The last two offseasons have not been kind to Mike Moustakas.

After hitting a Royals franchise record 38 home runs in 2017, Moustakas went into free agency hoping to score a long-term deal. Months went by without a new contract. He was forced to settle in early March, taking a one-year, $6.5 million deal to return to Kansas City.

The Royals traded Moustakas to the Brewers midway through the 2018 season, ending his 12-year tenure with the organization. (Moustakas had been the Royals’ first round pick in 2007.) While he played well, his offensive production took a dip from the year prior. This was particularly true in the power department: Moustakas’ ISO fell from .249 to .208. He posted a 105 wRC+ and 2.4 WAR overall.

Due to improved defense, Moustakas was actually more valuable in 2018 than he was in 2017, but he faced similar issues in his attempt to procure a new contract. Again, Moustakas was forced to wait until late in the game to sign. A February 19 contract with the Brewers — a one-year, $10 million pact with a $7 million mutual option — to be the starting second baseman was the offer he ultimately accepted.

But now, after his second chilly free agency winter, Moustakas has stepped up his game, reaching a new level of offensive performance that we have not previously witnessed.

His numbers are better across the board. He’s already hit 22 home runs, just six shy of his 2018 season total. His 47-home run pace (per 650 PA) would result in a career-high. But in a larger sense, Moustakas has done more than just crank homers. He is getting on base at a higher rate and collecting more hits, many of which have been of the extra-base variety. His .390 wOBA would be a career-high, as would be his 140 wRC+. Moustakas has already produced 2.7 WAR, his highest total in four years and already the third-highest mark of his career. All of which is to say that Mike Moustakas has experienced an offensive surge, and I’m here to tell you why. Read the rest of this entry »

At first glance, any plan for the Rays to split their home games between the Tampa Bay area and Montreal — the exploration of which was reported last week by ESPN’s Jeff Passan — seems like a cockamamie idea. At second and third glances, too, not only because of the numerous legal and logistical hurdles involved, and the specifics of how those will be overcome so lacking, but because the underlying premise is so flawed.

That aspect was underscored on Tuesday, when Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg and team presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman held a press conference in St. Petersburg to discuss the plan. Let’s cut to the chase:

Anyone who has followed the past quarter-century or so of Major League Baseball ought to be able to see the problem instantly. A franchise that has otherwise proven itself to be highly resourceful and competitive over the past 12 seasons has nonetheless been unable to convince area taxpayers and public officials to fund a new ballpark to replace Tropicana Field, where their lease expires following the 2027 season. Said franchise now hopes not only to build a new ballpark in that region, but also one in Montreal, a city the Expos and MLB abandoned in 2004 after a similar failure. You don’t need an Excel spreadsheet to do the math: convincing two cities to build ballparks for roughly half a season of usage per year is in no way going to be easier than convincing one city to build a ballpark for a full season of use, particularly given that in both cases the public will be expected to bear the lion’s share of the cost while the team profits.

Likewise, convincing two fan bases who have historically shown themselves to be particularly resistant to attending games to make a similar investment while confronting the reality of what amounts to a half-season road trip seems farfetched, to say the least. Let us consider the attendance histories of both cities:

The Expos spent their first eight seasons (1969-76) in Jarry Park before moving to Stade Olympique (1977-2004). Aside from 1970, their second season of existence, all of the seasons when they ranked among the NL’s upper half in attendance occurred during the 1977-83 span, when Stade Olympique was new. It helped that their lineup featured three future Hall of Famers (Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, and Tim Raines) for most of that period, but even so, they never ranked higher than third in the league in attendance, and made the postseason only in 1981.* From 1986 onward, only once did they rank higher than 10th (ninth out of 12 teams in 1987), and in their final seven seasons, they were dead last out of 16 teams, cracking one million fans just once.

*One aspect I neglected to note when I first published this was the fact that the team was robbed of a potential postseason berth — and with it, the long-term impact upon attendance and revenue — in 1994, when they had the majors’ best record (74-40) before the strike it. The powerhouse squad was dismantled before play resumed in 1995; attendance dropped by 26% that year, and for the remainder of the Expos’ tenure, only once did they even average half as many fans per game as in 1994.

