He's got a dog now.

You watch a game, you'll see some plays, like throwing a runner out at first, several times. You watch a whole season, you'll see those standards countless times. But there are some things you might never see in your whole life.

The Marlins pulled off the hidden ball trick in their 10-5 win over the Diamondbacks last night. I didn't know you could really do that; I thought Disney made that crap up for Rookie of the Year.

If the Reds want to make that happen sometime when I'm watching, my life experience would be just a little more complete. If they'd also like to pull an Oscar Robles and hit a pitch off the bounce, I wouldn't complain a bit.

Anyone else got weird plays they'd like to see? Weird ones you've already seen?

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.

For making my afternoon bearable. At 1:20, just as the twilight zone of corporate America was starting to take over and I was beginning to think that there was no way I was going to survive reading any more SQL, you gave me an application window to station on my second monitor, and through that window you showed me several reasons to throw my arms up in silent jubilation and spin around in my office chair, after carefully checking that no one in my office was watching, of course. I am in your debt.

As you probably gathered from that last overly loquacious paragraph, I was at work through today's game, so I don't have much insight to share, just a few quick random thoughts that I'll bulletize:

• The Gameday identifies Lopez as “Felipe LopezJr.” I assumed that was a screw-up, someone getting overzealous with the Jrs after typing in Griffey's name. But I learned something new today; according to this article, Lopez is, in fact, a junior. Also according to the article, he's doing his name much prouder than his predecessor.
• Edwin Encarnación hit his second home run in the majors. I'll be disappointed if the story of getting the ball back doesn't involve a long, rambling tale of a writing implement. Since it was at Wrigley, I imagine someone just threw it back and I'll be disappointed. But maybe they threw a pencil along with it. A pencil with a long, rambling tale. Hey, I can hope.
• No one's had a three-error game in, like, two whole days, so I'm waiting for the other shoe to fall. Casey's due for some errors, right?

Tomorrow is promising to be just as full of SQL, so I'm glad that there's another Gameday show in store. Of course, I would much prefer to be at an actual game, especially if it was one with one of these upcoming giveaways. The Aurilia doll gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies, but I'll take a plaque commemorating Dunn's strike-out record any day.

Oh yeah: on the bench. Javier Valentín, Adam Dunn, Ken Griffey, Jr., and Austin Kearns all contributed RBI tonight, and three of the four were sitting when the Reds were shut out yesterday.

Imagine that.

Bitterness aside about what I didn't get to see yesterday in Cincinnati, tonight's was a great game. Brandon Claussen pitched seven innings and allowed just two hits, which made the game go quickly even though the Reds had scored nine by the time he was done. Brian “Love” Shackleford kept it going when he pitched the eighth and allowed only one hit.

Things started to get ugly when Randy Keisler came in to pitch the ninth and gave up the shutout, allowing four runs on five hits over the course of two outs. Todd Coffey had to sprint in to get the last out, but not before giving up a quick hit to Derrek Lee.

I had just been wondering whom the Reds would send down when Josh Hancock comes off the DL; Keisler made an excellent case for himself tonight.

The big nonstory of the game was the huge shake-up of switching Ryan Freel and Felipe Lopez in the batting order. Hello? That's not a shake-up. Nor did it work particularly well. While Lopez did draw a couple walks, Freel went 0-fer again.

You know what would be a better shake-up for Freel? Now, this is pretty unorthodox, but hear me out here. It's this new-fangled thing called “a day off.” I'm just saying they might give it a try.

Lots of easy, routine stuff in the field, but young Austin Kearns did have a pretty fantastic running catch just a step short of the ivy out in right field. Amazing that this kid just came up from Louisville this year. And he wasn't even listed among the Reds' best prospects. Hard to believe.

With the 9-4 win in Chicago, the Reds make life just a little bit harder for the Cubs and make a whole game's progress on third-to-last in the division. Sounds like the sort of thing they ought to do again tomorrow.

Go Reds!