waiting for that good hard drop. I touch the visor and throw a big slow curve. He was so wound up he couldn’t swing. But he spit at the ball as it went by.”

Yesterday's loss couldn't have happened to a nicer team Say goodbye to the playoffs this year Cowboys fans.

I'm wondering if we should have a Hot Stove League thread for the Red Sox and one for all other teams so we can get some words in edgewise

Someone mentioned to me that Rollins had something to say about the Mets in his speech so I found a You Tube clip where he says a couple of things (nothing big) and frankly they're entitled to it because they are World Champions and they've beaten them in the NL East, etc. ad infinitum and so forth but I'm wondering why even bother. You're the World Series Champs, why even mention it. If the Mets ever get where the Phillies are now (which may take awhile considering the solid team the Phillies have now), I'm sure that's the last thing that will be on the minds of the Mets players.

I'm also happy for Charlie Manuel! http://www.philly.com/dailynews/sports/200...last_laugh.html There was a nice article about him in today's NYT.

The battle for Texeira will probably be a three team race and I just can't see the Angels letting him go (unless they have a replacement waiting) because they gave up a decent first baseman. I can't see CC going anywhere but to the Yankees although I do hope the Sox make them up the ante big time. My team (Mets) has a lot of work to do; good luck on fixing that pile of shit known as the bullpen. I might keep one or two of them but get rid of the rest. It will be a work in progress.

You have no disagreement from me (or probably anyone else) about Maddon being manager of the year. However, I'm not sure Manuel will win it as they were expected to compete, if not repeat, and you have to give some consideration to the Marlins manager. I don't think anyone thought they would be that good.

My son likes Devil Driver. Maybe Hank came back as a metal head. :rsmile:

The Phillies were clearly the better team and appear (I hate to say it) well poised for next year, with perhaps only modest changes, other than the Burrell situation. However, what the f was Maddon thinking, not bringing in Price in the sixth or the seventh innings. If he's worried about having Price hit or having to hit for Price, give me a break. Those were just bonehead moves and may have cost them this game.

That's a hell of a letter. At least, he's perfectly candid.

I haven't stayed on top of this story but I thought he was going to split his time with Milan and the Galaxy.

Chris, It's a cool thread. I'll bet even Schapp would like it.

I'm sorry but these aren't compelling games, whether or not I'm a Mets fan. As a Phillies fan, I would expect you to be excited, since you make it to the World Series every fifteen years or so. However, from a purely baseball point of view, what has been exciting about this World Series, except maybe the ending of game 3. Games 1 and 2 were well played but not really exciting. Ditto for last night's game. In the Divisional Series and the Championship Series, the only thing to write home about was that game in LA where the Phillies hit a couple of homers to come from behind and game 5 of the ALCS (maybe game 6). Other than, pfft.

I'm sorry but this just ain't a scintillating series so far, nothing to grab you by the scuff of the neck. In fact, the whole postseason, except for game 5 of the ALCS, has been rather dreary. Games have not been barn burners. The hitters need to break out big time.

Good news. Would one year be a possibility?