In their final two seasons, they played a total of 43 games at Estadio Hiram Bithorn in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Despite the park seating just 18,000, they averaged more fans there (14,222 in 2003, 10,334 in ’04), than at Stade Olympique, which in its post-1992 configuration could seat 45,757 (12,081 in 2003, 8,876 in ’04). As Jonah Keri — a Montreal native who coincidentally wrote a book about the Rays — recently wrote of the two-city arrangement, which would seem to be relevant here: “[I]t was still a split-the-baby approach that ultimately left no one happy, and did nothing to help the health of the team in its original city.”

While much of the blame for the latter-day Expos’ attendance woes falls upon owner Jeffrey Loria (who bought the team in 1999) and MLB (which assumed control of the franchise in 2002 while allowing Loria to purchase the Marlins), the underlying reality is that the team could not secure public funding for a new ballpark. Ultimately, the franchise moved to Washington, D.C. following the 2004 season and became the Nationals.

The Rays are now in their 22nd season at Tropicana Field, where only twice have they ranked higher than 10th in the AL in attendance. They ranked seventh out of 14 teams in 1998, their inaugural season, and ninth out of 14 in 2010. They have ranked last or second-to-last in every season since, and, despite winning 90 games last year and being on pace to improve upon that record this year, are currently on their way to their fifth straight season of ranking last among the AL’s 15 teams. The ballpark’s location in downtown St. Petersburg is a major problem, as it’s far from the area’s corporate base and wealthiest suburbs, with significant traffic congestion problems and a lack of sufficient mass transit service. As Keri noted, “Fewer people live within a 30-minute drive of Tropicana Field than any other stadium.”

The Rays have spent more than a decade trying to get another ballpark built in the Tampa-St. Petersburg vicinity, but have been unable to get a plan off the ground. They can’t escape their lease, which has commonly been described as iron-clad. Earlier this week, colleague Sheryl Ring delved into their use agreement’s “exclusive dealings” clause, which forbids the team from even negotiating to play elsewhere. She also noted a similarly restrictive memorandum of understanding that allowed the team only to seek new stadium sites in the two Florida counties that encompass the Tampa-St. Pete area, Pinellas and Hillsborough.

You may recall that at the 2018 Winter Meetings, Sternberg made a show of announcing that a plan to build a glitzy, $900 million new ballpark in the Tampa neighborhood of Ybor City had fallen through, with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred blasting Hillsborogh County’s lack of specifics (read “public funding”). That came near the end of the three-year window granted by the aforementioned MOU, which expired on December 31, 2018.

If the Rays’ attempt to sell a dual-city plan weren’t already underwater enough, St. Petersburg mayor Rick Kriseman handed ownership an anvil last week when he said, “I have no intention of bringing this idea to our city council to consider.” Without that, the Rays can’t get another MOU that would allow them to discuss any proposal with Montreal. In fact, there’s already an inquiry into whether Sternberg violated the lease agreement by discussing his plan with Montreal mogul Stephen Bronfman, son of former Expos owner Charles Bronfman and a prime mover in a group spearheading effort to return baseball to Montreal.

If the Rays were hoping to find high-level civic support elsewhere, Pinellas County Commissioner and 2021 St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Ken Welch said, “I am not open to funding a part-time stadium where our home team is shared with another city.” Meanwhile, former St. Petersburg mayor Bill Foster likened the two-city plan to the team wanting a wife and a mistress. Good times.

“I’m confident it’s an amazing idea,” said Sternberg on Tuesday while denying that this plan was part of “a staged exit,” or “a page out of a playbook to gain leverage.” His main selling point appears to be the fact that both new ballparks would be intimate, open-air venues with 30,000 or fewer seats, which would be less costly than building parks with retractable roofs, as in Arizona, Houston, Miami, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Toronto (the Trop is currently the only dome). According to Neil deMause, who has spent the past two decades chronicling MLB’s stadium shell game in his co-authored book Field of Schemes and a long-running blog of the same name, the “ballpark figure” for such a roof is an additional $200 million to $300 million, though “it depends what kind of roof, and how it affects the overall design.”

