My brother and his wife had their second daughter born yesterday morning. Her name is Sarah Elizabeth and she and her mom are both doing well. You wonder whether he’s ever gonna have a son so we can all find out whether he’ll pass on his name another generation. Like freaking royalty. Congratulations to Ed (III) and Lisa (I).

My beloved Cardinals got off the Schneid the other night on the strength of a solid start by Reyes, a nearly perfect Wainwright save, and—of course—a monstrous, third deck home run by Albert Pujols to lift the Cardinals into a lead. Then they handed the ball to Jason Marquis the next night, who gave up 8 runs in less than three innings. The belief is now widely held among Cardinal fans that Marquis will never start a game for the Cardinals ever again. I’ve thought Weaver beat him out for the fourth starter spot in the postseason a while ago, but now I don’t think he deserves a spot in the bullpen either. I’d rather have Narveson and carry three lefties in the bullpen. Especially for the Mets in the NLCS, should we play well enough to earn a berth. (Narvie, by the way, is eligible for the postseason roster. We had three players on the 60-day DL when eligibility was set.) And I’d rather have Kinney than Marquis as far as a right-hander out of the ‘pen. I’ll make my postseason roster prognostication as soon as we clinch.

Jon Spencer’s side project, Heavy Trash is playing at Cowboy Monkey in Champaign tonight. I’ll be at the 50th season opener for Illini Hockey with C-Rae and Val tonight. (And maybe I’ll see this feller there as well.)

This list of the best American beers was fairly amusing. I haven’t had most of those. I was pleased to see in the Penn Weizen review that they consider Weihenstephan to be the gold standard for all Weissbier. Will have to try the Penn if it’s as close as they say.

It’s a bumpy ride, though. Makes the stomach turn at times.

My beloved Cardinals lost their seventh straight game tonight, allowing the Astros to draw within a game and a half of the Redbirds. Our best two starters gave up 12 runs over 10 2/3 innings the last two nights. It’s bewildering, to say the least.

Tomorrow, the Cards send out Anthony Reyes to end the streak. He’ll be opposed by an enigma in Chris Young. The right-hander has a reverse platoon split, is a rather extreme flyball pitcher, and pitches better on the road than at his spacious home field. Bizarre.

Three Cardinals have faced Young in the past, two of them are injured, and the one who has collected a hit is one of those injured players (David Eckstein).

I’ll be at Saturday’s game with Jeff Suppan pitching against Ben Sheets. Ideally, the season will be wrapped up by then. If the Cardinals win the next three and Houston loses one game between now and then, it could be the clincher. Definitely need to get off the schneid in a hurry, though.

This rotating phasor demonstration is pretty nifty.

Jason Marquis was suffering from back spasms today and will be scratched from tonight’s game. September call-up leftie Chris Narveson will make the start in his place. (Stats: MLB, AAA)

I’ve liked what I’ve seen out of Narveson so far this month. He’s aggressive and moves his fastball around the zone. He’s done well at inducing double-play balls and he’s striking batters out. His curveball is not a good pitch. If he tries to throw it for strikes it ends up anywhere above mid-thigh or so, he’ll get burned.

My wild guess at his line for tonight: 5IP 4H 2BB 6K 2ER

That would be a very good outing for your first major league start. He showed some poise in his debut out of the bullpen in spite of what the wild pitch and balk would indicate.

While drinking my morning glass of ice cold crushed female cochineal beetles, I read through the recent archives at McSweeney’s and came across this beauty: an essay proposing three new Macintosh TV advertisements. (This was the funniest one I read, though).

Then I saw this clip of an Adult Swim bumper, linked from Wil Wheaton’s blog, which I thought of for the first time in a long time after discovering that he was in The Secret of NIMH, along with Shannen Doherty.

Not entirely unrelated.

Jeff just sent me this link in an IM. It’s a brilliant and hilarious enactment of Emperor Palpatine taking the call from Darth Vader that the Death Star had been destroyed, courtesy of Adult Swim.

Adult Swim didn’t blow up the Death Star, that is. The rebel alliance (remnants of the ousted aristocracy) did. Adult Swim produced the clip, though.

I’d been clamoring for the Cardinals to make their best attempt to pry Oliver Perez away from the Pirates once he really started stinking this season and it was clear that his future was not to be with the Pirates. Unfortunately, the GM of the Pirates apparently was not keen on trading any of his players anywhere in the NL Central—and the Mets offered Xavier Nady for Perez and a relief pitcher Roberto Hernandez—an offer the Cardinals wouldn’t have been able to match. After pitching a few games at AAA for the Mets’ affiliate at that level, he was brought up and put in the rotation for the Flushing Pond Scum. This was a surprising move—one that I considered foolishly greedy. As infuriating as Perez must be for Willie Randolph, you can’t help but with the Cardinals had such problems. Look at his last two starts:

Date IP   H   R   ER   HR  BB   K   K/9  BB/9  WHIP9/6   9   5   0    0    0   1   6     6     1  .6679/12  5   5   4    4    1   2  11  19.8   3.6  1.40

His high strikeout rate for that September twelve start against the Marlins was aided by striking out the side against the bottom of the order twice, but still… Whichever Oliver Perez shows up on the mound, you at least give the fans something to be excited about.

