Just win, baby.

Beat those Cardinals!

Love the sunshine!

Day baseball! Love it!

Today is, as you no doubt know, the 20th anniversary of the first scheduled night game at Wrigley Field, which, as you also know, was rained out. Shameless promo: if you still don't have a copy of Wrigley Season Ticket, I wrote a long article on the events leading up to the first night game, and the game itself, for that annual. (Order by clicking on the link.) The weather today couldn't be more different from that night. On 8/8/88, at game time it was unbelievably muggy and 99 degrees (and ironically, had they played the 8/8/88 game during the day, they'd have had no problems -- it was dry all day). Today, it'll be in the upper 70's with light winds and bright sunshine.

In yet another manifestation of how bizarre this year's schedule is, today is the first 2008 meeting at Wrigley Field between the Cubs and Cardinals -- one of baseball's biggest rivalries. To put this off for 115 games is just ridiculous. Imagine if ESPN's favorite East Coast teams didn't play at Fenway till early August. They'd have been screaming about it since April.

You're likely to see tons of red-clad fans in Chicago all weekend, as both the Red Sox and Cardinals are in town; the White Sox and Cubs are home on the same day nine times this month. The link above gives some reasons for this, and some of the rest of this year's bizarre schedule:

"It's more of a quirk than anything," said Katy Feeney, Major League Baseball's senior vice president for scheduling and club relations.

Feeney said the 2008 schedule has more teams home or away at the same time in New York, the Bay Area and Washington-Baltimore, in addition to Chicago. She pointed to the Democratic and Republic conventions and the Pope's decision to visit Yankee Stadium in New York and Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., as factors behind the unusual schedule.

If those things are true -- then the 2009 schedule ought to be better. Let's hope so. Enough now -- we have an important series this weekend.

Today's Starting Pitchers

T. Lilly Cubs vs. B. Looper Cardinals 11-6 W-L 10-9 4.35 ERA 4.29 129 SO 65 50 BB 32 25 HR 19 vs. Stl -- vs. Cubs

Those stat lines are pretty similar -- except for the strikeouts; Lilly has nearly twice as many as Looper. Lilly has thrown two good games vs. the Cardinals already this year, and has a win and a no-decision, the ND coming July 5 in the game Kerry Wood blew in the 9th. Lilly allowed a HR by Rick Ankiel, who has missed 11 straight games and may or may not play in this series. Lilly also has to be careful around Albert Pujols (.381/.458/.762, 8-for-21, 2 doubles, 2 HR.

The day before Lilly's game in July, Braden Looper allowed the Cubs only two runs in seven innings, but thanks to Carlos Zambrano, the Cubs won that game anyway, 2-1. They'll have to hit Looper better today to win. Looper's done pretty well vs. the current Cub lineup; only Geovany Soto has done well (small sample size: 3-for-5, a double, a HR). Kosuke Fukudome and Derrek Lee have also homered off Looper.

Today's game is on cable in the Chicago and St. Louis markets. Check your EI listings. Also see the MLB.com Mediacenter.

MLB.com Gameday

Baseball-reference.com game preview

If you happen to visit the SBN Cardinals site Viva El Birdos during this series, play nice. Larry runs a good site and there are good people over there. I enjoy the Cubs/Cardinals rivalry and though I want the Cubs to win every single game they play vs. St. Louis, there's no need to be nasty about it. Thanks.

Once again, a reminder that you can find the overflow comment threads, including the first pitch thread, on the right sidebar of both the front page and any interior page in the box headed "RECENT STORIES IN GAME THREADS". Today's first pitch thread posts at 1:15 pm CT, and the overflow comment threads will post at 2:15, 3:15 and 3:45 pm CT.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

There are a couple of news items this morning that I know you're going to want to dive into, but first, let's look back at some of the better teams of Cubs past, to see where this year's edition might be headed.

The Cubs are 23 games over .500. The last time they were 24 games over .500 was October 1, 1989, the last day of that NL East title season. They beat the Cardinals 5-1 and finished the year 93-69.

The last time the Cubs were more than 24 games over .500 was September 30, 1984; they won the final regular season game that year, beating the Cardinals 2-1 and finishing the 1984 season 96-65, 31 games over. The high point of the 1984 season was reached on September 15, when they beat the Mets to go 90-58, 32 games over.

In only one other season since the last pennant in 1945 have the Cubs been 32 games over .500; that was in 1969, when they reached that mark several times, the last time on September 2, when they beat the Reds 8-4. They were 84-52.

The 1945 pennant winners finished 98-56, 42 games over .500 -- that's the best Cubs record since 1935, which was the last time the Cubs won 100 games.

Those are marks for this team, which is clearly the best Cubs team in my lifetime, to shoot for.

Now, on to two topics of interest: Mark Cuban showed up at Kerry Wood's benefit bowling tournament last night and a couple of players weighed in on the idea that Cuban could, among other things, improve the clubhouse:

"Our locker room is pretty awesome," joked Cubs pitcher Ryan Dempster on Wednesday during a charity celebrity bowling event that Cuban attended. "We get to see everybody naked, and hang out and have a good time."

"I don't know if [Cuban] has ever been in the clubhouse," [Reed] Johnson said. "But I know there's not much room underneath to do much, unless they put some dynamite down there and dig straight down."

Finally, remember that building the Cubs were going to build west of the park? The one with additional parking? Well, it's apparently going to be a bit different than originally planned:

Cubs Chairman Crane Kenney said the building planned for a triangular parcel adjacent to the stadium has been "completely re-designed" by Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell's real estate team to include more retail and office space at the expense of parking.

