In retrospect, it won’t seem like a big deal. Given the 20/20 hindsight of perspective, it will be just another visit to the mound by a major league manager. Only for a moment yesterday, it said everything you need to know about two guys.

Mark Prior had dominated the Dodgers all day on Sunday and had done it so effortlessly that the Cubs let him blow by his prescribed pitch count. With a 3-1 lead, and after an easy as pie eighth inning, Dusty Baker sent The Franchise back out to finish the job.

But with two outs, Prior allowed Shawn Green to reach, and now Dusty was walking to the mound with Regular Joe Borowski and Mark Guthrie warming in the bullpen.

Prior’s day was all but over.

It caused us to cringe at Desipio World Headquarters because the man coming to the plate for LA, erstwhile slugger Jeromy Burnitz, had no chance to get a hit off Prior. If you had let Burnitz bat 20 times yesterday, he’d have gone 0-20. But here it was, the defining moment, and Baker was going to go by the book and bring in a reliever.

Only, a funny thing happened on Dusty’s trip to the mound. He crossed the foul line and still hadn’t motioned to the bullpen. He walked up on the mound and asked Prior if he had enough to retire Burnitz one more time. Thanks to the miracle of TiVo, you could go back and see what Prior said. He looked at Dusty and said, “I’ll get him.” Dusty then asked Damian Miller and Miller nodded in agreement. Dusty turned and walked off the mound.

Just another reason why Dusty’s the coolest guy in any room.

Five pitches later, Burnitz was flailing away cluelessly at strike three. The Cubs had salvaged the final game in LA and wrapped up a 4-2 roadtrip, bookended by huge performances from Prior.

Sprinting in from right field was a familiar happy face. It’s been a long, strange year for Sammy Sosa. It started with him getting pats on the back for actually showing up for work on time. Then he got his helmet destroyed by a fastball. Then he had a toenail ripped out of his foot. Then he had a little incident you may have heard about when he was thrown out of a game for putting cork in his bat.

But on July 1, Sammy decided enough was enough, and he got back to doing what he does best. He started destroying National League pitching. Since that day he’s hitting .309 with 18 homers and 40 RBI, and he’s one of those tears that he alone can ride for a long time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Kevin Brown threw three bad pitches yesterday, all of them to Sammy and all of them were hits. Two of them were the longest homers you’re liable to see in Dodger Stadium for quite some time now.

Sammy has hit five homers in the first 10 days of August alone, and all of them were huge. Four of them won games, the other one made a 1-0 game a 3-0 game. None fit into the odd, wrong, dumb stereotype of Sammy launching meaningless bombs in 12-4 losses.

The Cubs come home tonight to start a four-game series with the Astros. First place is three games away. How very un-Cublike would it be to grab the NL Central by the throat this week?

Given that the offense tends to spend long stretches of time in a coma, you never know. But riding the arms of the best starting staff in the National League seems like a good thing to do.

—

Saturday night was our first real look at the 2003 Bears. It also marked a welcome shift of preseason games from WBBM to WMAQ-TV. Our eardrums were saved the abuse normally committed upon them by Hollerin’ Kevin Harlan, and replaced with the sedate Dave Barnett of ESPN college football fame. With him is the now preseason staple, Michael Keller Ditka. Ditka does things to the English language that are illegal in most southern states, and yet he’s just about as entertaining as you can find.

The open included several shots from inside Soldier Field and as weird as it looks on the outside, the place just looks awesome inside. I think it’s time Bears fans had a world class place to watch their team. You obviously can’t tell from a few panned shots of the stands just how close to completion the stadium is, but the grass is green, most of the seats are in and the scoreboard’s up, what the hell else do you need? In fact, that’s about all the old place had that worked anyway.

Ditka opened the broadcast by saying, “Let me reckon this…” Huh? I have no idea.

He likened the preseason to test driving a new car. Let’s just hope Kordell Stewart isn’t a hearse.

How come it’s a big deal that Rex Grossman is wearing Cade McNown’s old, cursed number, but nobody says a whit about Kordell wearing Henry Burris’?

Besides, I think we all thought that Grossman would have to pick a different number. I mean, what more does Maury Buford have to do to get that thing retired?

