Jake

What Zapata and his family did to make him an international FA is brilliant. There is SOME chance that he squandered a chance to become a first round draft pick and earn more than 1.6 million, by moving he ensured he could get that when he's 16 instead of 18 and not risk injury/prospect status dropping/etc. Still, there was probably much to be uncertain of when they made the move. Someone gave them very good advice.

When I'm feeling down about the Sox, I usually avoid PHT as much as I can even though I frequent other threads since I have begun to trust certain posters on certain things so I am more comfortable going to ST for many non-baseball things. I don't love just hating on everyone and everything so I try to avoid going into threads where I will feel the need to talk everyone off the ledge. The rest of the forum is great, for the most part. Anyway, I think the ultimate health of the forum depends on more enthusiastic posters. The "golden age" (Was it golden?) was powered by a lot of super enthusiastic posters with time to post. This is true of every forum. Likewise, individual posters' usage levels will change on any forum over time. You hope that for every frequent poster that becomes less frequent, a less frequent poster becomes more frequent. I have no idea if that's the case here right now. I don't mind the level of traffic. There is a ton of discussion (IMO) but I can keep up with it. I frequent some forums where there is too much activity to keep up with or so little that there is little motivation to keep checking throughout the day. ST fits nicely in the middle for me if I check in once or more per day. A couple days away and I won't be able to catch up on conversation, which is fine.

QUOTE (kev211 @ Jul 2, 2013 -> 12:03 AM) After seeing what head coach and GM disputes can do to teams I'm worried. 6 titles? Me likey. Did Oz/KW hate each other from the start? Make it 7.

I would say the Cubs are the worst run organization. Then the Bears, though this could change dramatically in the next year as we get a better understanding of what the differences are between Angelo and Emery as well as Lovie and Trestman. Then the White Sox, who could quite easily drop below the Bears or maybe rise up if they turn things around quickly. At this point, their current problems seem to be rooted in the KW-Ozzie squabbles, which is a very silly root cause to your problems. Bulls Blackhawks

Keppinger is not value-less and is signed to a fair contract. Also, since he isn't great, his fair contract isn't very big. I wouldn't trade him for s***s and giggles, I'd try to get something potentially nice back for him. I'll continue to say this, but we are going to be saving lots of money in the coming year with expiring contracts and some of the other trades that are likely. You don't need to dump a guy for $4M a year because you think he is overpriced. He is NOT Mark Teahen.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Jul 1, 2013 -> 06:44 PM) Eh, he did that once, and Rodman was persona non grata in the nba at that point. Was writing a post that said the same thing. Scottie was the one key acquisition in his tenure that is more or less unequivocally a great move and that wasn't a big named player, he was a draftee.

This could end up messy. On the other hand, we got six championships the last time our coach and GM hated each other.

The NBA thread is by far the worst thread in this entire forum. It has gotten worse than the days where every thread turned into Daniel Hudson vs Edwin Jackson. I come to Soxtalk for everything: White Sox, other sports, the tech thread, other SLAM stuff, the 'buster, etc.

You should get something REALLY nice for Crain.

Dual-booting Ubuntu alongside Windows 7. Had to do some funny business just to get a single partition available, but it will have to do. My HP laptop came with four partitions already: C:, boot, recovery, and HP Tools. Got rid of HP Tools to make a 50 GB partition for Ubuntu. Might have to drop that recovery partition someday to have a swap partition, not sure. I'm a total newbie to Ubuntu/Linux OS's, so I'm having some fun and some frustration getting acquainted with it.

Pretty high average, pretty long term. It wouldn't shock me if we end up disliking this contract quite a bit. With that said, I'm glad to have him back.

QUOTE (Soxfest @ Jun 30, 2013 -> 07:12 PM) Bickell resigns 4 yr deal. $4M per

A ton of capspace, though obviously much of it will wind up getting eaten by guys making the minimum.

QUOTE (flavum @ Jun 30, 2013 -> 12:31 PM) http://www.milb.com/scoreboard/index.jsp?c...mp;ymd=20130630 Anderson on a 9-game hit streak...16-41 (.390) Nice to see him take off running, clear that the glove needs lots of work though. QUOTE (flavum @ Jun 30, 2013 -> 02:36 PM) I'm thinking Jacob May isn't long for Great Falls. That's good, as a 3 year college player that should have been well below his playing level. Good to get him some confidence before throwing him into the wild, though. QUOTE (Heads22 @ Jun 30, 2013 -> 03:11 PM) I've been sort of following the 1B options we have at Charlotte, as obviously Paulie may not be back next year. It'd be nice to see Wilkins run with this opportunity. Indeed, but my hopes aren't super high.

I like the Hartman pick. Taking advantage of a potential big time value that fell a bit and was likely already undervalued due to size. Not sure how much seasoning he needs. QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 30, 2013 -> 05:41 PM) Bolland to Toronto for picks. 51st, 117th, and a fourth rounder next year. Better than a pure salary dump, I'd say! Hawks have 11.2 million in cap room.

More reason not to do that.

QUOTE (chw42 @ Jun 29, 2013 -> 09:30 PM) 3 months too late. On the forum I go to, they love their phones and carriers so much they would say something like, "this is great, they just took the time to work out all the bugs!"

QUOTE (chw42 @ Jun 29, 2013 -> 07:16 PM) Yeah, they're either late with new phones (S4) or they don't carry them at all (HTC One). They must think their coverage is so good that they don't need to try. One is coming in late July

Getting rid of Dunn just to lose his salary with the amount of salary we are dumping already is lunacy IMO.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Jun 29, 2013 -> 03:43 PM) Man, I couldn't disagree more about Bilas. I love listening to him talk about players. He is supposed to love them all, they are the cream of the crop that he watches all the time. His job isn't to talk about how good they will be in the NBA, he is supposed to talk about how they got there. It's not that it is useless, it's nice to know some good things about a guy. Unfortunately, in the NBA draft broadcast you could totally randomize the descriptions of each player (for instance, if you ran his description of Snell after the first overall pick) and you'd have no idea that he was describing a player that isn't that good.

I keep hearing that Nazr's return is almost a sealed deal.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Jun 29, 2013 -> 02:31 PM) Do fans of all horrible teams always talk about falling closer to the top draft pick in baseball? The sport with the most boring, worst draft, biggest crapshoot draft of all sports? My guess is you'd get laughed out of a bar or the Cell if you brought up this topic with most Sox fans. Who gives a frick about the draft? I care more about free agency and putting wins on the board and getting the best possible manager and hitting coaches as soon as possible. Have fun talking about the draft all the way til next June when we take some high school kid who may or may not make the bigs. You're right, Greg. It's nice to have a really good draft pick, but the other costs of being that bad far outweigh that one reward. And don't get it wrong, the draft pick is the ONLY bonus to being bad. Everything else can be done with good teams or at least "transitional" ones...something like what the Indians have going on, for instance.

I would also like to point out that it is very much a possibility that Dunn finishes this game with a higher OPS than Alex Rios. Just let that sink in for a while.

It is astounding that Jeff Keppinger is batting .247 and Adam Dunn is batting .200. Tremendous comebacks in progress. All too late, of course.

I thought Bill Simmons was the best person on that broadcast. I don't love the Celtics talk, but there wasn't that much of it and I enjoy him because I know he isn't full of s***. It's clear that the rest of the guys can't stand him, though. I also hate Jay Bilas. Nobody knows the draft class as much as he does, but he won't actually say anything substantive about any of them. He loves every draft pick. Great. At least Simmons will actually react to things that are happening in an honest way.