Secondarily, Sternberg claimed that such an arrangement will drive plenty of Canadian fans to the region, the kind of vaporous “economic impact” claim so common in stadium proposals. As FloridaPolitics.com’s Noah Pransky wrote:

In short, he suggested losing 41 home games a year — while also paying for a new Rays stadium — would pay for itself, as new Canadian tourists would come down to see their “home” team early in the season.

Back-of-the-napkin math on this suggests St. Pete would need tens — or even hundreds — of thousands of new Canadian tourists to make this work, which seems somewhat ridiculous, given that no Montreal fan is going to want to watch their team in Florida’s June humidity when they could wait three weeks and watch them up north in July.

You could also simply count all the empty seats at Blue Jays’ spring training games in Dunedin to know hundreds of thousands of fans aren’t coming down to watch their home team play baseball in Florida.

DeMause has his own debunking of Tuesday’s presser at Field of Schemes. His conclusion:

Whatever exactly Sternberg has in mind, this is clearly a long, long con, or if nothing else a way to kill time and build momentum for something while waiting out the remaining eight years of his lease. It’s transparently a classic non-threat threat — even Twitter noticed — but the question now becomes what the Rays owner plans to do with any leverage that he’s savvily created, especially considering he faces an opponent in St. Pete Mayor Rick Kriseman who isn’t afraid to sue to enforce the lease’s gag rule on stadium talks.

Of course, it’s always possible this non-threat threat is all Sternberg plans to do, in hopes that it will shake loose more stadium talks in Tampa Bay, given that he’s tried that move (albeit without the Montreal gambit) roughly a billion times before:

DeMause then linked to a tweet promoting this Pronsky article enumerating five separate occasions over the past decade in which Sternberg suggested the Rays’ future in the region was in doubt.

The one unplayed card Sternberg appears to have is that once the Trop is replaced, the team will receive 50% of the revenues that come from redeveloping the current site’s 86-acre footprint — but only if they remain in St. Petersburg. Any escape route from their current lease probably runs through that arrangement, with the Rays either forgoing some percentage of that revenue or paying the city a lump sum. Even if that happens, the obstacles to building two part-time ballparks remain, and it is difficult to imagine the Major League Baseball Players Association signing off on putting its constituents through the extra hassle. Even though players are well compensated relative to most Americans (and Canadians) — admittedly, less well compensated in the case of anyone in a Rays’ uniform — they and their families already lead lives that are bifurcated by the realities of the baseball season. Adding another temporary residence to that arrangement, particularly one in a foreign country, will be a tough sell.

Given all of the above, it hardly seems worth scratching the surface as far as the Montreal aspect of this plan, which surely has its own obstacles. While it would be wonderful to imagine major league baseball returning to the city, which would appear to be at or near the top of any short list of desirable expansion sites, it’s nearly impossible to believe that this is how it will happen. While Bronfman’s group has made progress towards a downtown ballpark, as Keri wrote, “It’s even harder to imagine the city, provincial, or federal governments kicking in a big chunk of the construction cost (which could easily approach or even exceed $1 billion Canadian) for partial seasons.”

Thus, the Rays’ plan makes for an interesting thought experiment, but that’s about it. Don’t hold your breath for this tale of two cities to end happily.

Zack Greinke shouldn’t still be this good. His fastball velocity has ticked down yet again; per Pitch Info, his four-seamer is averaging under 90 mph for the first time in his career. This isn’t a new phenomenon — his velocity has been in slow decline since his masterful 2015 season, when he posted a 1.66 ERA and finished second in Cy Young voting. These days, Greinke makes the news for shunning no-hitters and hitting like a position player more than he does for his pitching. Quietly, though, he’s having another superlative season, defying the slow ravages of time to amass a vintage stat line. His ERA and FIP are both lower than his career averages, which must be gratifying for someone who cares about his FIP more than perhaps any other active pitcher.

The way Greinke has adapted to aging is particularly interesting when compared to his former teammate, Clayton Kershaw, whose adaptations Ben Lindbergh recently chronicled. Kershaw was a singular marvel at his peak, and he remains so today. He’s always been predictable, and it hasn’t seemed to matter. When he was all-caps KERSHAW, he basically never threw a curveball when he was behind in the count. Hitters knew it, and it didn’t matter. Now, he’s throwing more pitches in the zone than ever on 0-0 before throwing fewer than ever in the zone after that. He’s still predictable, only in different ways.

