Raise your hand if you still want Micah Hoffpauir on the postseason roster.

No hands? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Oh, and raise your hand if you think the Cubs should let Henry Blanco go and give Koyie Hill the backup catcher slot in 2009.

Thought so about that, too.

The Cubs gave the backups some playing time last night, partly for playoff consideration and partly because, unfortunately, Geovany Soto had to leave the game after re-hurting (I didn't want to say "injuring", because it isn't really an injury) his hand during an at-bat in the sixth inning, and the result was another loss, 5-1 to the Brewers. The Cubs will need to win both of their remaining games to match the 1945 team's total of 98, which is the most wins any Cub team has had since 1935.

This, combined with the Mets' 6-1 loss to the Marlins, gave Milwaukee a one-game lead in the wild card race. If they win it -- and it's possible they could today (although the Cubs will have something to say about that) -- the Cubs' first-round opponent will be the Dodgers. But there are still two days left in the season and -- as the old mantra goes -- stranger things have happened.

About the misplays that cost the Cubs the game: Hoffpauir made a truly bad baserunning blunder in the fifth inning, with the game still tied. After a single sending Mike Fontenot to third with two out -- and Fontenot had zero chance to score, and Mike Quade wisely held him -- Hoffpauir inexplicably decided to stretch his single to a double; he had about as much chance to do that as I would have, and he was gunned down easily to end the inning. Soto was the next hitter, which would have given the Cubs an excellent chance to break the tie -- and maybe that would have avoided the play in the next inning where Geo swung and re-aggravated his hand owie. What else do you call this? It's not really an injury, because he can play, but it occasionally gets bad enough to have him sit. He'll sit today, and play Sunday. Henry Blanco should be starting today -- he could use the playing time, too.

Koyie Hill finished off Geo's at-bat by striking out, and then let Brewers pitcher Seth McClung (who, incidentally, had one of the better relief outings by anyone this year -- four one-hit, six-strikeout innings) reach in the 7th on catcher's interference. CI -- as Len kept reminding us, that's the scorecard abbreviation -- is rare enough that it doesn't even have a separate stat line; the catcher gets charged with an error. So, when Chad Gaudin gave up a three-run homer to Rickie Weeks later in the inning, icing the victory for Milwaukee, one of the runs was unearned.

It appears that Gaudin has pitched himself off the playoff roster, especially now that Lou has committed to Bob Howry for the postseason bullpen. To which I say something that I often hear among our group in the bleachers, right now directed at Howry: "Please don't suck."

Jim Edmonds provided the Cub scoring with his 20th homer of the year, technically giving the Cubs six 20-homer men (only 19 of his homers have been with the Cubs, so I'd like to see him hit one more to make this "official"). Mark DeRosa, who hasn't played since tweaking his calf muscle on Wednesday, dumped the boot he's been wearing since then and wants to play on Sunday, just to get some timing back, and I think this is a good idea, especially since he'll be facing CC Sabathia, the quality of pitcher he'd be seeing in the postseason. The best news to come out of the loss was Ryan Dempster's performance -- he allowed four hits and a run in five innings, throwing 80 pitches, in a final pre-playoff outing.

Or not. If the Brewers win today and the Mets lose, Milwaukee wins the wild card and Sabathia would probably then not pitch Sunday. (Parenthetical good news: the Brewers' win eliminated the Astros from the wild-card race, meaning the Cubs will NOT have to go to Houston for the Hurricane Ike-postponed makeup game.) The Cubs will have something to say about this, of course. The races this year have been pretty wild. I think we've got a couple of days of craziness left.

MILWAUKEE -- There comes a time in virtually every season put together by a championship team to which you can look back and say, "That was the play -- or the game -- or the series -- where it all came together."

It is, of course, far too early -- there remain two months in the regular season, and we hope, a month of postseason play -- but if the Chicago Cubs do indeed do what they seem capable of, what we have hoped and dreamed for all our collective lives, it seems clear that this four-game sweep of the Brewers in Milwaukee is that moment.

Just five days ago, after the dispiriting 3-2 loss in 12 innings to the Marlins on Saturday, at which time the Cubs found themselves barely hanging on to first place and having gone 3-6 since the All-Star break, that many here were ledge-jumping and worrying and panicking... but the players never did. The turnaround started with the win over Florida on Sunday, and continued through this dominant rampage through Miller Park, where the Cubs outscored the Brewers 31-10 (and it really could have been 31-7, a football-type score; the last three runs were a sloppy gift from Scott Eyre, who hadn't pitched since being activated eight days ago) and, apart from the close game on Monday, were never challenged.

