Quincy

How to raise your value in a few easy sentences (along with a lot of time in the gym), blurb from Baseball Musings: ''This winter, I'm really going to work on my physical condition in order to be in the best shape possible for spring training,'' Cabrera told LasMayores.com. ``I've been at it for four weeks now at a gym that specializes in professional athletes, and I'll be there until the spring. ''I'll keep at it in order to get to spring training in the best shape possible, to have the best season possible for the team I end up on,'' he said. He also says he's willing to move to the outfield or first base. I'm guessing he wants out of the Marlins as soon as possible, and is doing everything to raise his value." Full Miami Herald story here. Glad to see he's paying attention to health & nutrition, as he has a chance to be one of the all-time greats.

I used one of the Borders coupon on that - yup, you need to dig in. The extras are very good too, not just junk tossed in, and sometimes kind of weird too. What a show, what a cast.

At least those rumors of that certain somebody-who-shall-go-nameless as the DH probably won't be happening. Whew!

(Can't believe I've been set up to say this!) Thanks Moose & Squirrel! (If only I had a Russian accent.) And right on about harsh penalties for abandonment. It's really sad (understatement) what some people do. Thing is despite knowing about the problems involving cats & wildlife, when I walk through town I do enjoy seeing cats on front porches and those occasions when they decide to be sociable and say hello. Even when you backtrack a little because the cat starts following you. Wild or domestic, we got some animal lovers here.

Unlikely to happen. In my 5 years at the wildlife center I never came across a cat attacked sea gull, and people would bring in gulls, especially in the winter. Unless one was sick & injured and solitary, a cat would go after something else. They're just too big & ornery for most cats. Nesting grounds might be another matter, as cats have been known to cause herons & egrets to abandon rookeries. Grackles nest too high off the ground to be an easy mark for a cat (one reason why there are so many, compared to other species.) The ones in my back yard as a kid were always at least 10 to 12 feet up, and we've all seen cases of cats being good climbers going up, but having trouble coming down. The best chance the cat has to kill them is when they're on the ground after grubs or when a young one has fallen from the nest. Here's a link to a website that has a PDF that gives synopses of various studies involving cats and wildlife. In the first paragraph in blue is a PDF link to a report entitled "Domestic Cat Predation On Birds And Other Wildlife." It's only 3 1/2 pages and a quick read. You could also Google the title & view it as HTML if you don't want the PDF, but the PDF reads better. Are there bias? Sure, as there are from the cat side. But I think as you scan through the short report, you may find there are many problems caused by free ranging cats. And some interesting findings too: 1. That like the "small pox blanket," cats can be a threat to bobcats & cougars because of the spread of diseases like feline leukemia & feline AIDS. 2. One report found that house mice were more plentiful outdoors where cats were allowed to roam, to the detriment of "outdoor" mouse species. Personally I'd love to see a follow up on that study, as that's something I wouldn't have expected, but then again, I don't know much about the lives of mice. If anything interests you there are links to investigate the studies in more detail. Like I said, I love cats. But having spent 5 years doing wildlife rehab and seeing the damage they do, along with seeing species that were relatively common 20-30 years ago fade away, cats left to roam free are part of the problem and one where an individual can make an instant contribution by keeping the cat indoors.

so, do you think it's possible that he's already killed other people's pets that were unfortunate enough to wander onto his property? Probably. And I'm not going to give the Michael Dukakis answer and claim to be okay with it if this guy had shot my cat had it escaped from my house. But are there laws against letting cats run loose in this community? And if not, why not? Again, the ignorance about domestic cats' role in the ecosystem is something so few people get, and is a good reason why all sorts of birds which were quite common during my childhood in the 1970s are less numerous. Many of these species are small insectivores that eat their weight in insects. This guy should have used a paintball gun instead, as that would mark the troublesome cats as well as maybe dissuading them from stalking the plovers.

I'd be surprised if anyone would adopt a feral cat (assuming it's disease free and healthy). They don't make the best pets, as they don't trust humans. And it seems to me the cats have just as much right to exist in the wild as the birds, regardless of their endangered status. Heck down here, I'd prefer the cats go after some of these dang seagulls and grackles. People always want cuddly "everybody lives" answers, but they don't exist easily in this situation. You can either have feral cats and house cats, running around in abnormally high numbers picking off migratory & endangered birds (and mice & other "vermin".) Or people can keep their cats indoors, especially when located near wildlife sanctuaries, and society can try to do a better job of keeping unwanted cats out on the loose. Given the high numbers of unwanted animals, it either means death to the unwanted cats, or places to rehabilitate them. Then you have the matter of trying to find volunteers to staff such operations correctly, along with funds, and the space to ensure that the cats don't spend a lifetime in a 3 x 3 foot cage. Looks like most people here are on the side of extinction of wild birds. That's the way the world's going.