Greinke, by contrast, was never as dogmatic as Kershaw. He’s thrown 62.5% fastballs when down in the count for his career, compared to Kershaw’s 72.8%. His first-pitch zone percentage this year, 52.3%, is actually below his career average, whereas Kershaw’s 61.3% rate is the highest of his career. Greinke has also always erred on the side of more pitches rather than fewer, throwing most of his pitches in any count and any location. Despite this difference in mindset, though, Greinke and Kershaw’s 2019s share two major themes: fewer fastballs, and using the count (and base/out state) to their advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

Cavan Biggio has turned yet another corner this season. One year after blasting 26 home runs in Double-A New Hampshire, the 2016 fifth-round pick has ridden a torrid start at Triple-A Buffalo to a spot in the Toronto Blue Jays lineup. And while he remains an unfinished product, the early returns have been promising. Since debuting on May 24, the son of Hall of Famer Craig Biggio has a 114 wRC+, and he’s gone deep five times.

What type of hitter is the 24-year-old infielder? Part of that answer can found within our Blue Jays Top Prospects writeup, which dropped prior to spring training. A more recent, and much more comprehensive look, went up just one week ago, courtesy of my colleague Devan Fink.

And then there is Biggio’s own take. The young Blue Jays basher broke down his mechanics, as well as his power-and-patience approach, in a wide-ranging conversation that took place last weekend.

———

David Laurila: What is your hitting philosophy?

Cavan Biggio: “My goal is to get a pitch I can square up, and drive. Hitting the ball hard is my No. 1 goal. If I don’t get the pitch I want in the first couple of strikes, I’m going to take. Once I get to two strikes, I’m going to battle and just try to get on base.”

Laurila: Are you basically looking fastball middle?

Biggio: I’d say I’m pretty traditional in trying to hunt the heater. I look for a heater in the middle thirds: middle-in, middle, and middle-away. Those are the parts of the strike zone where I can do the most damage. I’ve also gotten better at recognizing offspeed while looking for the fastball, so if it’s a mistake— if it’s a hung breaking ball — hopefully I’m able to hold off a little bit, put a good swing on it, and barrel it up. So I’m basically trying to hit the heater, but if a guy makes a mistake with a breaking ball, I’m ready for that as well.”

Laurila: What is the key to recognizing an off-speed pitch, particularly one you can handle? Read the rest of this entry »

After putting up an MVP-type performance in 2018, José Ramírez has not been a good baseball player this season. It’s not like last season came out of nowhere either. In 2016, Ramírez broke out with a five-win campaign and followed that up with a 6.5-WAR season in 2017. That the Cleveland third baseman would take another step forward last year as a 25 years old was not unexpected. What has been unexpected is the fall Ramírez has taken in 2019. With nearly half the season gone, Ramírez has been a replacement-level player with a 68 wRC+ and a near-complete evaporation of the power that led to 68 homers leaving the yard over the previous two years. Ramírez has been terrible, but he might not actually be that far off from being good again.

Early in the year, Devan Fink noted that Ramírez actually started slumping in the last few months of the 2018 season, and theorized that perhaps Ramírez was trying too hard to beat the shift.

Why would Ramírez start trying to hit the ball the other way, especially if that’s not what works for him? One answer could be that he began trying too hard to beat the shift. Ramírez is a switch-hitter, and he was shifted at a drastically different rate when he batted right-handed (6.3% of the time) versus left-handed (53.0% of the time). If Ramírez was truly getting in his head and trying too hard to beat the shift, then we’d expect to see his pull percentage drop even further for when he hit lefty versus when he hit righty. And that’s exactly what happened. While Ramírez did see his pull-rate drop by not-insignificant 9.2 points as a right-handed hitter from prior to the slump to during it, his pull-rate dropped by 19.2 points (!) as a lefty.

