caulfield12

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/a...wright/2481383/ Argues for the inclusion of Sale and Crain on the roster.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 10:02 AM) It's a joke dude, just giving you s*** I think with marty having disappeared and Greg only doing "hit and run" comments in the middle of the night, there's nobody left to pick on or try to agitate. Haven't even seen much of Dick Allen these days, either.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 09:34 AM) Needs a Jerry Don Gleaton reference SIGH.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 09:33 AM) It was posted in here http://www.soxtalk.com/forums/index.php?sh...15&start=15 you commented on it a half hour ago YES, I GET THAT. But we don't have a Crain specific thread in terms of his possible injury, and he's kind the most important asset on our team right now, in case you hadn't heard. That twitter update came LAST night, that's why I was wondering if anyone had heard anything TODAY, especially those living in Chicago. Like an MRI, just precautionary, whatever the case happens to be....starting to think whenever something like this happens he's going to be lost for the season with how things went with Floyd and Peavy.

Jesse Crain was unable to come into Tuesday's game against the Orioles due to tightness in his pitching shoulder. Crain felt the tightness while warming up in the bullpen. It's not clear at this point how long he might be sidelined, but it's obviously poor timing for one of the White Sox' most tradeable assets. Crain has been one of the best relievers in baseball this season, boasting a 0.74 ERA, 1.15 WHIP and 46/11 K/BB ratio over 36 2/3 innings. Chuck Garfien, twitter

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 09:13 AM) http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/alex_rios/ All players want to be on a winner and in our situation it has been tough to win. Rios really has a way with words sometimes, he sometimes doesn't come off well, like he's not to blame for anything. Wasn't the situation he was referring to created by the very players themselves?

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 08:56 AM) The 20% didn't make the team better. There's a reason the offseason slogan wasn't "we're giving the injured John Danks a $13.75 million raise, keeping underachieving Gavin Floyd and giving him an extra $2.5 million, and boosting the salaries of Adam by $1 million, an aging Paulie by $1.5 million and an aging Alexei by $2 million." Along with that, we're going to hand out a generous 3 year contract to the relatively unknown Jeff Keppinger and let one of the final fan favorites from 2005 in AJ Pierzynski leave for someone who's likely to hit .220 and strike out 35-40% of the time... About the ONLY thing they did right was saving money on Peavy and bringing in Gillaspie. In retrospect, the tiny $500K gamble on Lindstrom might pay off, too.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 08:51 AM) Cripes...if something happens to Crain that would really suck cause they should be able to get something really really good for him. It would be fitting with how this season has gone. With Floyd, Peavy, Beckham, Konerko...

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 08:32 AM) IIRC all of their guys last year were in that 200 to 300k range. Johan Cruz was $450K.

