Thing One: The Astros are officially eliminated from winning the division. Dude, it’s not even September yet.

Thing Two: Joey Votto is all manner of awesome. I mean, seriously. He ought to be MVP again, but he probably won’t, since the Reds are going to be struggling to even finish the season at .500.

Thing Three: Dontrelle Willis goes tomorrow, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a loss. The team could take the lead after he leaves the game.

I saw this nostalgic look back at Adam Dunn and Austin Kearns on Redleg Nation today.

The duo was going to, if you believed Jim Bowden’s hype, form one of the greatest outfields of all time.

And it was easy to believe in him. Dunn was a tall, incredibly strong young man when he arrived in 2001, with no foreshadow of the flabby oaf he would one day become. Kearns would be his counterpart, a coveted five-tool player. (Six-tool, if you counted his ability to make up for Dunn’s ineptitude in left field.)

Of course, that didn’t happen. Instead we were left with losing years and futile hopes. And a lingering hatred of Ray King’s fat ass.

Oh, and one of my favorite fake news stories that RHM ever wrote: Dude, Where’s My Bat.

According to this story about smiles on Shine, a study of old baseball player photos showed a correlation between a big grin and longevity:

People with big grins live longer. In a study published last year, researchers pored over an old issue of the Baseball Register, analyzing photos of 230 players. They found that on average, the guys with bright, bigmouthed beams lived 4.9 years longer than the players with partial smiles, and 7 years longer than the players who showed no grin at all. We can’t credit wide smiles for long life spans, of course, but smiles reveal positive feelings, and positive feelings are linked to well-being.

It’s funny how just reading “players who showed no grin at all” brings to mind so many team photos of guys who are simply too tough to smile. I wonder if the lesson here isn’t really, “taking yourself too damn seriously shortens your life.” It would certainly lead to more aggressive driving, bar brawls, and other macho nonsense.

But, of course, there’s one dude on the current team who is always sporting a big smile, and is therefore on the fast track to longevity. Don’t give away *everything* in your Twitter contests, B-Phil; you may need to support yourself for a long time yet.

On the one hand, I can’t believe it’s so late in the season. It felt like it just took forever for baseball to start this year, and now we’re down to single-digit weeks of the regular season. On the other hand, I can’t believe the minor leagues haven’t even wrapped up for the year and we’re already thinking elimination numbers.

For Cincinnati, the magic number is 23, which is hardly something to start panicking about now. I mean, if starting today, the Brewers continued winning at their current pace and the Reds won out, the Reds would take the division by two whole games.

The poor Astros, I’m afraid, are a different story. Their magic number is 4. They’ll be eliminated before the end of August, which definitely brings a certain futility to the last several weeks of the season. Hopefully they’ve stockpiled some bobblehead giveaways and other special events for this eventuality.

Which reminds me, next Friday is the Brandon Phillips Fireworks Jam, a “post-game fireworks show featuring a soundtrack of the second baseman’s favorite summer hits, starting approximately 15 minutes after the end of the game.” So you won’t want to miss that (even if you do end up wanting to miss contest against the Nationals that precedes it).

Today the Chicago Cubs did what they should have done about 4 years ago: they fired general manager Jim Hendry.

Cubs owner Tom Ricketts had this to say about the decision.

“We just didn’t win enough games,” Ricketts said. “Nothing should diminish Jim’s tenure here. We won three division titles while he was here. … Jim is truly a first-class individual and we’ll all miss seeing him here in the office.”

Hendry did oversee the Cubs winning first place 3 times, but in recent years, he’d lavished large contracts onto players who underperformed and became untradeable, including Alfonso Soriano and Aramis Ramirez.

The search for a new GM begins immediately.