Nearly halfway through this season, Ramírez’s pull rate as a lefty is now pretty close to where it has been the past few seasons. That doesn’t mean that Fink was wrong about what was going on, as Ramírez could have made an adjustment to start pulling the ball again. If Ramírez has made an adjustment, it clearly isn’t working. On twitter, Mike Petriello advanced the following argument.

There’s got to be something to the increased launch angle causing more poorly hit balls. Petriello started a new thread here discussing weaker contact, and Mike Podhorzer discussed the weaker fly ball contact over at RotoGraphs. A year ago, Ramírez hit 67 balls with a launch angle of at least 40 degrees as a lefty, essentially automatic outs. This season, he’s already hit 41 such batted balls. That can’t really be all of the issue though. Much of Ramírez’s increase in launch angle has happened on the right side of the plate, and he’s actually performed reasonably close to last season as a right-hander. The switch-hitter’s average launch angle from the left side has only moved from 19.4 degrees to 21.0 degrees. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not causing a 100-point drop in wRC+ over the last year when hitting against right-handed pitching, either. Read the rest of this entry »

Christian Walker has always been able to hit well. While he was coming up through the Orioles organization, he compiled a 124 wRC+ across five minor league seasons. Unfortunately, Chris Davis and his massive contract blocked Walker from breaking into the big leagues with Baltimore and they designated him for assignment after the 2016 season. He bounced around that offseason and was claimed by two other teams before finally latching on with Arizona, and he’s continued to hit since joining the Diamondbacks organization. He compiled a 142 wRC+ across two seasons in Triple-A, but was again blocked by Paul Goldschmidt at the major league level.

By 2018, Walker had managed to accumulate just under 100 plate appearances in the majors but couldn’t break through. The dreaded “Quad-A” label was looming. Then the Diamondbacks traded away Goldschmidt this offseason, and suddenly Walker had a path towards regular playing time. He earned a part-time job out of spring training that quickly turned into a full-time job after Jake Lamb injured himself five games into the season. Walker seized the opportunity. He collected seven hits in his first 15 at-bats and continued to produce well through the first month of the season. In April, he collected 17 extra-base hits while posting a 152 wRC+.

Despite the hot start to the season, there were a few warning signs that his performance wasn’t sustainable. He struck out almost 30% of the time in April, and his BABIP was elevated at .393. Unsurprisingly, he came back down to earth in May.

It’s not as if Walker’s success in April was completely BABIP driven. His average exit velocity ranks in the 83rd percentile in the majors and he’s making hard contact nearly half the time he puts the ball in play. His expected wOBA on contact ranks 28th in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

Edgar Martinez’s story — at least as recounted in Edgar: An Autobiography, written with veteran Seattle sports scribe Larry Stone and published by Triumph Books earlier this month — reads like something of a fairy tale. Born in New York City in 1963, he moved to Puerto Rico when his parents split, and was raised in the Maguayo neighborhood of Dorado by his maternal grandparents, whom he chose to stay with at age 11, even after his parents reconciled and returned to New York. Though his love for the game was kindled by the heroics of Roberto Clemente in the 1971 World Series, and his development stoked by his relationship with cousin Carmelo Martinez, who spent nine years in the majors (1983-91), he didn’t sign a professional contract until just before his 20th birthday; putting aside $4-an-hour work on an assembly line, he received just a $4,000 bonus from the Mariners. Despite hitting a homerless .173 in his first professional season (1983), and battling an eye condition called strabismus, in which his right eye drifted out of alignment, the Mariners stuck with him.

While Martinez debuted in the majors in 1987, he spent three seasons trying to surmount the Mariners’ internal competition at third base, wound up shuttling back and forth to Triple-A Calgary, and didn’t secure a full-time job until 1990, his age-27 season. Though he won a batting title in 1992, a slew of injuries — shoulder, hamstring, wrist — threatened to derail his career until the Mariners convinced him to become a full-time designated hitter. Once he did, he became one of the AL’s most dominant players; from 1995-2001, he hit .329/.446/.574 for a 162 wRC+ (third in the majors) and 39.9 WAR (seventh, less than one win behind teammate Ken Griffey Jr.).