QUOTE (balfanman @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 08:17 AM) I know this is kind of a longshot, but if I had to pick one player that J. T. could help the most with hitting I would pick.........drum roll please..... Jordan Danks. Again, nothing factual, just a guess. Would prefer it be Dayan...unfortunately, they have something in common, taking massive, 110% power cuts at pitches. And being a lefty, perhaps he can help Conor with his power stroke, although I don't think you should mess too much with how he's approaching at-bats right now, as he has perhaps the best, most compact swing on the major league team right now.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:54 AM) And outside of Konerko hitting the wall, this is what has killed us this year. It's game after game after game. The pitching staff would look a ton better in the stats if the mental mistakes were happening at the same rate they happened last year, and this was something that I don't know how any GM could have predicted in the offseason. This team plays with the level of focus and discipline they had last year, this team is looking to add players in the next month and not subtract, so no, don't tell me "This team in the offseason wasn't set up to compete". I'll concede they might be around .500, +/- 1 or 2 games, but with the caveat being that version of "within striking distance" would feel more like 1997 than 2003. And you didn't take into account Ventura "regressing" as a manager instead of taking a step forward...and how much the positives were more attributable to Ozzie's absence and the end of the KW/Guillen feud than anything that Ventura was specifically doing well.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:54 AM) I think all this year has verified for us is that Johnson can hang. Next year is going to be far more important. He's put up better numbers at an older age and a lower level than Brandon Short. Short has become a non-prospect. Injuries, and the fact that's just not ever going to be a true power hitter, really derailed his prospect status.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:07 AM) I have read a few DM2 reviews that said it is a good movie, not as good as the first, but still fun. I have yet to read any reviews that destroyed it Destroyed perhaps isn't the right adjective. Just disappointed and let down, as the first one was so clever, especially the interplay with the girls and GRU as the movie wore on...it was totally different approach that had never been done in quite that same way before (and yes, Megamind kind of was a copy of that concept). So it would be more fair to put it under that same category as Cars 2 and Kung Fu Panda 2, not box offices failures or financial disasters (like the Lone Ranger movie will likely be)...but critical/creative disappointments. Gru, the bald and beetle-browed rascal hero of Despicable Me 2, is an infectious imp — as voiced by Steve Carell, he’s like Uncle Fester with the personality of Nikita Khrushchev. But in the first Despicable Me (2010), he was a supervillain with a grand plan (he wanted to steal the moon), and in the surprisingly toothless sequel, he has been neutered into a boring nice guy. The co-directors, Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, create a seductively tactile computer-animated landscape in which gentle slapstick rules the day. For some reason, though, they have mostly left out the flashes of egomaniacal dastardliness that even a movie for kids can thrive on (e.g., the far superior Will Ferrell animation Megamind). Kristen Wiig voices Lucy, the Anti-Villain League agent who has a crush on Gru and recruits him to be a spy. You keep waiting for Wiig to display some of her flaked-out inspiration, but she, too, has been given almost nothing to play but sweetness and light. The best thing in the movie is the army of chattery yellow minions who are injected with a serum that transforms them into gnashing purple beasties. By the end, every child in the audience will want his or her own monster-minion toy. Adults will just regret the way that Despicable Me 2 betrays the original film’s devotion to bad-guy gaiety. C www.ew.com

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:36 AM) Like I said, this white sox team could very readily have been competitive this year even with Flowers not putting up AJ's numbers last year. They were a disaster at 3b last year. Keppinger was supposed to improve on that. Their pitching has been better than last year (same ERA with a much worse defense). A lot of things have gone bad, injuries and guys not developing, but the combination of the defense/pathetically embarrasing sloppy play and Konerko finally getting old are the 2 that I point to as really killing this team. If you put those 2 things back where they were last year, IMO this team has a winning record right now and is hoping Peavy comes back to make a solid run to push them into contention. And the way Conor Gillaspie has recovered and started showing some more punch, there might be a 75-100 point shift in favor of the 3B production this year overall compared to last year. You have to add the fact that despite missing 2-3 weeks, Viciedo's going to come nowhere close to 25 homers. He might end up with 15-18. A ton of it's not easily measured in stats or box scores but just that general category of mental/physical mistakes and extra outs given up that other teams are taking advantage of.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:39 AM) Isn't left field a little more than 60 yards away from the 1B stands? Watch the video of that catch and tell me how many yards or feet you think he covered from start to finish... And yes, he's going to be playing RF sometimes until they can figure out what to do with Crawford and Ethier. They're minting money out there, so who knows, maybe they won't even trade Ethier or try to add a SS and shift Hanley Ramirez back to 3B. (And Uribe's been playing much better recently with Kemp and Hanley back, probably not a coincidence). The best alignment's Kemp in CF, Crawford in LF and Puig in RF, IMO.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:31 AM) There's a very good set of reasons why the White Sox shouldn't be mixing in other guys getting starts. They have a number of guys on the big league roster who need innings. Santiago, Quintana, Danks all absolutely need innings. Like him or not, Axelrod could benefit from more MLB level work as well. All of those guys could use additional innings this year to get stretched out and prepared for next year. Sale, yes we have to be careful with him, I totally agree, but if we want him to turn into a 200 inning+ a year pitcher, he's going to have to pitch some innings too. Don't want to cut him back too much; his arm needs to get used to a good workload. I was under the assumption we'd be blowing another spot in the rotation by trading Jake Peavy before the deadline. Maybe Hahn holds onto him and they TRY to market 2014 as a competitive season, we'll see. And I'm going to have to disagree about needing to see anything more out of Axelrod. We're unlikely to get much of anything in return or trade (kind of like Viciedo at this point), but he might need to be an innings eater next year if Peavy/Santiago/Quintana/Danks are traded and/or Erik Johnson proves not to be ready. There's always a 25% chance they can trade Danks instead of Peavy, and we should be all for that.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:33 AM) Maybe he is a long-lost son from another mother? That's starting to sound like a bad Adam Sandler screenplay that somehow gets produced simply because Sandler's involved and nobody has the courage to say no to his face...

