Does it have to be a decent one? I think it has a chance to be. I was banging the drum pretty hard in May and June that the 2014 pitching needed to be addressed at the deadline and in the offseason, and they've begun to do that. They haven't added any impact pieces, but we desperately needed MLB-quality, replacement-level-or-slightly-better pitching to fill out some holes. If we were filling out a pitching staff for 2014 right now, we'd have something like: Samardzija/Jackson/Wood/Villanueva/Arrieta Russell/Strop/Hendricks/Vizcaino/Hendricks/Cabrera (and apparently maybe Neil Ramirez?) You could rearrange them or argue for a different usage pattern, but that's the basic state of the union. It's not good, but for heading into an offseason, it's not terrible. I know I've seen some people theorize that we will be buying 2 or 3 $6m pitchers to put in the rotation and then flip every year between now and eternity, but my guess is that we do let Grimm/Arrieta/Vizcaino/Hendricks/Villanueva/Cabrera fight it out for the fifth spot in the rotation and only add one starting pitcher in the offseason and a couple of relievers. The result would be a high-upside adequate pitching staff, a bit worse in the rotation than this year's but better in the bullpen, with the bulk of our offseason cash being able to be focused on offensive upgrades. I have trouble seeing us become some sort of amazing world-beating team, but I think the path to an 84-win projection without needing to go crazy on free agents is there for the taking if we've scouted these pitchers well and get something out of most of them.