Is that you Estrada?  You can't hide up there.If you believe Gordon Wittenmyer (and really, why would you) the reason the Brewers took Wade Miller out behind the woodshed yesterday wasn’t because Wade was throwing 84 MPH or because he’s not any good. Nope. It was because a day earlier, Carlos Zambrano had the temerity to opine that the Brewers’ offense isn’t as good as the Reds’ offense is.

Nobody got more fired up about the comment than tubby catcher Johnny Estrada who said,

”You’ve seen his act out there. Why listen to anything that guy says? Seriously, that guy doesn’t have much etiquette as far as I’m concerned. Zero mound presence. We’ll face him a lot, and maybe we’ll get him next time.”

You will listen to him, Johnny, because he is Carlos Zambrano and the rules of mere mortals do not apply to him. If he wants to scream and pump his fist and yell and jump off the mound, he gets to. If he wants to yell at umpires, he gets to. If he wants to switch hit and break bats over his knee, he gets to. He isn’t just Carlos Zambrano, Major League Pitcher.

He is Carlos Zambrano, Force of Nature, and you’d better learn to like it, because he pitches most of his games just down the road from you, and two or three more times this year he gets a chance to shove your bat where you sit. It’s science. Love it.

Besides, what a pansy bunch the Brewers are.  A guy calls them out for being an overrated bunch of cheese curd eating pansies and all they can talk about is “etiquette” and “mound presence?”

Besides, it’s obvious that Johnny doesn’t know what “mound presence” is anyway.  Did you see Saturday’s game, Johnny?  Of course you did.  What you saw was two of the game’s best pitchers.  Carlos versus Ben Sheets.  You saw Carlos blow away the first four batters of the game.  You saw him drive in the eventual winning run with a single.  In fact, he got as many hits as you did.  Remember when he struck out Geoff Jenkins to end the fourth and you were on first base?  Yeah, you probably heard him cussing his way back to the dugout.  In fact, you were likely frightened by it, given your pansy at bat wit runners on in the sixth when you popped out to Jock.  That’s mound presence.  What does your ace do when he gets in trouble?  He pushes his hat way up on his head like a gas station attendant with an extra chromosome.  Now that’s presence all right.

At least one Brewer had a real reaction to Carlos’ comment.

Rickie Weeks:

“He’s full of shit anyway.”

Now that’s a statement a guy can get behind.

The Wade Miller batting practice session yesterday left the Cubs 3-3 on the season.  All in all, Lou’s happy with the start of the season.  That’s probably because the NL Central certainly looks like a division where a .500 record in August will still have you in the hunt.

It especially looks like that given the miserable start the Astros are off to (the Cubs can continue that misery through Wednesday) and this is tragic news…get a hanky and brace yourself…

Karen Carpenter’s elbow swelled up again.   This is terrible news.  I really feel for the guy.  Boo hoo.  I hope it’s leprosy.

Albert Pujols started the season 1-17 (.059) before homering yesterday.  Take a good look at Albert.  He’s getting fat.  He’s not Daryle Ward fat (not many are) but old Al’s getting pretty thick through the middle.  Much like athletes tend to in their mid to late 30s.  Hmm.  I wonder why that might be happening?  I can’t imagine why.

What the hell was going on in Cleveland on Friday night?  They sat through a long snow delay and played two and a half hours of baseball, when with two strikes and two outs in the top of the fifth (just one strike to make it official) the game was called, and has to be replayed.  If you’ve made it that far, finish the damn thing.  Or at least make an effort to finish it.  It was a combination of luck and strategy by Mariners’ skipper Mike Hargrove.  With one strike to go and snow coming down he went out to complain about the (Steve Stone alert) visibility.  While he argued it started to snow harder.  Indians’ manager Eric Wedge came out to find out what was going on and it snowed even harder.  By the time the conversation ended it was snowing markedly harder than it had been before Hargrove came out of the dugout and the game was called.  When you get that close, though, why not just shoo the whiny-assed manager back into the dugout and see if Paul Byrd can finish his five inning no-hitter.  You froze your ass off for hours, why not give it a shot to have meant something?  The happiest guy in the park?  Adrian Beltre who’d made three errors and now those just go away like they never happened.

Speaking of managers coming onto the field…  Lou has already had a couple of curious mound visits this season.  The first was when he did his walking-yelling-swearing-U-turn in front of Ryan Dempster.  That was pretty cool.  But that one ended with Dempster throwing a pitch before Lou actually got back into the dugout.  Yesterday, Lou came out during an intentional walk and Scott Eyre threw a pitch while Lou was walking towards the mound.  Is this Lou’s way of speeding up the game?  He makes his mound visits while the game is actually still going?  I half expect him to get called for interference this season when he gets hit with a batted ball–between third and the pitcher’s mound.