At the beginning of August, I made a spreadsheet to track Cubs wins/losses--both actual and predicted.  When some folks thought my predictions were overly optimistic, I dropped a couple of W's...however, the Cubs wound up doing even better than my original prediction, beating it by a game!  They beat the revised prediction by four full games...

Link to spreadsheet snapshot

So, with that in mind, let's see how they stack up against my (totally informed and rather pessimistic) predictions for September!

Link to September spreadsheet snapshot

Just like with Chris Carpenter...you hate to hear about a person getting injured, but this is something that makes me a bit more comfortable about facing the Astros in September...

 He got hit in his pinky finger by a pitch from Bronson Arroyo.  Sheesh, I thought this sort of thing only happened to the Cubs.  Hope he feels better...but once again, I've feared this guy since his walk-off grand slam against the Cubs in 2001 or 2002 when he played for the White Sox.

 http://houston.astros.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20080809&content_id=3281292&vkey=news_hou&fext=.jsp&c_id=hou

With all of the talk of how the Cubs will fare in August, the geek in me decided to put together a spreadsheet for predicting the Cubs' record, along with their progress:

I'm not much on making predictions, so feel free to save yourself a copy--it's an Excel 2003 file.  Just type a W or L (upper case!) in the Predicted or Actual column.  Have fun, and GO CUBS!  Let's start with a W today!

Brewers lose to Cinci, 8-2...Cards had leads of 5-0, 8-1, and 10-2, with that last being in the eighth.  They give up 2 in the 8th, then, with one out in the 9th, give up 4 more--tie game!

Cards score 1 in the 10th, then after a base hit, a pitching change, and a popup, Jason Michaels, hitting .234, hits a 2-run home run to win it for the Pirates!

Cubs are 5.5 games up!!