Clevelander17

That's one way to live life, but I prefer to worry about things to an unhealthy extent, especially when it comes to Cleveland sports. :drunk: Seriously though, I do think we have to take into consideration the very real possibility that even with Kevin Love this team is far from a lock for an NBA title next season...especially considering the team's lack of depth and Irving and to a lesser-degree Love's respective injury histories. I wouldn't trade Wiggins and Waiters/Bennett for just one season of Love.

Wait a minute...now the word is that Kevin Love won't be signing an extension with the Cavaliers upon arrival? That's almost a deal-breaker for me, especially considering I was already on the fence about having to give up both Wiggins and another asset. If this plays out as badly as I think it realistically could (Love is traded, Cavs don't win the title, Wiggins shows big potential in regular season, Love bolts) I will be really angry. In other news, I was definitely blindly buying into the Bradley Beal hype, but after looking at his stats and comparing them to Waiters' numbers, I do agree with the above argument that Dion should be getting more love nationally. Call me a homer, but I think there are four incredibly solid young players at diverse positions that all could end up thriving alongside LeBron James.

Interesting that CWRU and C-M are (re-)joining the PAC, at least football. If I understand the schedule, this means that neither team will have any open dates, which is definitely a good thing if you're an AD who has to fill slots, but as a fan I really wish CWRU and JCU could find a way to play each other more often. I definitely think that it could be a great rivalry if given a chance to bloom. In fact, taking it a step further, I'd like to see JCU, CWRU, B-W, C-M, and maybe the Columbus OAC schools form the core of a new conference formed around larger city-based schools in the Great Lakes region. As a semi-JCU fan, I don't think the OAC is as good of a fit for the school as it once may have been.

Yeah, and I'm okay with that. I know there has been a lot of bullish talk around town about Waiters lately, and I think he has the potential to turn into a good player someday, but I think Wiggins' ceiling is higher. And I would love to see how he develops alongside James.

Yeah it stinks, but the Indians have been playing the game like this for at least ten years and truthfully if the Dolans are unwilling to open their wallets it's all that the front office to do to keep the club marginally competitive.

Yeah in which case I think I remember hearing that Philly would be giving us someone as well. Either way, going back to my original point, we still have a couple of somewhat valuable picks in upcoming drafts, so if we're really the only ones in the Love sweepstakes, I think Wiggins needs to come off the table.

I'm not a huge fan of batting average, but his OPS at AA this year was above .900. He's got good pedigree and as far as these types of trades go, I'm satisfied. I really liked Masterson and hope he does well in St. Louis, but he's not been integral to this team's "success" this year and I'm not sure he would have turned it around.

Seems to me that if Cleveland is the only team really in the running for Love (or if he's made it clear that that's the only place he'll accept a trade to), it gives the Cavaliers more leverage and hopefully increases the possibility of them keeping Wiggins. Although earlier I was hearing it was going to be Wiggins and Waiters for Love, which I still think is too much considering the precedent for similar such situations/trades.

