No, I'm not just copying Joe, but it is important to me to share with everyone that this past Wednesday, August 18th, was the second anniversary of the blessed union of my wife and me. We were off in Niagara Falls, Ontario while the Cubs were blundering their way to a 13.5 game division deficit and a half-game deficit in the wild card.

Upon my return this evening I caught up with Joe's work on this blog. I both agree and disagree about Sammy. Mostly I agree. Regardless of what a wind machine Sammy is, he's still got an .893 OPS, which ranks a reasonable sixth among MLB rightfielders. But though it hasn't yet been effectively measured in a statistic, some of the impact of that solid number is softened by the fact that he has, as Joe pointed out, not advanced a single runner all year, not gone to right field regularly, and drawn just 42 bases on balls. When he was "SAMMY," he was doing at least the last two of those things. Now he's just "sammy," but he's pulling in about 20% of the team's salary (un-researched number; swallow with a grain of salt).
*Nomar: .935 OPS for us. He's all I expected so far.
*Put Grudz on waivers now and let the Sox or Yanks swallow the rest of his salary for the rest of the year. Never again will he hit two homers in a fortnight, much less a single game.
*Derrek Lee has drawn 42 walks this year. What kind of crap is Gary Matthews whispering into his ear? Apart from that he's had an awesome year, but not for the reason I expected.
*Cubs hit six homers and score nine runs. Raise your hand if you think playoff teams go to the series by feasting on pitchers' off nights.
*Aramis Ramirez is just 26 years old. Hot diggety dog!
*Barrett's magical stagecoach is rapidly turning back into a pumpkin.
*Who's leading the Cubs in wins this year? Six inning, fifth starter Greg Maddux, that's who.
*No one pitcher is the key to the Cubs making the playoffs. Cubs hitters starting to see a few pitches against tough pitchers is.
*It's nice to talk about whether the Cubs will make the playoffs instead of whether the Cubs will reach the seventy win plateau.

But enough about the Cubs. What I really want to talk about is my anniversary. To that end, here are the items of note:
*Niagara Falls is REALLY cool; definitely worth seeing. The falls have about a 36 hour appeal, then it's just a whole bunch of water hurrying to fall into some other water.
*I love my wife. Also, she's hot. I think. I don't really know--I'm a rather subjective judge. I'm certainly not going to post a picture and leave it up to a random collection of internet-ready geeks like yourselves. So get your hands out of your pants.
*I'm a big dork who misses his stupid dogs every time he leaves the house.
*If the rest of my marriage is as easy as the first two years, we should stay happily married until we're rotting corpses. Which means that either we're in love or that we're interested in the "murder-suicide" scene.

The Cubs have a rough road ahead, but they have enough talent. If Magic Dusty Baker is what his reputation leads us to believe, he'll have them rising to the crop of the second place crowd. If it's all been a bunch of David Copperfield crap, Moisty Alou and the gang will be watching the playoffs with tears in their eyes and urine on their fingertips.