Probably b/c we are okay with Pena accepting, we know that Ramirez won't, and know that it doesn't matter either way with Wood.

As many of us suspected, the "Wilken will leave if we fire Hendry" meme was a lot of hot air and baseless speculation.

Does Wilken still want to see it through and watch his draft picks grow up and form the core of a contender?

"Hell yeah," Wilken said. "Without a doubt. That was my goal when I came here. Jim hired me, but I work for the Chicago Cubs."

That settles that. It will, of course, be up to the new GM. But (edit) Ricketts will recommend that they keep Wilken on, and he's hoping to stay.

....with the Rangers.

Would it have been impossible to sign this guy? Yes, he's an injury risk. But considering that we threw 20X this much money at Shark, I would have liked to have taken that risk.

Well, there you have it. We'll see if their reverse-engineering of the Elias Rankings holds up, but they have Lilly in the Type A group, by a pretty large margin.

This is exactly why I was so upset with Hendry for the Lilly trade - 2011 is going to be an absolutely stacked draft, and if we'd kept Lilly and offered arb, we would have had either an extra first rounder, or Lilly on a 1-year deal for 2011.

Instead, we have Blake DeWitt and Kyle Smit. Would you trade both of those guys for a 2011 first rounder? Yes, yes you would.

I just saw this on the local news ticker - Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA system has the Cubs finishing 80-82, nine games behind STL.

That's up from 77 games predicted a few weeks ago - I suppose that the Nady signing helped?

Anyway, it looks like PECOTA has changed its mind about some of our 2009 underachievers, who they loved last year. This is the lowest predicted finish for a Cubs team that PECOTA has ever had since it started in '03.