Baseball In The Daytime: 8-16-07

Whereas yesterday we highlighted the jumbled mess that is the AL wild card tussle, today we turn our gaze back to the shittiest of divisions, the NL Central.

Leading off are the Cardinals and Brewers under the open dome of Miller Park at 12:05 Mountain. St. Louise's victory last night pulled your defending World Champions within three and a half of the division-leading Brew Crew, which is preposterous. The Cardinals have been horrible this season, and they just might do exactly what they did last year, provided their AL World Series opponent commits seventeen errors a game. Adam Wainwright engages Dave Bush on XM 187, and DirecTV is once again not cooperating with a schedule. Radio's better anyway--these teams are both pretty rough on the old eyeballs.

At 12:20, the Reds visit the Friendly Confines to finish their series with the Cubs. Lou Piniella's boys ave been playing like ass for a week or two, but thanks to Milwaukee's concurrent skid they're only a game and a half out. They send Jason Marquis out today to shut down the Reds' bats, while Bobby Livingston does the same for Cincinnati, on XM 188.

The final day game pits two teams that have nothing to do with the NL Central, although if they played there either would probably run away with it. As it stands, the White Sox and A's are stuck in the infinitely stiffer American League and are thus playing out the string. The pitching matchup is juicy, however. Javier Vazquez takes on Dan Haren in a classic gunfight. I'll defend Vazquez until the day I die, because he's a good fucking pitcher. His ERA is 3.65, he throws a ton of innings, and he's seventh in the league in K's. If his team could score at all he'd have a much better record than his current 10-6. He could also cut down on the number of jacks he yields, but now I'm nitpicking. Haren is just flat out awesome. Tune in on XM 180 at 1:35.

And finally, a note about the Colorado Rockies. They won again last night and sit 5 back in the NL West and 2 behind in the wild card. But Aaron Cook has some kind of rib cage issue and will miss a handful of starts. Feel free to kick me square in the balls at any time. They've traded for Ramon Ortiz, who may be a find in the Rodrigo Lopez, sucked-in-the-AL-excels-in-the-NL vein. There's also chatter about David Fucking Wells setting up shop at Coors. Please. Square in the balls.