The heroes of today's 11-4 Cubs win over Milwaukee included Jim Edmonds, who homered twice including a grand slam, which got a rousing standing ovation -- and Edmonds was given another standing O from the more-than-half-Cubs-fans crowd when he came up to bat in the seventh inning. The grand slam was particularly rewarding because it happened after the first two batters in that fourth inning were retired easily by Dave Bush; a two-out walk drawn by Aramis Ramirez started the rally, continued with a Kosuke Fukudome double and then Mark DeRosa being hit by an 0-2 pitch from Bush.

After that it was Rich Harden, relaxed and dominant, blazing through the Brewers lineup like they were minor leaguers. Just one mistake -- a HR pitch to Prince Fielder, no shame there, since that guy can hit -- was the only thing marring Harden's outstanding effort, and one of the keys to his success today was the total in the "BB" column. ZERO. He threw 71 strikes in his 105 pitches and it seemed effortless.

After leaving 15 men on base Wednesday night -- and I'm certainly not complaining, because there were baserunners galore then and seven of them scored -- the Cubs didn't leave a runner on base until the ninth inning today, when Mike Fontenot drove in the final two runs with a single and then was stranded. All the runs prior to the 9th inning had scored as a result of homers; Alfonso Soriano, hot right now just as he was the last time he came off the DL in May, hit his 18th, and Fukudome slammed a rocket to right for his 8th. It seems, after a long funk perhaps partly due to the calf injury he suffered in June, that Dome is back on track; he also doubled today and his average has poked back above the .280 mark.

What a special, wonderful season this has been so far. By the end of the game virtually all the Brewers fans had departed, so the remaining part of the 45,346 -- Milwaukee's 11th straight sellout, pushing them past 2 million on their 55th home date -- were Cubs fans, and we all gave the club a roaring sendoff after Sean Marshall struck out Rickie Weeks to end the game, after Eyre couldn't keep the Brewers down. Lou didn't seem very pleased to have to come out and yank Eyre; since it's past the trading deadline Eyre's probably staying a Cub, at least for now.

About the ejections of Eric Gagné and Prince Fielder in the 9th -- well, frankly, I think Doug Eddings isn't a very good umpire. If Gagné had wanted to throw a purpose pitch at Edmonds, why did he wait till the count was 3-0? I think Gagné just didn't have any command today. Still, perhaps the ejection was justified; Eddings did warn both benches after that, in an effort to prevent future bad blood between the teams. The ejection of Fielder may have been more justified -- after flying to left, Fielder came back and jawed at Eddings repeatedly, continuing after Eddings had tossed him. A fine is likely to be in Fielder's future. You can understand the frustration of the Brewers, I suppose, after getting swept in their own park where they had been 32-19 before this series. Meanwhile, the Cubs improved their road record to 26-30, better than it was -- and remember, there are only four teams in MLB with winning road records this year (Yankees, Angels, Phillies and Cardinals).

While this series was a huge statement, remember that 53 games remain in the season and that's a long time, and the Brewers are a good team and aren't going anywhere -- if the Cubs do win the NL Central, it's a pretty good bet that the Brewers will be the wild card team, setting up a possible matchup in the NLCS. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, because there is much baseball left, including a tough road schedule for the Cubs in September (after September 3, they will play 16 of their final 22 on the road, although three of them will be in Miller Park, where they just swept, and three others in St. Louis, where they have played well this year).

So, onward to August and early September, where between tomorrow and Sept. 3, 22 of the next 31 Cubs games will be at Wrigley Field, where the Cubs have dominated this year. That'll have to continue, and the Cubs will be facing the Pirates minus Jason Bay, who was traded to Boston in the three-way deal between the Red Sox, Dodgers and Pirates that sent Manny Ramirez to LA. Make no mistake, the Pirates got some good young players, including Brandon Moss and Craig Hansen from the Red Sox, and uniting Andy LaRoche, acquired from LA, with his brother Adam, the Pirates' first baseman.

Bring 'em on. Till tomorrow. What a week, what a year. Each day, remember where you were, what you were doing, who you were with, when you remember each of these wins... because if the Cubs do reach the Promised Land, you will want to remember these moments forever.