I’d have worked him back in from the bullpen, though. Perhaps the Mets’ rotation problems are so bad that they considered that strategy a luxury that could not be afforded.

My asymmetric digital subscriber line had been driving me nuts for a year or so. It’d disconnect me regularly while I was doing work. The worst was when I’d be sshing to a remote ‘puter to do work on and suddenly the connection would go down and I’d lose work. I didn’t have cable until the 2006 baseball season started since the local fox sports network changed from Fox Sports Chicago to Midwest, which carries all the Cards games during the week and was under contract with the DSL, so I was just stuck with it. I think my contract’s up this month though and couldn’t stand it anymore.

I fixed a Spaniard friend’s computer a bunch of times over the years and when he recently bought a laptop, he gave me his old ‘puter to use as a fileserver or to cannibalize. In the box was a cable modem and that sealed the deal.

Getting the cable internet connection set up was no problem and I’ve got a faster, more reliable connection at home now. The only problem has been getting my telephone service cancelled. I sat on hold with AT&T for over half an hour this morning before giving up. I have to admit, though, they have an impressive speech recognizer handling their call center lobby.

Two of my three professors this semester are out of town at conferences this week, so I aim to get ahead of the ridiculous amount of work that’s landed on my desk in the last week. When I got home tonight, I did some grocery shopping—picked up a strip steak and a 4L box of Tefft Cellars Chardonnay. Back home with the goodies, I was squatting in the backyard, about to fire up my grill. Lighter in hand, I turned the propane valve on and got a blast of gas in my face. A filthy rodent, presumably of unusual size, had gnawed a dime-sized hole in the rubber gas line feeding the burners. This angers me.

On the other hand, at least I didn’t get blown to smithereens. I imagine that was the R.O.U.S.’s plan—he and his family aimed to feed on said smithereens. And the wine’s chilling, but I like the look of the vineyard based on their website. You can take a raft trip on their grounds before enjoying some of their wines. I like their style.

I’ll be posting tonight while cleaning up my crib, watching baseball, and working through this book. I promise.

It’s been a busy time lately between classes, a surprisingly demanding work schedule so far, and everything else. My 10-year high school reunion was this weekend. We took a trip on a riverboat, partied at this enjoyable wine bar afterwards, then post-partied in the first air-conditioned hotel in the US. Good times were had by all, I believe.

As a later addendum, now that I’ve got more than two minutes to slap out a post, the wines we had at Copia were a Chardonnay and a Shiraz from the Beckett’s Flat winery in Australia. They were both Kosher wines—if it’s good enough for God, it’s good enough for us. And it was—we bought two more bottles for the post-party. Beware navigating around the Beckett’s Flat website too much… A few of the pages have obnoxious background audio.

Allerton Park, owned by the U of I, has a slick program in place to maintain the park and grounds. A few years ago, the place had a severe problem with its deer population. So what they do is they hold a lottery to hunt deer on the grounds. On top of that, the hunters who are picked in the lottery are required to put in 30 hours of community service—cleaning the park, fixing up buildings, and removing invasive non-native plants—before they can bag their deer. I’ve never been hunting before, but that sounds like a hell of a good program. The hunters interviewed for the story seem enthusiastic about it, too.

Looks like my taxes are going up next year, too. Ugh. Friggin’ Urbana. I think I may have to have more to say about this in coming days. There are too many irritating quotations from our elected officials in there.

Jim Rossow liveblogged the Illini @ Rutgers game. It’s painful to read. I feel for that guy, although hopefully he’ll continue to do that throughout the season. Football and baseball are sports that work well with semi-live commentary like that.

This one’s from the same source as last time:

A woman went to a plastic surgeon to have a face lift. In her consultation with the surgeon, she let him know that she’d like to have a procedure done that would last a long time so that she wouldn’t have to keep coming back to have the procedure performed again every few years.

The surgeon smiled and told her about a new technique that he’d perfected. “We’ll install a dial in the back of your head—you can hide it under a bun or your ponytail so it won’t show. Whenever you think your skin is starting to sag or show wrinkles, just give the knob a turn and it’ll draw your skin back a bit. It’ll last you a good ten years at least, then we’ll have to reset the knob.”

The woman’s tickled pink about this, of course, and has the procedure done. All is well for eight years, when the woman comes back to see the surgeon.