Here in Oregon we have a few sections along the coast where dogs must be kept on a leash, kites can't be flown (because they look like flying predators), and no ATVs can be driven nearby to protect nesting grounds of an endangered bird known as the snowy plover. The B&B cat shooter was protecting a similar species, the endangered piping plover. Ground nesting birds are especially vulnerable to predation. In such areas in Oregon feral cats are trapped & killed. Natural predators such as skunks and foxes are also killed in these (limited) areas by means of poison because they are more common than the plovers. (Use of poison is disturbing, but obviously gun shots during nesting season would scare off the plovers.) Plover parents tend to flee the nest at signs of danger, which is why if you want to protect them you have to use harsh measures. I don't know whether this guy's property is a nesting area or just "hanging around" habitat, though I know November isn't nesting season. It's hard to defend his leaving his property to seek out the cat that he had observed stalking birds earlier, which by the way had been trapped earlier and released after being spayed & neutered by some feline organization. Cat non-profits that sterilize cats & let them lose don't take into account the damage they do wildlife. Catching & then releasing a cat near endangered wildlife especially vulnerable to predators is ridiculous. If the organization that had trapped the cat had tried to put it up for adoption this wouldn't have happened. This guy has endangered ground nesting birds on his own property on an island, where a cat would especially be menace. Normally I wouldn't approve of cat killing, but as he says "This is about wild species disappearing from your planet. I did what I had to do." Ideally he would warn neighbors to keep their cats out of his yard, but you'd have to hit up every residence & apartment/condo complex within at least 1/2 a mile in every direction. Given the cutbacks that have happened under the Bush administration good luck trying to get a working answering machine at Fish & Wildlife, let alone a body that will come out to private property to check out the situation. Who knows how few are scattered about to patrol such a large state. It's not like some fish & wildlife official was going to show up with a tranquilizer gun and sit around all day trying to dope a cat.

Has the winky changed slightly? It looks to me as if its lips got smashed to the side.

Back to Dan's observation, yes, there are weird birders. But I think like any hobby you'll have obsessive types who engage in odd behavior. Not unlike the baseball fan who cares about VORP, or a jazz collector who cares whether it was Workman or Watkins on bass and whether the session was August 5th or the 7th (uh, I made that part up, so no one go looking.) As Dan used to go to school in the St. Louis area you'll get a kick out of genuinely obsessive behavior of watchers who maintain lists. There's a bird called the Eurasian Tree Sparrow (Passer montanus) which is practically identical to the common House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) Like the House Sparrow it was introduced, after the Civil War in the Eurasean's case. The House Sparrow is about a centimeter longer and the Eurasian Tree Sparrow has a black spot near the eye & a brown crown. In flight it'd be hard to catch the difference. In the US the Eurasian Tree Sparrow is found in part of St. Louis and into a bit of southern Illinois, but it's not a wide range. So the extreme obsessive birder will try to see one in-between flights when passing through St. Louis. Thanks to the internet, it's much easier. Weird you say? Psaw!

Oh yeah, observing birds in nature, admiring the beauty, learning about their behavior...Yeah, that's really weird.

if cats would have to live on birds, there would not be so many cats Again this is true, but it is still a natural instinct of a cat to kill a bird. But there is nothing natural about the density of domestic (or feral) cats and the toll they take on bird populations. Bobcats & cougars and never had such numbers, and North America never had such a small and efficient killer of birds until domestic kitties started running loose. And what's especially deadly is that if the cat punctures a bird with its teeth and the bird gets away, the bird will likely die anyway because of the bacteria in the cat's saliva. For the record I did wildlife rehab for 5 years, and cat related injuries were the number 1 cause of injury to birds. Small migratory birds like warblers have a hard enough time with pollution, pesticides, loss of habitat in summer & winter grounds, and as more people build houses in the forests, or when wetland restoration happens within a mile a huge subdivision (and more cats) and counts as habitat replacement, it gets that much tougher. You think the feds have time for this? Good luck. Anytime you have a situation like this you have to figure out which agency is involved. State, federal, local, which branch of the federal, so on & so forth. Ideally you set a trap for the cat, but then what happens? I'm a cat owner and love my cat dearly, but I keep her indoors, and a good part of the reason is so she doesn't kill birds. Too bad the feral cats can't be trained to take out invasive starlings.

Got him on 2 of my fantasy teams. There are some crazy highlights of him on Youtube for those who haven't seen him in action. He's been putting up some crazy points & boards (and sometimes block) numbers this year. Oops, I used crazy twice.

I had a giggle when (even after hitting Cancel) it did it's fake scan, listing all sorts of Windows files. I'm using a MacBook. This blog link includes a short Youtube video where the author explains the tricky behavior of the redirect ads.