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 06:46 AM) I wasn't implying he would win the ROY or MVP. I was saying that the start of the seasons were similar with the fantastic stats. He needs to show it over a much longer period of time. How many teams has he even seen twice let alone three or four times. I'll just say this, and I've watched about 50% of his ab's now. The adjustment by the league to him has been to throw him sliders and cutters down and away, getting him to fish out of the zone and preying upon his aggressiveness/impatience (4 walks still) and lack of strike zone command. With that said, he's adjusted right back. Six of his eight homers have been to the opposite field. He has moved a BIT closer to the plate than when he first came up, but that's the only difference I've noticed. On one of his GW-RBI's, he still was able to yank/get around a slider low and away off the plate and actually pull it on the ground between 3B and SS. Even with shorter arms for someone of his height, he has the frame to cover even five inches outside if he needs to. Basically, he's the anti-Dunn. The shift other teams have been using is to play him like a LH pull hitter. Eventually, they'll take the other track and bust him inside with fastballs, once again, off the plate, and see what damage he does there...as his stroke has been that inside-out opposite field one, except for hanging offspeed stuff over the plate that he's lift-pulled to left.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:22 AM) Puig's BABIP currently stands at .513. If he sustains that, maybe he is Roberto Clemente Jr. That would be bad. Both of his sons were pretty much terrible ballplayers, although they've both done a ton of work for charity and the Roberto Clemente Sports City in San Juan.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:25 AM) I tell you what, you give me 20% of your yearly earnings and I'll agree that $20 million+ payroll is just a semantic difference. But your argument sounds like a Chris Rongey "spin" argument, not one that most Sox fans would bite on.

Since this thing's basically over, there's no reason they shouldn't give Rienzo and Simon Castro some spot stats in July/August, and Erik Johnson in September, unless they decide his workload's been increased too much and shut him down.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 06:39 AM) They upped the payroll by more than $20 million over last season. Semantics, Balta. A lot of automatic salary increases kicked in, like John Danks or Alexei Ramirez, for example. If you walked around the stadium and asked 1000 fans randomly did the White Sox improve themselves, what would they have said? Well, we added that Jeff Keppinger fellow (he's not even really a starter, is he?) and we re-upped Jake Peavy to a fair salary (lower than before) and finally, we didn't want to pay AJ at his age and coming for the anomalous 2012 season so we finally decided it was right and fair to give Tyler Flowers a shot.... Well, we can go player by player and look at WHY the payroll increased, but nobody believed the talent or the ability to compete vis a vis the Tigers had increased, and that's the only thing that really matters, perception.

