Just North of Wrigley Field

posted by James - 11:54 PM

David, David, David... how dare you? You keep telling all of my greatest hits like that and pretty soon (maybe already) there won't be any left for me. (I still have that application, by the way. After moving three times over the last year, I have no idea where it is now, but I know I have it.)

Good thing we have David around here to show us that it is possible to have a discussion about baseball while having some wrestling in there somewhere, because lately that's all Skippy and I have contributed, besides some crappy basketball teams and the most disappointing future hall-of-famer in sports history.

I don't often give many shoutouts, but I feel compelled on this night.

Courtesy of Edgar is God:

"Even Japanese managers don’t take the righty-lefty switch this serious. Shouldn’t the best hitters be in the heart of order regardless of which hand they hold their chopsticks with???"

Not only has his site given me the two best phrases I can think of to continually have on my site in the links section (the other being Fire Bavasi), but he gives me hope that people will stop despairing over the Cubs right-handed dominated lineup.

I'm not going to go over their statistics tonight, but the middle of the Cubs' lineup (mainly Sosa, Lee and Patterson) still mashes right-handed pitchers. Not as effectively as they'll do a number on left-handed pitchers, but I don't expect a problem except against the toughest righties (i.e. Oswalt, Morris, Schmidt, Millwood, etc.).

And Edgar is God is also a great resource for anyone who wants to understand more about the media coverage of Japanese players in MLB, and I'll be checking in frequently throughout the season.

And because with all the wrestling coverage over the last three days on this site, I'm going to send out a warning (an anti-shoutout, if you will).

I have a couple links to my favorite providers of wrestling news on this site. Unfortunately, they all heavily rely on popups to generate revenue. These popups are usually benign, but lately my computer has fallen under non-intentional, malicious attack from these popups on two occasions to where I am now no longer visiting these sites.

The most virulent forms of these popups come in the guise of a security warning. Again, most are easily disabled without incident, but some don't actually give you a choice... clicking cancel or any action to close the window results in several pervasive programs infiltrating your computer without your consent. Suddenly, your IE home page changes to a casino, your browser is running an extra module or five and there are ads for AOL Top Speed all over your desktop.

Even worse, they load directly into your system processes and self-replicate. That is the first place you should check if you fear any suspect action. Make sure there aren't any rogue programs running on your computer or set to run on startup. Also check your add/remove programs to see if any programs you didn't authorize show up and run a program called Ad-Aware to get rid of them (whatever you do, don't try to uninstall them yourself. There are so many files that your computer could become unstable if you don't get them all. Ad-Aware does this for you).

I'm not saying don't patronize these sites. I wouldn't continue to link to them if I didn't believe in their content, but just be careful out there no matter what sites you're on.