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[Nabubrush]

Quoted for truth. Man, Posh and Becks...well, they kinda irritate me. Especially their matching haircuts and Posh's fake tits. 

It's so hard to believe they aren't originally from LA.

[Golfhaus]

It's so hard to believe they aren't originally from LA.

Was Tom Cruise successful in converting them to Scientology?

[Drygioni]

Was Tom Cruise successful in converting them to Scientology?

I hope so. Beckham will be a fuck*ng monster on the pitch once he's unlocked his innate psychic abilities.

Melack: Best way to get in is to watch as many games as possible, and pick the team who are most interesting/have the sexiest players. Read up a bit on them (Wikipedia?) and once you have the nasty twinge in your stomach as a result of your team losing, you're hooked.

Good news: Liverpool had a comfortable away victory at Sunderland today! With another win we will be equal on points with Chelski, and we have a game in hand against them.

[Nabubrush]

Once you have the nasty twinge in your stomach as a result of your team losing, you're hooked.

That's a pretty succinct definition there. Unfortunately, I can't put up with even more of this happening (see San Diego Chargers: 70-77, 82-91, 96-03 or Detroit Red Wings: 56-96 for Chrissakes), so I'm going to have to leave footer on the shelf. If it wasn't for Detroit's Stanley Cups, that San Diego thing would really be causing me a problem.

[Carlos del Vaca]

DC U-Ni-Ted!  (thump thump, thump thump thump thump)

La Barra Brava, La Barra Bruta,
El que no salta es hijo de puta!

Sadly, my MLS fandom has gone markedly downhill since we got a major league baseball team.

[Nabubrush]

DC U-Ni-Ted!  (thump thump, thump thump thump thump)

La Barra Brava, La Barra Bruta,
El que no salta es hijo de puta!

You kiss your Mom with that mouth?

[Carlos del Vaca]

Si, chingaso!

[Drygioni]

Anyone been watching Liverpool? Fuck me but we look good this year. Rotation actually looks a hugely viable option this year without dropping any points because of it.

Carlos: How do you 'get' a Major League baseball team?

[CortJstr]

Carlos: How do you 'get' a Major League baseball team?

A team moved to the area about two years ago, so now there's a hometown team for him to root for.

[KeithHernandez]

I don't have a tv.  I watch random games that come on a sports channel between 3-5 am at a friends.  They only play the good matchups of the week, so I have only seen Liverpool-Chelsea.

[Carlos del Vaca]

A team moved to the area about two years ago, so now there's a hometown team for him to root for.

Precisely.  You have a players' strike in 1994 that ruins the best season ever for the Montreal Expos, you have them play in a shitty stadium that everyone in Montreal hates, and you give Montreal's electorate the good sense to refuse to put tons of public money into a new stadium.  Throw in some DC politicians willing to jury-rig $600 million in stadium funding, and before you know it, you've got the worst team in the NL East three years running right in your back yard.

[Drygioni]

The transfer season is over. Which leads me to a question:

Liverpool's main acquisition, explosive striker Fernando Torres, cost around £22,000,000 to buy off Atletico Madrid. That is a lot of money. How does it compare to the prices paid for players (of any sport) in the USA?

[Nabubrush]

The transfer season is over. Which leads me to a question:

Liverpool's main acquisition, explosive striker Fernando Torres, cost around £22,000,000 to buy off Atletico Madrid. That is a lot of money. How does it compare to the prices paid for players (of any sport) in the USA?

My understanding is that it doesn't work precisely the same way. It actually works differently in different sports. In the NBA (and I'm not an expert) they often make trades for contracts - i.e. to trade the impact of the contract to another team. In the NFL, big blockbuster trades will probably be for impact players or draft picks (the Herschel Walker trade is a great example of this - the impact was probably more than the amount you reference above, but note that a trade like this is virtually impossible now). Usually no money goes directly to the teams. There are plenty of jokey trades in triple-A ball like trading a guy for several cases of beer or what-have-you.

[melack]

The closest thing we have to that is the posting system in American and Japanese baseball. When a Japanese player wants to play in the States but is still under contract, he asks to be "posted" by his team. That's just a way of saying, "Hey, this guy's on the market. Who wants him?"  When that happens, each MLB team submits a confidential bid to the player's Japanese club for exclusive negotiating rights. The team that bids the most then "wins" the right to pay all that money to the Japanese club and then negotiate a contract on top of that.

The most famous example is from this past season when the Red Sox bid 52 million to the Seibu Lions so that they could give a 60-something million dollar contract to Daisuke Matsuzaka. That's definitely the largest amount of money exchanged since the process when into effect. This posting fee is obviously a few million pounds more that the payment for Torres (£22 compared to roughly £26, or has the dollar sunk even further since I was  in London?), but I would imagine that there are plenty of players brought in from other teams that cost more than Torres, right?

As far as the NBA goes, the only time you'll see a trade for money is when a good player is traded for a decent-to-bad player with a huge but expiring contract. In this sense, a team is trading talent for impending salary cap space, which they can use to spend more freely.

In football... well, football teams almost never make trades. It's really not even worth talking about. They might trade draft picks once in a while, but money usually isn't the motivating factor there.

[theinevitable]

Precisely.  You have a players' strike in 1994 that ruins the best season ever for the Montreal Expos, you have them play in a shitty stadium that everyone in Montreal hates, and you give Montreal's electorate the good sense to refuse to put tons of public money into a new stadium.  Throw in some DC politicians willing to jury-rig $600 million in stadium funding, and before you know it, you've got the worst team in the NL East three years running right in your back yard.

imagine this, except for the stadium being pretty new and still awesome but somehow Not Good Enough, and you have the Hornets leaving Charlotte for New Orleans.

The BOBcats? WTF!?