QUOTE (Lemon_44 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 05:25 AM) I was looking at some teams and I noticed the Rockies are screaming for starting pitching. I think a healthy Peavy would be a perfect fir for that team as they need an ace and don't look to have a veteran leader. They have Oswalt, Peavy's buddy, but he has been terrible. I don't know too much about their younger players. Two young guys that are putting up good numbers, and I don't know if they are considered cornerstone players or are being helped by playing in Coors field, are Willin Rosario and Nolan Arenado. Is it reasonable to think a deal involving Peavy could land one, or even both (with additions from the Sox) in a trade? They're definitely not going to trade Arenado. He's their cornerstone 3B of the future.

Jeff Passan, yahoo.com/sports It was time for a boat chase, the sort they craved. Months idling on the open seas left those aboard the Vigilant, a United States Coast Guard cutter, thirsting for action, and in the middle of April 2012, here it was. Somewhere in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, a lookout on the top deck spotted a speedboat in the distance. "I’ve got a contact," he said, and for Chris Hoschak, the officer on deck, that meant one thing: Get a team ready. He summoned Colin Burr, who had just qualified to drive the Coast Guard's Over the Horizon-IV boats that hunt bogeys in open water space. Before boarding, Burr and four others mounted up: body armor, gun belts and a cache of guns in case it was drug smugglers, which everyone figured because go-fast boats tend to traffic product instead of humans. The chase didn't last long. Maybe five or 10 minutes. Turned out the boat wasn't all that fast. Still, when it stopped, Burr approached with caution. Their assumption was wrong. There were no drugs. Just people, a dozen or so, attempting a defection from Cuba. The driver was an American. So was his partner. An older man was onboard. He was the leader of the passengers, most of whom looked in their early 20s, including another man who drew special attention. He was much bigger than the rest, dressed in a raggedy shirt, shorts and flip-flops. Burr drove the group back to the Vigilant, three or four at a time. They ascended a 20-foot ladder, where Hoschak and others awaited to start processing them. The standard procedure for all migrants, as the Coast Guard refers to them, is to move to the stern of the boat, where they're frisked, given wristbands, white jumpsuits, a shower and some food. Some migrants are combative, knowing the Coast Guard almost always returns them to the place from which they so desperately want to escape, and others say nothing. This group was cordial and cooperative. When a processing officer approached the big man, the first thing he asked was for his name. "Yasiel," he said. One of the most amazing things about Yasiel Puig's rapid rise to superstardom over the last month with the Los Angeles Dodgers is that his adoring masses know next to nothing about him. They buy his No. 66 jersey and bellow at the throws he makes from the outfield and gawk at his monster home runs, and that is enough because his game is so wondrous. If it seems as though Puig materialized from nowhere and became one of the biggest things in baseball overnight, it's because he did. The first 21 years of his life remain almost a complete secret. Part of Puig's intrigue stems from that mystery. Baseball demigods don’t just appear out of nowhere. Even Cubans who defect arrive with some sort of a backstory. Puig is an anomaly: a burgeoning legend without a past. Except for the one those on the Vigilant now know. Every year, thousands of refugees escape from Cuba to make a new life in the United States. They are doctors and lawyers and laborers and students, people who yearn for freedom and are willing to risk their lives for it. Since January 2000, at least 200 Cubans have died trying to defect, according to Gabe Somma, a public-affairs officer for the Coast Guard. In that same time, Coast Guard cutters have interdicted more than 20,000 others before they made it to the U.S. The Vigilant has intercepted hundreds of boats and thousands of people. From drug seizures to enforcing fishing laws, the 77 men and women on the 210-foot ship are the shepherds of the Southeast, patrolling the waters for illegal activity. Migrant enforcement represents one of the most conflicting parts of their job. Coasties recognize they’re denying liberties to people who no longer can stomach living on an island stuck in the 1960s after the U.S. embargo. It