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Ladies and gentlemen of the judging pool and everyone else besides, we hope you had a great weekend. It’s Monday-one day later than we normally meet, but we had some extra work to do to get things squared up for our competition this week. As always, I’m Dave Pease, and this is the Prospectus Idol finale.

Whew. One second here-let me catch my breath. I’m a bit overwhelmed with the gravity of the situation. This is very exciting.

We’ve got an action-packed last week of the contest for you here. Our top three contenders have been with us all the way, and now they’re faced with the final round of the competition, and someone’s going home a winner. Here are this week’s contestant instructions:

Welcome to the finals. You are the final three. In a week, one of you will be a Baseball Prospectus columnist and $1,000 richer. For your final theme, you will … do whatever you like. Your topic, your passion, your words. There are no limits, but please keep the length reasonable and readable. It must be original. There can be no part of this previously published. It’s ok to refer to previous work done by yourself, but it must be substantially original. The article must be in by SUNDAY at noon pacific. The articles will be posted Monday and the winner announced on Wednesday, the day after the All-Star Game.

In addition, you must-at some point between now and Monday-pick one of the “Suggest-A-Topic” suggestions and write an Unfiltered-style post.

You’ll have a double dose of content from each contestant this week-an article on a topic entirely of their choosing, and an Unfiltered post on a topic selected from the “Suggest-A-Topic” comment thread. (Because we don’t have a display-in-random-order function in Unfiltered, you can get to these Unfiltered posts by clicking links at the top of this week’s articles.) Please use both of these submissions to help you decide how to vote.

You will have until Wednesday, July 15, 8:00 p.m. Pacific to cast your vote in this last week of competition. Click here to visit the Prospectus Idol page.

Thank you for reading

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fireorlime
7/13
So much fun! You need audio to accompany this final round announcement and emphasize the drama. I suggest Lux Aeterna http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKLpJtvzlEI&feature=related

Anyone who answers my suggest-a-topic automatically gets my vote, unless your Ken Funck, in which case I will take merit into consideration.

Good luck you smarty pantses!
Oleoay
7/13
A great effort from all three finalists this week. What an awesome effort in the race to the finish line! Each article was enjoyable, I learned from, and surprised me (given the author's past efforts), in some form or fashion.

Regardless how it ends up, great job everyone!

*is eager to get off work so he can reread the entries and figure out who to vote for*
hotstatrat
7/14
I'm on vacation, and resultantly totatlly mixed up...
So, Ken, Tim, and Brian C. (my favorites from their qualifiying entries) are the last three remaining, there were no submissions this week-end and two will be eliminated next week-end?
kenfunck
7/14
Ken, Tim and Brian C. are indeed the three finalists. We each had to submit both a full-length article and a blog post, which were published today (Monday). Voting on them is going on right now, lasting until (I think) 11 p.m. ET Wednesday, after which a single winner will be crowned.

greensox
7/14
So do we just vote for 1 here?
brownsugar
7/14
The mechanics are the same as previous weeks, you can vote for as many or as few as you like. Personally, I'm trying to commit to just voting for one, but I've been agonizing about it for awhile now and I'm no closer to deciding than I was an hour ago.
fireorlime
7/14
This is tough. In any other week all 3 of the writers would have gotten my vote, but I think it's worth it to make the hard decision in order to identify a clear winner.
greensox
7/14
I'm going to vote for 1. I really liked 2 more than the 3rd, so I'll have to slice hairs.
Michael
7/16
I voted for 2 out of 3. I'm confident that I'm in the minority. It just seemed to me that's where the line fell if I was trying to differentiate the quality of the final 3 submissions.
llewdor
7/16
I struggled with that.

I had a favourite, so I wanted to vote only for that article, but there was a second article that was too good to pass over. So I voted for 2.

All three articles this week were excellent - I rank them as the three best articles of the competition - and I can't say I'd be disappointed with any one of them winning.
fireorlime
7/16
When is the winner announced?