His heroics not only helped the Mariners reach the playoffs for the first time in 1995 (a year in which he also won his second batting title), but he became a one-man wrecking crew in that year’s Division Series against the Yankees, capping his .571/.667/1.000 performance with a series-winning double in Game 5 that basically saved baseball in Seattle. Remaining with the team for the duration of his career, which lasted through 2004 and included three other postseason appearances, further endeared him to a city that watched Griffey and fellow Mariners Randy Johnson and Alex Rodriguez depart for greener pastures. When he retired, Major League Baseball renamed its annual award for the best designated hitter in his honor. Earlier this year, in his 10th and final cycle of eligibility, he was elected to the Hall of Fame, that after more than tripling his support from just four years earlier.

Martinez’s arc seems so improbable, and yet it’s all true. Over the course of Edgar’s 352 pages, Martinez candidly details the highlights and lowlights of his career, the big decisions, unlikely events, and tactics that helped him surmount so many obstacles. Stone provides testimony from his former managers, coaches, and teammates in the form of sidebars that offer additional perspectives and enhance the narrative.

Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Louis Cardinals announced Monday afternoon that their closer, Jordan Hicks, has torn the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. The news didn’t immediately come with a prognosis, a course of treatment, or a timetable for his return, some of which we’ll likely find out in the coming days. With a healthy elbow being a highly useful part of the body for a pitcher to have, there certainly isn’t much in the way of optimism that can emerge from this development.

While the news about Hicks has not been highly specific as of yet, I have not seen the word “partial” used to describe the tear. Assuming, for the sake of pessimism, that Hicks’s injury will require Tommy John surgery, the typical recovery time quoted these days is 12-15 months for a pitcher. That quite obviously would put 2019 out of the question and, given that we’re almost into July, would also seriously threaten all of 2020.

A lot of the initial buzz surrounding Hicks’ injury focused on his status as the hardest-throwing pitcher in baseball today, with fingers pointed at his velocity as a key factor in his injury. According to Statcast, of the 100 hardest-thrown pitches in 2019, 94 were thrown by Hicks. The only pitchers to intrude on this list are Tayron Guerrero (Nos. 24, 31, 54, and 70), Aroldis Chapman (No. 87), and Thyago Vieira (No. 61). 45% of all 100 mph pitches this year were thrown by Hicks. The fastball cred is real. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Shelby Miller, Daniel Norris, Tyler Olson — on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

———

Shelby Miller, Texas Rangers

“I probably didn’t start throwing a curveball until high school. Growing up, my dad always told me they’re not good for your arm — not at an early age — and that changeups are better. But then there was this guy named Jerry Don Gleaton in my hometown — he played professionally, and was a baseball coach at Howard Payne University and I worked with him. He taught me some mechanical things, showed me some grips, and it kind of went from there. Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Woodruff did everything he could for the Brewers in 2017 and 2018. When the rotation needed reinforcements at the end of 2017, he started eight games. When the team needed relief arms in 2018, he filled whatever innings they needed — 10 of his 15 relief appearances went more than an inning, and he contributed four spot starts when the Brewers needed an occasional extra starter. This year, the team needs a starter again, and Woodruff has outdone himself. In 16 starts, he’s gone from solid bullpen arm to the best starter on a playoff team. If the team needs a pitcher to start an elimination game, Woodruff is probably the man for the job.

If I had been asked to make a prediction about Woodruff before the season, I think I would have landed somewhere near our Depth Charts projections — 23 starts, a 4.30 ERA and FIP, and peripherals that looked worse than his 2018 relief turn, when he struck out 26.7% of batters he faced and walked 8%. Pitchers who switch from relieving to starting tend to have worse rate stats across the board, and nothing about Woodruff screamed exception. Instead, he’s improved in essentially every category. He’s striking out 29.6% of the batters he faces, and walking only 6.5%. His FIP is 0.23 lower than it was last year. Heck, he’s gained fastball velocity, something you’re not supposed to do when throwing more pitches per game.

Luckily for the purposes of our analysis, however, he’s also made some changes in approach that we can pore over. If all there was to Woodruff’s improvement was a tick on his fastball, there wouldn’t be much to say. But that’s not how Brandon Woodruff’s season has gone. He has overhauled his arsenal and approach in ways that look well thought-out and sustainable to me. Read the rest of this entry »