is a job they believe somebody must do, even when it means returning to Cuba a baseball player whose potential seems limitless, especially after a debut month in which he batted .436 with seven home runs and 16 RBIs. The last player with as many as 44 hits in his first major league month: Joe DiMaggio in 1936. While the Coast Guard declined to release specific information about the interdiction of Puig's boat, conversations with six men aboard the Vigilant at the time gave Yahoo! Sports an in-depth look into a nearly two-week sliver of Puig's life. Though this was not his final voyage, it offers the greatest insight yet of his tortuous journey to Dodger Stadium. "He stood out from the group," Hoschak said. "The conditions he was in on that boat were terrible. He's got his stuff in a garbage bag. Not really enough food. You can tell." As Hoschak dropped off the migrant boat along with the two Americans at the nearest safe haven in Haiti, word began to filter around the Vigilant that Puig was a ballplayer. Two months earlier, Yoenis Cespedes had signed for $36 million with the Oakland A's after defecting from Cuba. And the baseball fans on the cutter heard about the recent defection of outfielder Jorge Soler, who would secure a $30 million deal with the Cubs. Puig was just a name. He looked the part, but so do plenty of others who can't hit a fastball once it reaches 90 mph. "We all heard he was a baseball player," Burr said, "but none of us knew who he even was or where he had played." Curiosity finally got the best of Carlos Torres. He was the Vigilant’s interpreter – the liaison between Puig’s party and the security team that watched the migrants 24 hours a day – and he wanted to better understand the man with whom he had chatted with for a few days as the Vigilant held the group while waiting for Cuban instructions of when and where to repatriate it. So on April 18, 2012, Torres punched "Yasiel Puig" into a search engine on a Vigilant computer and perused the results. He clicked on a Feb. 11 post at Camden Chat, a Baltimore Orioles fan site that was discussing whether the O's should sign Cespedes. About three-quarters of the way down the comments, a man with the handle "gio2chat" scoffed at Cespedes. He preferred a kid named Yasiel Puig who had thrived during the 2010-11 season of the Serie Nacional, Cuba's major leagues. Because he had tried to defect, wrote gio2chat, Puig no longer was playing for his team in Cienfuegos, off Cuba's southern coast. Torres then searched for Puig and Cienfuegos, and up popped a picture of him in the green uniform. The face and body matched. Puig wasn't just some kid with delusions of baseball grandeur. Long before he enamored Los Angeles, he was making fans in the open water. Torres printed the picture and brought it to the deck where the migrants were situated. He showed it to Puig and the older gentlemen. "Their faces lit up," Torres said. Those small moments sustained Puig. Life as a migrant on a cutter is not glamorous. Because the Coast Guard never knows how many boats it may interdict on any mission, there are no rooms for migrants. Puig and his party spent 24 hours a day outside on a deck with a tarp to shade them from the sun and one wool blanket to keep them warm. They had access to bathrooms, enough water to keep them from dehydrating and three meals a day, almost always rice and beans. In addition to the older man, Puig traveled with a woman to whom he seemed particularly close and a handful of other friends. One was sick and didn't have much of an appetite. Puig got the extra food. Nobody wanted their 6-foot-3, 245-pound meal ticket to wither away. Torres' comfort level with the group grew, and Puig started to tell him about his life in Cuba. During the 2011 World Cup in Rotterdam, Puig said, he and another player tried to defect. Left-handed pitcher Gerardo Concepcion left successfully and signed for $6 million with the Chicago Cubs. Puig was caught, and Cuba banned him from playing, a story that dovetailed with the post on Camden Chat. Puig asked about life in the United States, whether Torres had a big house in Florida, where the Vigilant is stationed, and what life was like where the government couldn't control its people. It was so novel to him, a 21-year-old who knew nothing else. On the good days, Puig would play cards with his friends and wax on about baseball. His older friend said he was better than Cespedes, that one day he was going to play in the major leagues, and maybe Torres could be his agent, take his small slice of the booty that awaited. "Boricua," Puig said, knowing