Jake

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.

QUOTE (The Ultimate Champion @ Jun 29, 2013 -> 12:31 PM) Here is a good comp, the Tex trade: July 31, 2007: Traded by the Texas Rangers with Ron Mahay to the Atlanta Braves for Beau Jones (minors), Elvis Andrus, Neftali Feliz, Matt Harrison and Jarrod Saltalamacchia. Sale is more of a difference maker than Tex was even then. Sale also has multiple years on his contract, whereas Tex had 1.5 seasons left. At the time of the deal it was looking like the last year that Bobby Cox & Schuerholtz were going to spend together and they wanted to win. At the time the Braves felt they were probably going to lose that deal on the talent end, and maybe it would end up a major mistake. If you deal Chris Sale you need to have the team dealing for him feeling exactly the same way about that deal as the Braves did when they pulled the trigger on the Teixeira deal. That's the kind of return you need. The Latos deal is like the worth of half of one of Sale's massive 32 testicles. If I'm Hahn & someone proposes that deal to me I send Samuel L Jackson to go visit him in his apartment & have him question that guy why he happens to think I'm a b****. Edit: BTW I can't make a post without at least one glaring typo. Here I was going to edit this to change the quantity of Sale's testicles from "32" to "2" but thinking about it, I'm just going to leave this typo, it's far more accurate. Chris Sale has at least 32 testicles IMO. I don't hate that comparison, but Tex would be considered far more of a sure thing since he lacks the catastrophic injury risk of a starting pitcher. Might not be an apples to apples comparison

QUOTE (Noonskadoodle @ Jun 29, 2013 -> 02:22 PM) GAKE THREA FTW!!!

I sure as hell hope we don'tt target pitching over hitting in the return. With a guy like Peavy, there should be at least one MLB part in the deal too.

We have no need to dump his puny salary so I'd hope to extract something relatively useful from the Yanks. He's been coming on strong lately and looking much like the guy we thought we were getting.

QUOTE (BigEdWalsh @ Jun 29, 2013 -> 12:03 PM) And Addison Reed did not. Is he interested in playing the OF?

This team will end up going on a run at some point, moving our draft pick to around 7-10 just to piss all of you off. This kind of thing often happens after the firesale.

Went to the DH today, stuck it out until the final pitch. Was my girlfriend's first big league game. How profoundly disappointing. We still had a good time, going to an MLB game is always a positive experience, but it was among the most frustrating things I've ever had to watch. This is especially magnified since I was there in person and you're hoping to make a nice memory. What a mess. That's all the money they'll get from me this year.