It's a great thing for him to have made it, but in the same way people shouldn't have been dancing in the streets when Phil Stephenson made it up, not everybody has to throw a party.

Yep. That's Micah Hoffpauir: Phil Stephenson, a lefty-hitting Cub career minor leaguer who also made his ML debut at age 28. Stephenson's ML career, almost three hundred AB, is about all Hoffpauir's going to get.

Today's Starting Pitchers

R. Dempster Cubs vs. C. Sampson Astros 5-1 W-L 2-3 2.35 ERA 6.46 48 SO 18 24 BB 9 3 HR 2 vs. Hou -- vs. Cubs

Chris Sampson has made three career starts and has had five total appearances against the Cubs. He's 2-0, 1.25, but a great deal of that comes from this game on June 7, 2006, his first career start, when he threw seven scoreless innings and beat Sean Marshall, and this game on April 4, when he threw 6.2 innings, allowed two runs, and the Astros wound up winning after he left the game. Sampson has alternately thrown real well this year (7 scoreless innings at LA on May 10) and real bad (2/3 of an inning, six earned runs vs. the Rockies on April 18). He hasn't faced any current Cub more than 9 times (Aramis Ramirez, 3-for-9).

Ryan Dempster has made 11 career starts against Houston, but of course, the last one of those was five years ago. Against the current Astros he's done pretty well, except for Lance Berkman (.294/.455/.647, 10-for-34, 4 HR), but then again, Berkman hits just about everyone. Let's hope Berkman's 0-for-4 last night is the beginning of a slump for him.

Today's game is on WGN, so available nationally to those who have WGN, and also on FSN Houston, so it should be on EI. For more see today's MLB.com Mediacenter.

MLB.com Gameday (2007 version)

MLB.com Gameday (2008 version)

Baseball-reference.com game preview

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