Torres was Puerto Rican, "somebody is going to take a chance on me, and I'll be rich someday. That someday will be pretty soon." Puig was so sure of himself, even though this wasn't the first time he’d been denied. Cuba had not broken him yet, his talent and naivete a potent enough brew to fuel another try, and another, and another. If it meant surviving under the tarp on slop and sleeping on a pebbled deck and waking up at 0700 hours with the rest of the Coasties, that was merely a precursor to his eventual success. A tennis ball signed by Yasiel Puig during his time aboard the Vigilant. (Special to Yahoo! Sports) And yet he knew he was going back to Cuba, and that the authorities would again find him derelict in duty to his country. Even if Cuba's immigration laws were thawing and the country was allowing more and more people to leave, recidivism was especially frowned upon. They could trump up some charges on him and send him away. He'd heard of other players who went to jail for years and lost their careers. One night, the gravity of the situation depressed Puig. Torres could tell the toll his impending return to Cuba was taking, so he went to his locker and retrieved a pair of tennis balls. He brought them to Puig, along with a Sharpie, and asked him to sign. Carlos Torres was the first American to get Yasiel Puig's autograph, looped in perfect cursive with his number for Cienfuegos: "Y Puig 14." Almost two weeks after the Vigilant interdicted Puig's boat, it parked just outside of Cuban water space. Cuba was sending a boat to bring the migrants home. The Coasties thanked them for their conversation, their companionship, their attitude, their appreciation – for understanding this wasn't personal but a policy implemented more than half a century earlier, when the world was a different place. Puig and his friends gathered their belongings and walked toward the ladder. For some migrants, it is the last glimpse they’ll ever get of something American. "I remember as they were leaving, I said [to Puig], 'Are we going to see you again?' " Hoschak said. “He just smiled." Less than two months later, Yasiel Puig landed somewhere in Mexico. Nobody will say where. Or how he got there. Or who brought him. Or whether his friends from the Vigilant came as well. One story, maybe apocryphal, maybe not, goes like this: Mexican drug smugglers ferried Puig to Cancun and held him with the understanding they would receive a cut of his contract. Puig has not confirmed this. He has not said anything about his defection, any of his previous attempts or his life in Cuba. When asked about his time aboard the Vigilant, Puig declined comment through a Dodgers spokesman, other than to say: "The story is completely true." He has told it to others, too. During a recent conversation with his agent, Jaime Torres – no relation to Carlos – Puig recalled the Vigilant with fondness. It was one of his many defection attempts – six, or eight, or who the hell knows. Puig lost track. "He told me a funny story about this," Jaime Torres said. "He had attempted to leave from one particular place. By the third time, the police officer begged him to leave from another place because [Puig] was going to get him in trouble." For the last 20 years, Torres has been a lifeline for Cuban expats. He fell in love with Cuban baseball at the 1987 Pan Am Games in Indianapolis, and the more he learned, the more he felt compelled to help. While players in the Serie Nacional earn a nice living in Cuba, they make pennies compared to what they could in the major leagues. Even though Cuba has allowed star outfielder Alfredo Despaigne to play in the Mexican League this summer, Torres said the government will garnish perhaps 80 percent of the money he makes there. When Torres met Puig in Mexico last June, he said, Puig "was scared. I remember he asked me: 'Please help me. Help me get to the big leagues.' " Torres had scored the first big-money deal for a Cuban player in 2002 with Jose Contreras' four-year, $36 million contract, and he was determined to beat that with Puig. He didn't have much time. Starting July 2, new Major League Baseball rules would limit the amount of money available for international players under 23 years old to less than $5 million. Torres announced June 19 that Puig had defected successfully, and soon thereafter he secured permanent residency that allowed Puig a license to play in the major leagues, something that normally takes months. Scouts flocked to Mexico. Puig disappointed most of them. He wasn't in great shape. He hadn't played in a year. This wasn't Cespedes, who