A lot of angst was spilled in this diary yesterday, including calls for me to delete it, to enforce community guidelines, and various other comments, all of which I read.
Here's the bottom line. There are two posters here -- gaius marius and Chuck -- who have their own strong viewpoints on how the Cubs ought to approach building the team, and building a winner, and those opinions frequently differ from mine -- though they mischaracterize me as "Pollyanna". Do I think every move the Cubs make is gold? Hardly. But to me, there is more to being a baseball fan and a Cub fan, than simply looking at the bottom line of the payroll. That's MY opinion, just as the opinions expressed by gaius and Chuck are theirs.
They are both entitled to their opinions -- and in fact, both of them have their own blogs on which they express opinions similar to the ones they express here.
Where the problem occurs, it seems, is the way in which some people here take what gaius and Chuck say, and more importantly, how they say it.
Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, and indeed, as I say in the Community Guidelines:
Several of you, in the comments in yesterday's diary, feel that the diary poster violated the guidelines. He was asking for gaius to be banned from here, and gave his reasons.
Gaius responded simply with a comment that he felt that the guidelines had been violated. Frankly, I don't see that. And frankly again, it appears that the main complaint about gaius' comments isn't what he says, but that the tone of them appears to be condescending.
I think this discussion should be closed at this time. I'm not going to ban anyone unless they get really out of line -- and I don't believe anything here has gotten to that point, and as several of you said in the diary comments, the best way to not let another poster bother you is to simply not read what he/she writes.
Finally, I agree with some of you who said that you don't want to see BCB become just another out-of-control message board like the one at cubs.com. Now, that is something I WILL take control over, and we have discussed ways of doing that, such as not posting 12,475 different diaries about the Tejada rumors.
All I'm going to ask at this time is for EVERYONE to respect everyone else, for opinions to be expressed without condescension, and to know that all of us, no matter how we approach the topic, want the same thing:
For the Cubs to win.