“Doc,” she says, “This thing’s worked great for the past eight years, but lately it’s giving me some funny side effects. See, I’ve got these bumps on my cheeks and I don’t know where they came from.”

The surgeon says, “Holy cow, lady! How often have you been tightening the knob? Those are your nipples!”

The woman grows wide-eyed and says, “Well! I guess I don’t need to ask you about the goatee, then!”

In the comments to Goold’s latest blog post, a reader started a game in which you guess which position US presidents would have played on a pro baseball team. Unbeknownst to them, the game was won definitively by Cardinal Curmudgeon in a post from before Spring Training even started.

Today’s Illinois at Rutgers game went so badly that ESPN2 (The Deuce) switched over to the the Akron & NC State game after the third quarter. They just lost 33-0. That’s an enormous disappointment.

I’m finally getting a chance to watch the games from the last two nights. Very much looking forward to seeing how Schumaker looked in the field on Thursday and how Narveson looked last night. I don’t understand why he didn’t start last night against Livan Hernandez. Think I’ll do some yardwork today and have a good time watching tonight’s game. Brandon Webb, the best NL pitcher not named Carpenter, pitches for the Snakes tonight, so it should be a fun game.

A newspaper I was reading last night had an advertisement on the back page for this product called AH. I thought it was just bottled water marketed as a hangover aid, but apparently there are vitamins in it, too. A fine idea from a company based in Peoria.

The finest Illini scribe around, Mark Tupper, says: Wipeout! I forgot that Syracuse is waiting a week away. The Orangemen took Iowa to overtime today. This could be a really looong season.

Schumaker will be joining the Cardinals for the ‘Zona series starting tomorrow night. Says the Skipper: “I think an experience like that is great for him. Plus, he comes in [after] playing under pressure, with his timing [down, baby]. And with Jimmy [Woo-Woo] out, there’s plenty of chance for him to play. We’re going in against a bunch of right-handers.”

I, for one, like the sound of that. Skip is no Jim Edmonds with the bat, but he can leadoff competently and defend centerfield with the best of them. That’s two thing the team could use right now. Here’s hoping he makes a good impression.

Tonight’s results are in. (Boxscore here (Use the foxit pdf-reader. It’s fast and light.)) The United States beat Cuba 8-5 for bragging rights, but in a game that meant nothing as both teams had already qualified for the 2008 Olympics. Skip Schumaker, who will join the Cardinals wearing #55 tomorrow or Thursday, went 2-4 with a run scored and was caught stealing. He struck out twice and walked once. Just going off the boxscore, there wasn’t a hero of the game, just good hitting up and down the lineup. Six players scored runs and five players drove runs in. Playing center field from the Phillies organization, Michael Bourn hit two solo shots. Good, balanced offense. Congratulations are due to the US qualifying team for representing themselves so well.

Skip’s final line for the tournament:

15-37, 2 2B, 1 3B, 1 HR, 6 BB, 6 K, 15 R, 8 RBI, SH, SF, CS
LINE: .405/.467/.595 avg/obp/slg for 1.061 OPS

The recap should end up here.

Here’s a recap from the San Diego paper.

Following is what I’d written while waiting for the results of tonight’s Cuba vs. USA game to post after the Cardinals finished shutting out the gNats:

The Padres are insane. If David Wells proves to be a contributing factor to that team making it past the first round, I’ll eat my words. George Kottaras has shot through the Padres farm system as a good-hitting catcher and has long been well thought of by John Sickels. That’s awful high rent for a month or so. I suppose Towers’ scouts didn’t like his transition to AAA and thought to sell high. I expect that Kottaras’ value has yet to near its peak.

This is just really dumb. I’d be embarassed if I was credited with inventing such a thing.

I’ve long enjoyed the History Channel show Modern Marvels. Sometimes lately, there’s an episode where you think to yourself, “Jeepers Cripes, they’ve run out of material.” I saw an episode on Paint a while back, and tonight’s episode is dedicated to Containers. I’ll be damned if it’s not interesting, though. They just advertised tomorrow’s episode: Water. Can water really be called a modern marvel? I already expect it to be really interesting, highlighted by the “purple plumbing” advances going on in California—described suitably in this story.

Here are all the kid-friendly jokes I know of:

What did the 0 say to the 8?

Nice belt!

Why was six afraid of seven?

Because 7-8-9!

What’s brown and sticky?

A stick!

Here’s a non-kid-friendly joke I heard the other night:

A woman walked into my bar and ordered a double-entendre. So I gave it to her.

Ah! The results are in! Back to the top!

One addition: Derrick Goold’s introductory essay to this week’s postcards feature is probably his best piece of blog-writing yet. He and Leach arrived at the same time, apparently. The essay’s got great voice and intimacy.

