Hairyducked Idiot

What's the highest bonus that doesn't count against that? $50 or $100K? You get six free $50ks and all $10ks and lower are free.

You're overthinking it. Yes, you could literally break down the selection to says that "That is to say" means that he's expanding on his definition of the term, so Brett is defining "want" as meaning Parks is one of the best, etc. But really, he's just heaping some praise on his guest interview and using the cool slang term he's attached to.

On the Baseball Prospectus prospects podcast, "want" is a term they coined as a noun to describe a player's work ethic and general dedication to improvement. A player who has a lot of "want" is supposed to be a better prospect in the macho, "I won't take no for an answer, I'm making it to the big leagues no matter what" sort of way. They use it as a tool, so they'll say things like "Man, that guy has 80 want." So saying Jason Parks is "full of want" is saying that he works really hard at being the best prospects writer he can be, digging up sources and learning about the game.

That's basically what I'm seeing too. This isn't Costillo just repeating vague rumors as facts of his own. He's directly attributing new information to the guy who is apparently Clevenger's agent: Joshua Kusnick. And Clevenger's agent seems like a bit of a weird, slimy dude himself, and just looking at his twitter feed and his internet history, I find it very plausible he'd answer e-mails from a kid like Costillo.

Chris Cotillo looks like a bit of a wannabe blogger, but he appears to have a legit source in Clevenger's agent.

Also we were all talking about Jason Parks on this page.

Hahaha, Moylan is actually a lot worse than anyone we have in the pen right now. I didn't know that was possible.

It was supposed to be a sort of transition to a draft. Each team's total IFA cap is the combination of four pools that would represent the slot pool of each pick they would have had if it were a 4-round draft instead of a free-for-all.

This chat with Jason Parks at BN is easily the best stuff I've seen on the Cubs all year: http://www.bleachernation.com/2013/07/01/a-chat-with-baseball-prospectuss-jason-parks-on-cubs-prospects-international-additions-and-so-much-more/

It's not a 1 in 3 chance, and the cost isn't the salary, it's the innings you waste finding out.

According to the Des Moines beat reporter, Steve Clevenger was sent to a hotel with his bags packed and told he wasn't being called up but to wait for further instructions. Now some reporters on Twitter are speculating that a midnight deal for IFA pool money seems likely, with the Marlins as a probable destination.

Luis Cruz is a special kind of awful. Shawn Camp type of awful? Yes. Roughly Starlin Castro levels of offer (including defense, evening out the playing time).

I keep wondering if there isn't a team under the radar (Dodgers, I'm looking at you) who aren't waiting to surprise everyone by blowing their budget by a ton and signing all the players. Probably not, though, because these deals are all basically done in advance. I'm assuming anyone the Cubs are "heavily tied to" has essentially already agreed to terms and is just waiting for tomorrow to sign.

The FO was also crazy interested in Gerardo Concepcion.

I guess so. But only because I guess you could limit the scope of the conversation to "Should the Cubs punt on 2014 at this trade deadline?" and we can (mostly) all agree "no," but I think the more interesting nuance is in trying to assess how realistic our 2014 chances are. This is the sort of nitpicking that had us all convinced we could go all-in on Pujols for 2011 because 85 wins might take the NL Central in 2012. These are all valid complaints, but it glosses over the strengths of those teams, and if you looked at the Cubs with an eye half that critical, I think you'd see our 2014 chances still look the fourth best out of the group.

Age of the Pirates' top six position players by fWAR: 26, 24, 30, 26, 27, 26. They're getting a lot of career years because they have a lot of talented guys in their primes. Meanwhile, Garrett Cole has already hit the big leagues and Taillon will get there sometime next year, both far more talented than anyone we have hitting until at best Sept. of 2014. And their FO has shown just as much of a knack as ours for finding undervalued starting pitching on the FA market. Their small-market status may get them eventually, but they've been planning around this window for a long time, and it doesn't look to me like it's closing in 2014. The Reds may get consumed by Votto's contract eventually, but it's actually structured to go down $7 million next year. They'll need to replace Arroyo, but the rest of their rotation is 24, 26, 24 and 26. I expect them to be a bit worse next year, but they're on a 94-win 3rd-order pace, so they could drop a few wins and still be problematic. The Cardinals have so much absurd young talent that they are going to win 100 games every year for the next 15 years. I don't even want to get into them. I don't think the idea that the Cubs can get better next year is that far-fetched, but I do think the whole "it's the NL Central, these small-market teams will collapse next year under the weight of their low payrolliness" is wishcasting. All three of these rivals have a pile of young, core talent that easily rivals or surpasses our own, better supporting casts at the big-league level, and two of them have farm systems that are in the same tier as ours. The new CBA and league-wide revenues are making small-market problems less impactful every year, but even if they do catch up to those teams, I don't see much reason to think it'll be 2014 when it does. All that said, I do agree that I don't think we should be giving up on 2014 already. We can take our best shot and dump at the deadline if it fails. The premium we get for dumping from 2014 resources before the 2013 offseason even begins isn't worth giving up on a season despite the relatively grim outlook.