Oh I don't know. They were so close - I mean even their WHIPs were the same. ERA close, Ws close. So as you say, the difference was Sabathia took the ball more. He averaged 1/3 of an inning more a start, along with the superior K/W. So there ya go. A little bit better gets you the award. Regarding 119-86, that's because of the 5-3-1 scoring. It would have been 73-56 if you used a 3-2-1 system. What I want to know is who left Sabathia off of the ballot?

With the price of oil continuing to climb, you can expect either the quality of vinyl to decline (try on some OPEC "oil crisis" mid-1970s MCAs for size as an example), or the price of LPs will climb so high that this fad will die another death. I say "fad," even though I hold on to & play from a collection of hundreds of albums.

Here's a screen capture of the '73 Winterland box set. Not released...though someday we hope!

But it's a lovely thought. I think the concept, or perhaps lack of a hard one, makes this new Road Trip series promising. Being able to pick over a month or 2 from the later years could produce some heavy material. Or at least heavier. And yet they're not ruling out complete shows either. Or box sets. That'll keep us guessing! I noticed that it seems like whenever I order something from the Dead store there's always a Monday postal holiday between it shipping & me receiving it.

Joe Morgan would, because the guy with 18 wins is a "winner."

I third it. And I also was unaware about the Peterson, so thanks. Though I have too much on my plate to order it anytime soon, it's good to know these things.

That's been my pick for where he goes ever since last summer's compliment exchange festival they had with each other. I also think that just like the last contract, only even more so this time, the dollar amount will be overstated with low interest paid on deferred money. As most people don't understand the time value of money ARod & agent will get the massive ego-stroke of big money amounts, never mind that the 1/2 the payday will be post-2020 at 2.5% interest or whatever. (Not to say the money won't be great, it just isn't as big as stated when structured like that.)

Some good stuff on Baseballl Musings. 6 man rotation being considered in Boston. Interesting idea given the mix of young pitchers whose innings could be limited along with the old man. Yankee speculation about Miguel. Boston ideas about Miguel (the author would trade Ellsbury and Lester for him.) The Yankees are going to offer ARod arbitration. Very savvy. If they don't resign him the get draft picks, if they do then they get ARod.

Well Lester did have great stuff in AA before the chemo. And as an M's fan who could never figure out why management didn't chalk up Guillen's underperformance to the fact he had fookin' TB I can appreciate how it'd take some time to recover (never mind he's young.) But c'mon, you can love Buchholz's stuff, but who gives a crap about a no-hitter. Francisco Cordova, Bud Smith, Anibal Sanchez & Jose Jimenez all threw no-hitters too. Hell, I threw one when I was 12. Big deal. If only I was a lefty, I could buy & sell all you chumps. (Wink!) I'm with Bear (can I call you Bear? ), I think you Red Sox fans expect to get something big for something less, and it's not gonna happen. (Pardon the tone, I've been drinking trying to kill off flu-like cooties.)

Wow, and he even played 1st base! (Still can't shake the year Palmiero got one and he played something like 13 games.) Maybe there's hope for the Gold Gloves after all. (I say this having not checked out who else won.) I know Lester is a lefty, so that has the potential to get other GMs excited, but honestly I'm not sure he's all that attractive. His K/BB ratio is very mediocre, as is his WHIP. He was good enough in Game 4 though, so maybe that adds value. But were it not for the "human interest story" I'm not sure people would even know about him, given his record so far. He is young though, so there's still plenty of time to turn it around. Miguel is scary good. #1 comp thru his age is Hank Aaron, and at 950 it's a very close match. Of course those projections don't always pan out (hello Juan Gonzalez), and flabbiness could easily lead to knee & back problems down the line. But being so young he can probably get away with being out of shape for the next few years. I would hope for the Marlins' sake they don't take a grab bag of lower level prospects for him and instead demand some quality players for him. Put that guy in a more hitter friendly park and he could really start doing some damage. Congrats on resigning Schilling too. I think it's important to keep the folk hero from '04 around as he likely will be more than merely useful, and it's worth a shot for both parties to see if he can still do it. Besides, it spares us of who knows what kind of weird conflicts he would have gotten in with LaRussa. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to exercise. Would you believe I got myself a 2 million weight clause too? Okay I lied, I'm on the drop 12 & give yourself a Mosaic plan.

Hmmm....I missed that one, though there was an April Fool's posting about Europe '72 one year. I put in an order (as did others here) on a "hidden" webpage for a November 9 thru 11, 1973 box. A few days later I got a polite email saying they didn't have such a thing ready. To quote "Magic Bus," I want it I want it! I have all of those shows on disc, but there are cuts in cruel places on 11/9 & 11/10. And 11/11 could use cleaning up & the HDCD treatment. So I'm hoping that's what they were hinting at, though obviously I'll take a big box of '72 too! (Especially if there are cleaner copies of the fall Texas run.)