I have no idea what point you're trying to make about relatively tiny and marginally diverse Painesville, however I will make this observation: When I look at a map at the borders between Painesville City Schools and Riverside Local Schools, it seems unlikely to be a coincidence that they look like a jigsaw puzzle. I'll also say this, Painesville is isolated enough in distance from any other pockets of diversity in Greater Cleveland that I don't find it surprising that you haven't really seen these "flash mob" problems there that have occurred in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland. And beyond that, I'd be skeptical about the fact that there haven't been other issues in Painesville similar to what MTS and Hts were speaking about earlier in SH and CH. I'm not sure what you mean by "marginally diverse"(?) Painesville is probably more diverse than many larger cities in Ohio, and certainly more so than any city or town in similar size (20K) in the state. With its sizable Hispanic population (and I used "Hispanic" because that's what Mexicans preferred to be called) it's certainly more of a microcosm of the overall population of the United States than it is of the population of Ohio. And yes, the fact that it's a small town and far away enough from Cleveland, it's escaped many of the racial problems that exist there and in its surrounding suburbs; which doesn't mean there aren't any. Like any community with a diverse population, there are conflicts. However, Painesville has had a history of diversity going back many decades before any Cleveland suburb. My point is that the affluent residents of places like SH and CH (originally of course 100% white) take a very patronizing, holier-than-thou attitude toward diversity (wow, look how "progressive" we are!), like they invented the concept, when it's been happening outside their gilded ghettos for a long time. I've read a ton on Cleveland area history (admittedly mostly limited to Cuyahoga County, though) and I don't think it's a stretch to say that there isn't another suburb or neighborhood in this county that at any point in the past century did as much to try to peacefully integrate as Cleveland Heights or Shaker Heights. I've never claimed to know how Painesville became integrated, but I can tell you that CH and SH are unique amongst SIMILAR suburbs in Cuyahoga County and they've both garnered statewide and national attention over the years for their integration efforts. So to some degree, yes, residents in these suburbs do have some things of which to be proud.

I have no idea what point you're trying to make about relatively tiny and marginally diverse Painesville, however I will make this observation: When I look at a map at the borders between Painesville City Schools and Riverside Local Schools, it seems unlikely to be a coincidence that they look like a jigsaw puzzle. I'll also say this, Painesville is isolated enough in distance from any other pockets of diversity in Greater Cleveland that I don't find it surprising that you haven't really seen these "flash mob" problems there that have occurred in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland. And beyond that, I'd be skeptical about the fact that there haven't been other issues in Painesville similar to what MTS and Hts were speaking about earlier in SH and CH.

In my pre-teens and teenage years during the 1990s when I was baseball-crazy I loved the All-Star Game, and looking back I do feel like it was much more compelling then. This could be for no other reason than the fact that I don't feel like the modern game has star power...at least not on a historic level like it feels like existed in the 1990s. That said, for many of the same reasons as you, I have grown to really dislike the All-Star Game and what it stands for. If it's an exhibition game, fine, have the teams play it out like they currently do. But if you want to make it about showcasing the league's best players AND making sure it's realistically competitive to determine home field advantage for the World Series, I suggest that the All-Star Game should become the All-Star Series. Baseball is a game of big sample sizes, and a single game is nothing more than a coin flip. They should either play a best-of-three series or play three games and tally the runs to determine which league gets home field advantage. This would allow the games to more realistically mirror actual baseball games, with starting pitchers and fielders playing more innings and to, in general, allow more players to get involved in a more organic manner. I would expand rosters to 40 players, keeping the rule for minimum one player per MLB team, but eliminating the notion for managers that every player should make an appearance in a game. Simply being invited would be the honor in and of itself. Also, the fan vote has to go. Derek Jeter was ranked 9th out of 10 in OPS for AL shortstops with the qualified number of plate appearances. If the game is about determining something as important as WS home field advantage, no league should be handcuffed by being forced to use (let alone start) inferior players, even if they are aging superstars on the cusp of retirement.

And a very generous strike zone for ATL's staff... :whip:

Poverty and crime seem closely intertwined. In this part of the world, poverty and race are also closely intertwined. I understand that when I write that I want CH, UH, SH, etc. to do what they can to limit the supply of low-income residences and to make their respective streets much less hospitable to crime that it comes off in a certain way. I get that, because that's an easy, almost lazy narrative to create. But you don't get to play that card on me. I grew up in this community, I still live in this community, and I spent a decade in the school system, not caring then or now about race. All of this is academic. Either change is going to come or it's not and we're going to lose some of the region's greatest assets because we couldn't adjust to reality in the name of trying to maintain an idealistic dream from yesteryear.

Sure, but these are people that, like all people, engage in generally predictable human behaviors, patterns if you will. And it probably makes sense for these patterns to be acknowledged and perhaps in some way used to guide public policy. I'm more concerned with preservation of the "Heights" than I am with seeing this community try to buck macro-level trends on the micro-level.