In Matt Leach’s Labor Day notes, he writes that Skip will definitely join the Cardinals after the tournament concludes Tuesday night. He also says that there are plans to call up three players: Cards-blog favorite RHRP Josh Kinney and Three True Outcomes favored SS John Nelson. Leach speculates that the third player would be either Chris Narveson or Matt Perisho. Narveson started his last game for Memphis yesterday and went seven innings of shutout ball on the way to striking out seven batters. Perisho was a lefthanded relief pitcher for the Redbirds who pretty well dominated lefties this season.

Matt Perisho has pitched in 177 games at the major league level over 8 seasons, and was hired on as a replacement-level lefthander waiting in the wings if Tyler Johnson started to crack. That didn’t happen and it would surprise me if he was called up now. (Ironically, for all the criticism of La Russa for allegedly favoring washed-up veterans over rookies, Tony showed more patience with Johnson than did those same critics.) I imagine they’d rather see Narveson come up to get a close look at what he’s got for next season, when he could be competing for a spot in the starting rotation or replacing Adam Wainwright as a middle reliever in the ‘pen. That last scenario would be ideal, especially if Mulder agrees to come back on an incentives-based contract. [Update: Narveson is coming up.] I’ll add a third name: Amaury Marti. He struggled badly down the stretch, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he is called up for the remainder of the season to provide some energy in the clubhouse and to pinch-hit against right-handed fastball pitchers. I imagine that Marti would find the amenities at Busch stadium to be quite inspiring. No matter what he says, I think Marti’s recently celebrated his 32^nd, and not his 28^th, birthday and that he’s going to have to be rushed along a bit more than you’d prefer to do with a younger player. The beauty is that he’ll have options for many years, and can spend the next few seasons bouncing back and forth between Memphis and St. Louis if they decide that’s the best way to move him along quickly.

After getting an email from C-Bot, I switched on the Sox-Sox game, in which the Red Sox tied it up late and went on to win in the tenth inning on a Carlos Pena walk-off solo shot. Al Hrabosky catches some flak for “homerism” in his color commentary on Cardinals broadcasts, but it’s nowhere close to how bad the White Sox in-game commentary is on the Comcast games. The call by Ken Harrelson for the game winning walk-off shot was delivered in a downbeat monotone, simply: “This game is over.” I mention the game because the Boston starter was former Birds-on-the-Batty right-hander Julian Tavarez. He pitched 6 1/3 innings, leaving the game in the seventh after allowing a home run to Jim Thome and a double to Paul Konerko. He struck out 5 on the night while walking none. Remarkably, Tavarez collected all fourteen of his non-strikeout outs by way of groundballs.

A final note: it was nice to see Mike Rose get a hit in his first Cardinal AB yesterday, even though he’s wearing a jersey number that DanUpBaby would rather see retired.

The United States olympic qualifying team won their first three games in the second round of the American regional tournament to clinch a berth in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, PRC.

Saturday’s game against Nicaragua was one of Cardinal farmhand Skip Schumaker’s worst of the tournament, which says a lot about how well he’s played. He went 1-5 with an RBI, but with two strikeouts in the 5-2 win.

In Sunday’s 11-5 win over Panama that clinched an appearance by the United States in the final Olympics in which baseball is played, Skip went 1-3 with an RBI, a sacrifice hit, and a sac fly (complicating the calculation of his statistics).

His aggregate line for the tournament:

13-33, 2 2B, 1 3B, 1 HR, 5 BB, 4 K, 14 R, 8 RBI, SH, SF
LINE: .394/.450/.606

The team has an off-day Monday, and will play the undefeated Cuban team Tuesday. The tournament is essentially over, since the USA and Cuba will be the two teams going to the Olympics from this region. Obviously, this last game means nothing on paper, but a great deal to both teams. Here’s hoping Skip makes a contribution and joins the Cardinals shortly thereafter to some recognition for what he’d done.

Boxscores: Saturday, Sunday.

Skip had a very productive game for Team USA in their 15-2 whooping of the Dominican Republic. He went 2-4, BB, GS, with 4 RBI and 3 runs scored. His updated line:

11-25, 2 2B, 1 3B, 1 HR, 5 BB, 2 K, 14 R, 6 RBI
LINE: .440/.534/.720

That’s a very good week. Can’t wait to see if he can continue the hottness with the Cardinals after the tournament’s over.

Boxscore

Update: Look at this POS Associated Press story at MSNBC. As of right now, it reads, “Schumaker, who recently joined the St. Louis Cardinals, led the Americans in their first win in the final round of a tournament that gives the top two teams slots in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.” He recently joined the Cardinals? Sounds like the writer needs to install the baseball cube search plug-in. Otherwise, he would have known that Skip has been in the organization since 2001.