If last night's 6-4 Cubs win over the Brewers had been a postseason game, it would have become legendary.

The game had so many memorable elements -- three lead changes, power galore from the Brewers, clutch pitching from Cub relievers, and a suddenly-hot Alfonso Soriano helping lead the charge with a double, homer and stolen base.

Let's get this quibble out of the way right now, then -- Soriano almost embarrassed himself in the first inning when he went into a home run trot on his deep fly ball to left, only to see it come up just short of "over the wall" and had to hustle into second base, just safe. Fortunately, he scored moments later on Derrek Lee's single.

Another moment that might have been seen as a momentum-turner had the Cubs not come back and won was 3B coach Mike Quade's ill-advised decision to send D-Lee home from second on Mark DeRosa's single in the sixth with the Cubs up 2-0 and only one out. Lee, still apparently slowed from having fouled a ball off his knee a couple of innings earlier, was thrown out easily. I started to have a "Wavin' Wendell" flashback. And when J. J. Hardy and Ryan Braun homered in the last of the sixth off Ted Lilly (just about the only things Lilly did wrong last night) to tie the game, all of us had visions of the power-laden Brewers running away with the game.

But darned if it didn't happen. The Cubs got a break in the 7th when Rickie Weeks threw away a DP relay throw (on yet another Lee grounder that could have been an inning-ending DP); credit to Reed Johnson for an excellent slide that broke up the DP. An earned run scored on the FC, and another one on the error, giving the Cubs the lead back.

Which was promptly coughed up by Bob Howry, allowing a pinch-HR to Russell Branyan.

OK, so I'm not going to yell "DFA Howry!!" here. But I seriously wonder why Lou keeps putting him in these situations, when he hasn't proven he can handle lower-pressure affairs like the game in Arizona last week, and especially considering Howry's flat fastball (CSN's pitch speed meter had that one at 90 MPH) is like raw meat to a hungry power hitter like Branyan. Once again, Scott Eyre sat gathering mold in the bullpen last night. It appears Eyre's on the trading block, possibly to the Rays, Red Sox or Tigers.

You could, I am sure, feel the tension through your TV, if you were watching -- I did -- as Chad Gaudin struck out the side in the 8th inning, and then as the Cubs put together their winning rally, helped out by two key walks to Soriano and the Wonder Hamster, and then D-Lee's double slicing down the RF line, to cheers just as loud from the large Cub fan contingent at Miller Park last night -- they set a record with their 8th consecutive sellout, and of course expect to sell out the rest of the series.

Carlos Marmol looked fine last night in closing, even when he had apparently struck Gabe Kapler out to end the game, only to be forced to throw one more pitch when the umpires ruled that Geovany Soto didn't catch a pitch swung at by Kapler. That was the ruling, right? Why couldn't Soto have just tagged Kapler out? Doug Eddings, the umpire who A. J. Pierzynski snookered in the 2005 ALCS, was the 3B umpire last night. With a chance for redemption, he did nothing. Anyway, all ended well when Kapler flied to left.

Whew! What a night, and that's just the first of four, with playoff intensity, and the Cubs made a huge statement by defeating CC Sabathia. If Carlos Zambrano -- who has pitched very well in his career in Milwaukee -- can win tonight, the pitching matchups tilt into the Cubs' favor starting on Wednesday night -- I can't wait to get up there!

Final note: thanks to BCB reader Hammer, who noticed something that nobody else did -- not the rest of us, nor the players, nor the official scorer -- the umpires called a balk on Ted Lilly when Lilly had apparently picked Rickie Weeks off second base in the third inning, clearly visible when he replayed the play. The official scorer credited Weeks with a stolen base. In the end, it didn't matter, because Lilly got Hardy and Braun to end the inning with no runs scoring.

Ryan Dempster was just outstanding today, and he needed to be... this is exactly the sort of thing that winning teams do, have one guy pick the other up when the team is struggling, and Dempster threw 73 strikes out of 104 pitches and I thought Lou should have let him finish. The Cubs haven't had a complete game shutout since May 9, 2007, thrown by, of all people, Jason Marquis, and today would have been a fine day to give the bullpen a rest and let Dempster get his first CG shutout since July 3, 2001 -- long enough ago that it was against a team that no longer exists, the Expos.

