OK, I know I've said it before but there's no qualifiers this time. It's a real-life sweep, capped off with today's 8-2 win. And of the Cubs no less.

I “watched” the game on Gameday again today, and it was such a thrill to see all those 1s on the screen when in the first inning the first batter got one hit and one run on the first pitch. I told you Freel needed a day off. And apparently earlier than yesterday would have been better, since he left the game with some quad tightness in the middle of today's game.

That was an adventure on the Gameday, let me tell you what. According to the image I saw, Freel was the second batter in the fifth inning, took one extremely high pitch, and then nothing for the longest time. Finally, Gameday announced that Ray Olmedo was pinch hitting.

I racked my brain, and the only reasonable explanation for why you would pinch hit for a guy after he took one pitch, and the pitch was a ball, was if the guy thought the high ball was intended for his head and charged the mound, which I was very disappointed to be missing. But from what I can gather, Gameday was actually just very late on announcing the substitution and I hadn't missed any dramatics after all. Well, not of the mound-charging variety. I missed a whole lot of scoring dramatics.

So, Reds, if you could keep the scoring going against the Brewers so that I could actually see it, it would really mean a lot to me. I'll leave it up to your discretion whether you want to charge the mound.

Tonight I've been working on projecting how the rest of the month is going to go for the NLC and I plan to post the rather long prediction to pass the time during the off-day tomorrow. I don't want to give it away, but the last three weeks of August see the Reds do some truly fantastic (and entirely plausible) things. Definitely tune in for that.

And continue to enjoy the sweep of the Cubs. Cardinals are going to visit them next, so their pain isn't likely to end any time soon.