Is the first he’s given up to a lefty since Kosuke Fukudome pulled one last summer. Glad both of the lefties have gotten their annual non-platoon home run out of the way early and in low leverage situations.

To the 2008 St. Louis Cardinals for finishing what may have been the most entertaining rebuilding year evar in fine style with a season-best 6-game winning streak and a respectable 86-76 record (three wins better than the World Series champion 2006 season).

We saw a lot of players establish themselves as exciting major league players: Ryan Ludwick, Rick Ankiel, Chris Perez, Jason Motte, Joe Mather, Skip Schumaker.

Aaron Miles had a career year and won some hard-to-win fans.

Chris Carpenter and Josh Kinney showed that they still have it after TJ, although Carp’s going to need his nerve issues sorted out (I’m optimistic about that).

Need to finish up my chapter by the end of the month, but I’ll get back to writing about baseball in a few days. I don’t like the Lohse extension, of course. And I’ll grade myself on pre-season predictions and such (Maj had a strong season; I was dead wrong on Hampton).

And a big congratulations to my friends Jeff and Karyn on their wedding this past Saturday.

A story about Matt Clement as told by a Cubs fan at Baseball Think Factory:

In ’03, my cousin and I went to ‘Fan Photo Day’ at Wrigley (where the fans got to go down of the field and meet some of the players and take pictures). Neither one of us were terribly interested (we were both much more interested in just seeing Wrigley from the field, more than anything), with one exception. He absolutely had to get a picture with Matt Clement (who, for various reasons, is his favorite player – so much so, that his license plate reads “HMC 30″ – the H stands for Honest). The way this whole thing was set up, there was a rope and the players would sort of walk along the rope from one end of the field to the other, posing for pictures and shaking hands along the way. It got pretty crowded along the rope and the crowd was probably 5 or 6 people deep at this point. When my cousin saw Clement, he politely pushed his way through the crowd to get up to the front, yelling “Matt! Matt!” the whole way to get Clement’s attention.

My cousin is a big guy (6’6″, probably 280). He gets to the front of the line, directly in front of Clement, and my cousin says “Matt! I’m your biggest fan!” At this point, the chucklehead standing next to him yells, “Literally!”, due to my cousin’s size. My cousin and Clement both crack up (at which point I snap the picture from the back of the crowd – one of my favorite pictures ever) from the joke. It became one of those stories that gets told over and over again and “Literally!” became something of a catchphrase within our circle of friends.

Around this time last year, I’m starting to think about my upcoming wedding and what to get my cousin for a best man’s gift. I wanted to get him something really, really special, because he’s done a lot for me over the years and the traditional stuff just wasn’t going to cut it. I was thinking about getting an autographed ball from the internet or something, but I decided that wasn’t good enough, so I wrote Clement a letter telling him the story and what a big fan my cousin was and asked him if he would mind signing the ball that I sent. A few months pass, and I get a package in the mail from Boston. I open it up and Clement signed the ball, “To Ben, My Biggest Fan – Literally! Matt Clement # 30″. This absolutely made my freakin’ day. I don’t think I stopped laughing for a week.

The night of my rehearsal, I give my cousin the ball and he was just stunned. I mean, he practically cried. He got me a truly great wedding gift (the best gift we got from anyone, in fact), and he later told me that he was embarrassed about how crappy his gift to us was compared to the ball. It’s one of his prized possessions now.

So that’s the story of the best autograph I’ve ever gotten. Very cool of Mr. Clement to do that for us.

Super cool.

What a downer. I’ve seen worse weather at a ballgame… And we got that one in!

Kip Wells looked good, as has been his custom lately. Too bad we had to lose him for a turn in the rotation. Wells has been better against Florida than he has against Atlanta, so I considered whether Tony might flip-flop Reyes and Wells—starting Wells on short rest and giving Reyes an extra day of rest. That would be a bad idea, though. Reyes has made one start against the Braves and was pounded. No sense in trying to outsmart yourself here.

I’m guessing they’ll schedule the makeup date for tonight’s game for October 1st if there are playoff consequences that would necessitate an outcome. This series will be a loss, but we can take comfort in that runs were scored in only two of the twenty innings pitched against the Cubs so far (18 of them official).

Here’s a comment I left to a Future Redbirds post about MiLB.com’s Moniker Madness:

I’ve been a fan of Will Startup’s for a while, for reasons of even parts funny name and solid pitching.

I’m guessing that Arquimedes Euclides Caminero‘s parents were hoping for a mathematician instead of a ballplayer.

Here’s Jorge Poo Tang‘s page. I don’t know what his parents were hoping for.

Erik’s picking Sharlon Schoop to cut down the nets. I’m taking Arquimedes.