I know, I complain too much, and shouldn't after an outstanding team performance today, a 9-0 shutout of the Astros. Virtually everyone contributed, if not offensively (three more hits from Ryan Theriot, two doubles from the slumping Kosuke Fukudome -- good to see -- a HR and two singles from Mike Fontenot, and I still can't figure out how he hits baseballs that far), then defensively (fine plays by Aramis Ramirez and Mark DeRosa in the field), and a quick and efficient inning from Carlos Marmol. That latter is just what the ballclub needed, too -- Marmol has been so bad the last month, and was so good before that, that seeing him back on track both in the All-Star Game and today is an exceptionally good sign.

Both the radio and TV broadcast teams referred to Alfonso Soriano's upcoming rehab stint, scheduled to begin tomorrow (in a 10 am game, played early in the day to minimize the desert heat) with the AZL Cubs and to continue, presumably, for Iowa at Tucson on Tuesday and Wednesday. But both broadcast teams also hinted -- just hinted, mind you -- that if everything goes well with Soriano in tomorrow's morning game, he could be activated as soon as tomorrow night.

Just sayin'. The club misses him, no matter how infuriating his strikeouts and misplays in the outfield can be at times. He came off the DL in May on fire, and did so also last September. The Cubs really do need him to do that again.

I thought Brandon Backe's little tantrum after he was called out on strikes in the fifth on an admittedly borderline call is going to work against him in the future. What umpire is going to ever give Backe a close call from now on?

Nitpick with the offense, and this is hard to do on a day when the Cubs had 13 hits and 9 runs: the Cubs were walkless for the second consecutive game. That's OK if they're hitting, but I'd like to see them resume their patient ways tomorrow.

Nitpick with the radio broadcast today: I happened to be out at first pitch time, and had the game on the radio in the car. If you didn't hear it, they missed the first play of the game entirely while running another in their endless series of commercials, and Ryan Theriot had by then led off the game with a fly to right. If missing the play wasn't bad enough, Pat then had to read some sort of ad that said that IF Theriot had gotten a hit, some sponsor would have given some sort of donation to some charity (you can see how much impact that made on me, because I can't remember either the name of the sponsor or the name of the charity).

The reason I was out early this afternoon was to see my son Mark's Park District game, a makeup from a rainout yesterday. I mention this because he's on the Astros this year. They lost 10-5 -- a harbinger of another Astros loss this afternoon.

As I was writing this, Troy Glaus hit a three-run homer for the Cardinals and they took a 5-3 lead over the woeful Padres. But I decided to wait to post, and amazingly enough, the Padres came back and tied it up in part because of a bad misplay by Rick Ankiel in CF, but then they lost anyway when Aaron Miles, of all people, hit a walkoff grand slam. Stupid Cardinals. And the Brewers, who acquired Ray Durham from the Giants this afternoon, are leading the Giants 2-0 early in their game. Durham has hit very well against the Cubs in his career, including in the seven Cubs/Giants games already this season, and with ten Cubs/Brewers games left, the Brewers clearly are trying to take advantage of that. Rickie Weeks, hitting .218, wasn't cutting it for Milwaukee and they're obviously looking at Durham as a short-term fix.

Site note: you may have noticed that some avatars and images are missing today, and you may be having trouble posting images. There are issues with the server hosting images; it's being worked on.

So if those leads hold up, the division lead will remain at 2.5 games, and the Cubs need to go into Arizona and take care of business. Fascinating pitching matchup tomorrow: Rich Harden vs. Randy Johnson. Enjoy the rest of your evening. Onward to tomorrow.

Prince Fielder, Yovani Gallardo and Reed Johnson have a close personal encounter after Johnson's ground out

Yovani Gallardo grimacing in pain after the collision; 1B coach Matt Sinatro looks him over

Reed Johnson and Kosuke Fukudome in yet another close personal encounter chasing Prince Fielder's fly ball in the 6th inning

Johnson drops the ball!

Derrek Lee slides into 2nd after a throw beats Ryan Theriot to 3rd (top of photo)

Prince Fielder chasing the errant throw after Lee's slide

Kosuke Fukudome slides into the plate in the 6th inning. This photo clearly shows him sliding in safely before Jason Kendall tagged him.

Fukudome is called out, As you can see, plate umpire Brian O'Nora was out of position to make this call.

Lou Piniella makes his point after the bad call on Fukudome by O'Nora

Click on photos to open a larger version in a new browser window. All photos by David Sameshima