was crushing major league pitching as a rookie. Many saw Puig as another in a long line of Cuban players whose hype exceeded their talent. On June 28, Puig signed a seven-year, $42 million deal with the Dodgers. And the entire baseball world thought they'd lost their mind. Chris Hoschak was about to leave the Vigilant for a teaching post on land last June when he saw the news crawl across the television screen: Puig had made it. He had made it, and he was rich, and everything he told the Coasties had come true. "From a law-enforcement perspective, you're talking about somebody who's illegal, and it's hard to sympathize," Hoschak said. "But when you hear about somebody who has the will to get where they want to go and make it happen, it's a great story. I don't look at this negatively. He's an entertainer. And he's doing what he was put on this planet to do." Hoschak sees the box scores and hears Vin Scully, who called his first game for the Dodgers when Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella and Duke Snider were playing, practically deify Puig. And it edifies Hoschak because this job he's done since he was 19 years old, the one that leaves his back locking up all the time, allowed him to know baseball’s greatest enigma. Others on the Vigilant don’t hesitate to take ownership of Puig, either. During his change-of-command ceremony June 14 when he ceded his captaincy of the Vigilant, Cmdr. James C. Estramonte joked about how one of the migrants is now making more money than any Coastie could imagine. Carlos Torres still tells stories to the new men and women on the cutter. "Yasiel was part of the Vigilant's history, and we are all happy for it," he said. When Puig Fever seems to crescendo, he finds a way to spike it a little higher. He logged his first four-hit game Sunday. On his Instagram page, he's asking people to vote for him for the All-Star Game, even though his name is nowhere on the ballot. He's not even supposed to be here. The Dodgers wanted to let him mature more at Double-A before summoning him. His baserunning was too shoddy, his fielding immature, his assimilation slow to the life he so coveted in America, as it is for almost all Cubans. Injury and serendipity brought him to Los Angeles, and the All-Star talk isn't far-fetched. Puig is addictive. He washes away all of the flaws in his game with a cocktail of aptitude and panache that plays to the sensibilities of baseball junkies and neophytes alike. Even if June is an aberration, it speaks to the power of one player, the power of a dream realized. Hoschak, Burr and some other Coasties have talked about taking a trip to Chicago or St. Louis at the beginning of August. The Dodgers swing through the Midwest that week. Hoschak is stationed in Charleston, S.C., Burr in Annapolis, Md., and all it will take is a flight and a few tickets to see him again. They want to congratulate him for making it. And so they’ll get to the ballpark during batting practice, and they'll slink up to the railing, and they'll lean over it, and they'll hope he'll see their faces, and in case he doesn't, they’ll know exactly what to do. "Yasiel," they'll say. "Yasiel."

Cubs To Sign Eloy Jimenez By Steve Adams [July 2 at 10:24pm CST] Top international prospect Eloy Jimenez has decided to turn down more money from another club to sign with the Cubs, according to MLB.com's Jesse Sanchez (on Twitter). Jimenez, a 16-year-old outfielder from the Dominican Republic, is regarded as the top international prospect in this year's July 2 class by both Baseball America and MLB.com. According to Sanchez, an announcement should come within the next few days. At just 16 years of age, Jimenez is 6'4" and 200 pounds, and Baseball America's Ben Badler says that his average raw power and flat swing produce line drives -- a combination that could lead to above-average home run power in the future. MLB.com raved about Jimenez in their Top 30: "Considered the crown jewel of the Class of 2013, Jimenez has one of the best baseball bodies available this year and is considered to be the total package. The teenager has impressed scouts with his intelligence, plus-speed, and gap-to-gap power that is expected to improve as he grows into his body." As MLBTR's Tim Dierkes noted earlier today (Twitter link), the Cubs added just over $963K in additional international bonus money in trades with the Orioles and Astros. That glut of pool space has helped them reach agreements with both Jimenez and shortstop Gleyber Torres, whom Baseball America ranked as this year's No. 2 international prospect and MLB.com ranked third.