"Your vote doesn't start or end WARS."

I prefer the Star Spangled Banner because it's so unique. The moment may be a historical footnote today, but the emotion that it inspired from Francis Scott Key was wonderful and gives it real meaning. America the Beautiful is a fine song, but it would be such a generic national anthem. I find national anthems that…

I'm from Mass and I know the locations of about 5 Papa Gino's within about 15 minutes of me, but I don't know the location of a single Dominos. That may speak more to a discrepancy in quality, though, rather than their relative ubiquity.

As a lifelong hockey fan, I also enjoyed it. It's one thing for two players to start angrily punching each other in the spur of the moment, but staged fights and wasted roster spots on enforcers are just asinine. And I wouldn't buy the increased television ratings argument for a second.

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Yes. Yes. Absolutely yes.

Pedmans

♫ Jadeveon's pappy woke him up one midnight

This may have been a strike, but if Carlos keeps throwing 57 mph pitches he'll be pitching in a new town very soon.

Aw shucks. Perhaps when my jokes become more consistent.

I agree that there is no good formula for figuring this out, which is why this is all just speculation. As for your point about counting Rose's triple A stats, I did not mean to suggest that counting AAA would be valid. My point was that the NPB is better than a AAA league but likely worse than MLB, so an argument can…

I intentionally oversimplified because the whole point of this discussion is whether or not Ichiro could have come close to reaching Rose's hit record if he had played nearly his entire career in MLB, not who was the better player. I acknowledge that Ichiro has a lower OPS and slugging in MLB, but that's beside the…

See my other reply above as well, but the difference between AAA, the Japanese league (AAAA?) and MLB is not likely to account for a large statistical difference for a player of Ichiro's caliber. If, for some reason, Ichiro had spent his entire career in AAA, he may have hit over .400 a few times, but he would not…

That's exactly the point. Ichiro transitioned from the Japanese Leagues (often considered a sort of AAAA) to MLB with only a tiny drop in his hits per game. This suggests one of two things: either the NPB is better than it's usually considered or Ichiro is a special player who was already MLB ready early in his…

If Rose's argument were true, it would require that Ichiro's statistics in the Nippon League and MLB show significant differences. He did have a major drop in his power numbers after his arrival in the U.S., but Ichiro put up only slightly lower batting averages with the Mariners. The Japanese leagues also play about…