I think so. The Cardinals and Pirates have oodles and oodles of young talent. The Reds are probably due for a step back, but not a huge one and they could fall quite a bit and still be pretty good.

I am. First, I very specifically did not say "no way, no how." Just "it's a really long shot." The problem is two-fold: 1) We are going to have to do a lot of good work this offseason just to get back to where we are now. 2) This division looks like it's super-duper-awesome going forward and is loaded with young talent even on the already-good teams, so .500 + variance probably still isn't enough. Before you even think about moving forward for next season, you have to replace Garza, Feldman and Gregg. Then you have to build the entire rest of the bullpen out of essentially nothing. All this in an offseason market that looks pretty thin on pitching, imo. So if you assume that you can pull like 6-8 MLB-quality pitchers together from the market in one offseason with no misses, and you're comfortable with Hendricks/Cabrera as your depth at AAA, then you've maybe got a playoff-caliber pitching staff. That's the pitching. To upgrade the position players, you basically must have one of the big-name outfielders. We've gotten just about as much mileage out of cheap platoons as we could possibly get this year, and we're going to have to hope each and every one of them can repeat this year's performance. But let's say for a minute that all that does come together in a rather improbable string of taking steps forward, avoiding steps backward, and hitting on all your new acquisitions. Now you've got like an 85-win team that'll play like an 81-win team with the brutal divisional schedule. You're probably the 4th-best team in a five-team division and are praying for 8 wins of positive variance to be enough to win half a playoff spot. I'm not saying they should be throwing in the towel yet, but I am saying I am very pessimistic about their 2014 chances.

If the "young players" are just a repeat of Castro/Rizzo, then I'm not sure the team you are describing is even good enough to get into the playoffs. That's just this year's team + a decent bullpen + one bat - Garza. Using the chart from this: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=1658 I get 64% odds of three SP the same age as next year's Samardzija, Jackson and Wood, coming off healthy and productive seasons, all getting through the next season without any of them experiencing a 50% decline in IP. Better than even, but the chance of it not happening is significant enough to be noted. That's just the nature of pitching. I don't like punting on any season, ever. But if we're basing our investment on where the team looks to stand in the success cycle, then I don't think 2014 looks any better now than 2013 did at this point last year, and maybe even a bit worse (have to replace Garza). As far as supreme confidence that they'll be able to find undervalued SP whenever they want, I think that's optimistic. They've done it twice, with some misses along the way. That's no guarantee that they'll be able to do it in perpetuity in every market. Market inefficiencies close quickly and every year's FA crop is different. It reminds me of how after the Rizzo trade, people wanted to start penciling in one or two "prospect for prospect where we get an awesome core piece" deals a year.

1) Get two players who are a combined 0.5 WAR in half a season to put up 8 WAR next year 2) Have no injuries or ineffectiveness to three crucial starting pitchers 3) Find two undervalued starting pitchers in a brutal FA market for SP 4) Build an entire useful bullpen from near-scratch, with only James Russell as a holdover at the MLB level 5) Sign possibly the biggest FA of the offseason, certainly the best outfielder 6) Have several "young players" take steps forward in a system that looks pretty thin to me in MLB-ready-in-2014 talent. I'm not gonna say that's impossible, but that's the fourth-best hope in the division, and a lot closer to fifth than third.

When the list of things that absolutely have to go right is already half a dozen long off the top of your head, and that's just to have a chance, then you are drawing to an inside straight at best.

I usually take these fan-driven velocity reports with a huge grain of salt and an eyeroll, but given: a) His results back it up this year b) He was projectable as adding that sort of velocity and is working with Derek Johnson now c) I really want to believe it I'll go ahead and believe it. That probably makes him the most interesting pitching prospect in the system.

Unless they come back in the bottom of the ninth, this is one of my favorite days of White Sox baseball ever.

I feel like maybe I overestimated how good Russell was earlier in the season. Still don't want to trade him.

I mean, we can point fingers as much as we want (and believe me, I'd be glad to), but I think if you realistically evaluate where this team is in terms of talent, farm system and contract situations, 2014 is an uphill battle. And 2015 will involve leaving some key spots open, hopefully, for some very talented rookies. The paths to contention any earlier involve having a whole lot of players bust out to the highest percentiles of their projections or suddenly coming up with a ton more payroll than we've been spending.