Okay, the T'Wolves want Wiggins? Fine, I'd begrudgingly do it. However I would not give them Bennett, as well. The longer that this has gone on, the more I'm leaning towards just starting the season with the roster as it's currently constituted, and seeing how it plays out. Wiggins is a rookie and he's going to have to undergo a learning process, but I think that it's going to be accelerated alongside LeBron James and he's really going to thrive.

I think that there is some truth to this, but I don't agree that all of the lower-income families moving to the Heights are good, hard-working. A lot of them are and they're coming here for better opportunities, but certainly not all of them. But the idea that they're bringing in/attracting trouble-making outsiders to the Heights is definitely true either way.

Sorry, I was using it colloquially, so I apologize for the connotations. The point is that we need the governments to be a bit more forceful...I will change it though. In regards to crime as it relates to low income residences, let me elaborate a bit on something I hit on earlier. I think that non-residents are a source of a lot of crime in the Heights, but I don't think that's a coincidence or simply because these communities are busy with thousands people commuting or visiting every day. I believe that many non-resident criminals are drawn to this area because they know and are visiting folks living in low-income residences, or they're visiting establishments that thrive on the business of the area's low-income residents. So the point of getting rid of these types of residences is not just because a larger proportion of people living in them are troublemakers or outright criminals, but also because their existence attracts outsiders of the same ilk to our area. Why might events like St. Greg's festival be targets? Easy access by transportation is one, but the second big one I think is because the troublemakers know that there is an existing critical mass of troublemakers living in the area that are sure to be there. You also may have a crowd that attends that perhaps has been overly tolerant of unruly behavior in the past. All of this can lead to what happened last weekend. And just as an FYI, I'm not proud to be making the above observations and suggestions. They're classist and exclusionary and on a larger scale really go against what I believe in. However I don't think it's right for these communities to shoulder all of this burden and continue to crumble while others refuse to pitch in. If CH, SH, UH, SE, etc. are going to be livable, realistic options for middle class families in the coming decades, something has to change, because what we've been doing isn't working as well as it may have in the past.

Hold on a second, I said that they've bent over backwards to assimilate* lower income newcomers (and to be specific, these have mostly been black) since around the 1980s through today. And I think that this was the right thing to do considering integration of CH and SH was going to happen either way. However based on some of the more recent outcomes, I think we perhaps need to rethink and update our new strategies because to some degree our old philosophy is not working now. In terms of low income residences, as I've mentioned previously on this thread and perhaps elsewhere around UO, CH and SH and other similar cities need to be getting rid of as many of these structures as possible. For starters if I'm CH I work with EC to focus on leveling as much of the Superior Triangle as possible. If I'm SH I'm keeping a close eye on what's going on along the city's southwestern border area. *Think Ludlow and Lomond community associations whose histories actually go back further through Cleveland Heights' more recent Civility Project. There are undoubtedly many other efforts that have been implemented by these cities and their residents that I'm not aware of.

Yeah I agree that the common thread is poverty, which may be amplified by cultural-based behavior, or density, or some other factor that I'm missing. But either way it does go back to a previous point that I made that CH and SH should be doing what they can to cut down on the number and limit the proliferation of low-income residences, because it's not the responsibility of these communities to take on a back-breaking burden for what is a national problem.