The new garage would shrink to 250 spaces to accommodate players, team officials, sponsors and media whose late departure from Cubs games would not exacerbate post-game congestion. To make up for the loss of parking, a smaller garage could be built on less valuable land away from Wrigley, sources said.

The ordinance allowing the Cubs to build the bleacher expansion required them to provide one parking space for every ten new bleacher seats -- or about 180 spaces. So, even though they're scaling down the parking, they still satisfy the ordinance. They'd basically be putting the same cars that now park in that surface lot where the building will go, into the new building. We await further developments.

Enjoy the off day. Here's hoping the Cardinals and Dodgers play about 16 innings this afternoon.

No, I'm not making this up. Former Cub #1 draft pick Montanez (2000 was the year he was drafted) was recalled yesterday by the Orioles, for whom he was playing at Double-A Bowie this year (with 26 HR and 97 RBI in 451 AB).

He got into yesterday's game as a defensive replacement. And today they started him in LF and he homered in the third inning in his first ML at-bat. On the second pitch he saw.

Unbelievable.

What, you thought that was some kind of sex reference? On this site?

Sixty-nine is, of course, the number of wins the Cubs have after today's outstanding 11-4 Cubs win over the Astros, the last of twenty games in twenty consecutive days following the All-Star break, during which the Cubs went 12-8 and increased their lead in the NL Central by half a game over the Brewers. If you check the "Best Starts Since 1900" box I've been keeping on the right sidebar for a couple of months, you'll see that only twelve Cub teams in the last 108 years have played 115 games with a better record than this year's 69-46 version.

That includes six pennant winners and the ill-fated 1969 team, which had just about reached its highest point right at about this time of the season, the first week of August. The 1908 team and the 1984 team didn't get hot till after the 115th game -- many of you probably remember the four-game sweep of the Mets at Wrigley Field in mid-August 1984, during which Keith Moreland and Ed Lynch got into a bench-clearing brawl after Lynch, then a Mets pitcher, brushed Moreland back.

The 2008 Cubs are creating their own history, of course, and today they just kept on rolling. That sounds clichéd, but it really isn't -- every day, there's a new way of winning, and new heroes, proving today once again that this is a complete team, not just one or two superstars carrying a club (although Alfonso Soriano can certainly do that, and has been leading the charge since he returned from the DL).

Today, after Jason Marquis likely got all the Marquis-haters here riled up after he allowed the Astros four runs after two were out and no one on in the third, capped by a Carlos Lee three-run jack (man, does that guy love hitting in Wrigley or what). The key at-bat in that inning was Hunter Pence drawing a walk after Marquis had him down 0-2. The Lee HR put the Astros up 4-1, and the Cubs looked a bit flat in the first two innings except for the back-to-back doubles by Jim Edmonds and Mark DeRosa that had given the Cubs a brief 1-0 lead.

They followed that top of the third with perhaps their best inning of the year -- scoring eight runs after two were out; with those two out and Ryan Theriot on with a single, Aramis Ramirez and Edmonds drew walks. Whoever posted in the pregame thread that if the Cubs waited Brandon Backe out, that would be the key to winning, had it exactly right. After those two walks, DeRo hit his fourth career grand slam, giving him five RBI for the day and 63 for the season, leaving him only eleven short of his career high set in 2006 with the Rangers. After another double by Kosuke Fukudome, the Astros intentionally walked Geovany Soto, only to have Marquis hit yet another double, driving in a run, and Soriano capped it off with his 21st homer.

Since returning from the DL, Soriano is hitting .348/.375/.697 with 6 HR and 14 RBI, and the Cubs have gone 11-4 in the 15 games.

Carrying a team? I'd say so. But again, Soriano's blow today only put the game away; the Cubs added two more in the next inning by drawing a couple more walks. They had six in all off Backe, who was clearly asked to take one for the team today; he allowed eleven earned runs and threw 99 pitches to get ten outs and his ERA went from 4.72 to 5.35.

Meanwhile, after allowing the Lee HR, Marquis settled down and allowed only two hits; the bases got loaded in the fourth on a strange ground ball where the Cubs IF didn't quite seem to know where to throw the ball -- there were two out and it seemed as if DeRosa forgot that; he could have just thrown to first but tried for a force play that failed. It didn't matter as Hunter Pence flied to center to end the inning. After that Marquis retired seven of the next eight hitters and might have had enough to finish the seventh inning had Aramis Ramirez not pulled Derrek Lee off first base on a ground ball by probably the slowest player on the field, Humberto Quintero. When Marquis left in favor of Sean Marshall he got probably the warmest applause he's had in his year and two-thirds as a Cub.

Say what you want about Marquis -- he does exactly what he's asked to do, eat up innings and keep his team in the game. He has now thrown at least six innings in nine of his last ten starts, and that probably makes him the best fifth starter in the league. That's a bold statement and I don't have time to make statistical comparisons with other NL fifth starters, so if anyone here wants to do that, go right ahead.

Today, BCB reader Rudey was the one who emailed me first and bought my extra tickets. Nice to meet you and hope you enjoyed the game.

The Brewers beat the Reds this afternoon so the Cubs' lead in the Central stays at five games; the Cardinals will play the Dodgers tonight and tomorrow afternoon and after last night's rain-delayed, extra-inning game in St. Louis, the best thing we can hope for is two more games just like that one, so that the Cardinals arrive in Chicago for Friday's game exhausted, while the Cubs enjoy their well-earned off day tomorrow.

You enjoy it too. Onward in this remarkable, wonderful season.

(OK, YOU think of clever stuff to put here!)

Go Cubs Go!