How about this: There is a community of lower-income people, a large chunk of them transient, living in the Heights communities. There's no denying this, nor is there denying that when it comes to crime (both home-grown and "attracted" from outside), they are a significant source of it. They are also the source of other, more minor but annoying antisocial issues that make these communities unattractive. Whether or not we want to use labels of separation or identification, there's one more big thing that we cannot deny: Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights in particular have bent over backwards since the 1970s in the name of "diversity" to try to assimilate (is that the right word?) these newcomers into middle-class and suburban culture. To some degree it has worked better here than elsewhere. But as alluded to earlier, problems still exist that indicate that this has not worked nearly as well as we would hope. And no, I don't think that this divides cleanly along racial lines. I believe that there are a great many middle and upper class folks of all races who are frustrated by this situation. So how do you describe this when it happens in majority white neighborhoods by whites? Truthfully, I don't think it does, or when it does, it's a statistical anomaly. If we're talking about crime, it's not even up for debate. If we're talking about other things (like willfully walking in the middle of the street clogging traffic, behaving loudly in public, littering and keeping your surroundings unkempt, etc.), anecdotally from my experience I believe that these things are much more likely to happen in certain Heights neighborhoods than elsewhere because of the attitudes of a lot of the people living here. Look, I live in a part of UH that is a majority white, but just barely, and heavily trafficked (by car, foot, and other modes of transport) by people of all races and ages at almost all times of the day. Truthfully, the behavior of the mostly white, mostly middle or upper class JCU kids can be pretty bad around here too, but I do think that that's a special exception that exists in every college town (and they've been called out by residents here as well). But there are also not insignificant, antisocial problems caused by a lot of other people around here as well, people that seem to have a completely different set of characteristics in common with one another.

How about this: There is a community of lower-income people, a large chunk of them transient, living in the Heights communities. There's no denying this, nor is there denying that when it comes to crime (both home-grown and "attracted" from outside), they are a significant source of it. They are also the source of other, more minor but annoying antisocial issues that make these communities unattractive. Whether or not we want to use labels of separation or identification, there's one more big thing that we cannot deny: Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights in particular have bent over backwards since the 1970s in the name of "diversity" to try to assimilate (is that the right word?) these newcomers into middle-class and suburban culture. To some degree it has worked better here than elsewhere. But as alluded to earlier, problems still exist that indicate that this has not worked nearly as well as we would hope. And no, I don't think that this divides cleanly along racial lines. I believe that there are a great many middle and upper class folks of all races who are frustrated by this situation.

Here are two of Cleveland Heights' old fire stations, courtesy of the CH Historical Society: http://www.chhistory.org/images/featstories/NobleRdStation1931.jpg http://www.chhistory.org/images/featstories/SilsbyStation1931.jpg They were built as mirror images of one another in the early 1930s and utilized as stations until the early 1980s. They both still stand today, one as a police academy and the other as a pharmacy.

Yes there are certain behaviors, ranging from those that are arguably benign to those that are downright sociopathic and dangerous, being exhibited by large groups of people in places like Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, South Euclid, University Heights and similar communities nationwide. There's no denying that it has to do with class and race. The problem is that no one knows what to do about it without offending people and few people want to take responsibility for it. So what is happening is that beautiful and unique areas of Greater Cleveland (i.e. CH and SH) are slowly but consistently becoming less and less livable, realistically, for middle class families of all races. Because of the complexities of the issues, I don't have much hope that it's going to get better any time soon.

Yeah I've heard that whatever happened occurred in the street (Mayfield, I believe) with dozens of teens creating near riotous conditions. A quick perusal of Twitter indicates that many of these kids were not from South Euclid...big shock there. I suspect that even with tightened security measures at these types of events, the kids will still use the event as an opportunity to meet up and cause trouble along the perimeter. I think the best solution is for communities and police forces to start becoming much more heavy-handed in how they address the issue. Put large amounts of the troublemakers in jail for extended periods of time (i.e. an entire weekend), fine parents several hundreds of dollars, etc. They need to go to greater lengths to send the message to those from outside the community (and some within, of course) that this type of behavior will not be tolerated. Make it so that engaging in this type of behavior becomes "painful" enough in terms of inconveniencing the troublemakers and hitting their pocketbooks that they will stop coming.

Wow, this thread really takes me back. Needless to say I had a lot of anger in 2010 and 2011, anger that even before last week had almost completely dissipated. That said, I will always begrudge Brian Windhorst for what he did during and after James' departure.