On the second offensive play, Kordell scrambled nine yards for a first down. Jim Miller once ran for nine yards. He then blew out both Achilles’ tendons and his pants fell down.

One play after a nice fake pitch to the halfback, turn and throw across the field play, the Bears run the ‘wheel’ play up the sidelines to Stanley Pritchett. It’s official, John Shoop is using the playbook from Madden 2003. I should have known when the parabolic mic on the sidelines picked up Kordell’s audible and you could hear him yell, “Triangle! D-pad left!”

Who wants to bet that Brad Maynard is in for more snaps this year than the A-Train?

Just to clear this up, the Colts’ offensive coordinator is Tom Moore, not to be confused with Joe Moore, the former Notre Dame assistant who sued Bob Davie for age discrimination. Also, Joe Moore is dead. Which makes it more unlikely that he’d be calling plays for the Colts.

Hunter Smith is punting for the Colts and Barnett correctly identified him as one of the best punters in the NFL. That got me to wondering where Joey Hildbold is punting, because he’s got a chance to be just that good. Is it bad that Notre Dame has been producing such experienced punters the last few seasons?

Over on one of the Madison, Wisconsin TV stations the Packers-Falcons is on. Two things. The Falcons have FieldTurf installed in their dome, which looks cool, and Kevin Harlan and Bill Maas are doing the game. Muahahahahahahahahaha! Packers fans deserve that.

Adrian Peterson ripped off three nice runs in a row. There’s just no reason why he shouldn’t get a lot of playing time this year. He’s fast, he hits the hole, the carries tacklers a few extra yards every time and the coaches love him. If I were the A-Train, my back would feel a lot better right now.

You know gang, Ditka likes to call us, ‘gang’ a lot. Karry Ling is planning a lawsuit.

Is it a bad sign that with his gray-ing beard that Chris Chandler looks like Kenny Rogers?

Have we mentioned that Bears football is brought to you by Bank One?

After future-serial killer Paul Edinger makes it 3-0, the “most accurate kicker in NFL history” Mike Vanderjagt shanks a 25-yarder.

Ditka says, “Some things are best said unsaid.” Huh?

Chriscussion Chandler starts the second quarter for the Bears and his season nearly ends on the third play when he scrambles 12 yards and gets hit in the head by (get ready for this) Walt Harris. Walt Harris? He must have accidentally run into him. Walt’s never hit anybody on purpose.

I hope I heard this wrong, Ditka sounds like he thinks he played “against” Chris Chandler.

To put Chandler’s age into perspective, Barnett points out that, “you know you’re old when you played for the LA Rams and the Houston Oilers.” Yikes.

Rabih Abdullah makes the run of his life and Ditka compared him to Gale Sayers, and not in a “Rabih Adbullah is no Gale Sayers” kind of way.

WMAQ shows an interview with John Shoop in which (surprise!) he never blinks.

Chandler makes a great throw to Ahmad Merritt in the back of the endzone and you remember that nobody’s ever questioned his ability to throw the ball. Just his ability to remember his street address after being tackled.

Barnett informs us that all of the Bears preseason games will be televised by WMAQ and Telemundo. Telemundo? Who’s calling those games? Carlos Huerta and Ron Rivera?

Jim Kubiak is the Colts’ backup quarterback. Wow. Really? Apparently, Jim’s Naval committment was just long enough that the Colts forgot that he can’t play.

Thank goodness for nat-sound. In the background you can hear the PA announcer say, “Atlanta 21, Green Bay three!” The crowd goes nuts.

On the sidelines Peyton Manning has little earphones on, I’m sure he’s listening to the coach-quarterback feed, but it looks like he’s listening to tunes on his I-Pod.

The “other” Ricky Williams is playing for the Colts, but it doesn’t stop Ditka from offering his entire draft for him.

At halftime while WMAQ had local news and a day with Michael Haynes, the Rockford affiliate is showing a montage of all the great shows on their channel. (That ought to take six seconds.) Included is some MLB on Fox stuff, and includes Cubs highlights of Sammy Sosa, Eric Young and Damon Buford. Wow.

In the second half, Brock Forsey takes center stage and looks pretty good. Ditka compares him to Brian Baschnagel. I have no idea if that’s a compliment or not. But I’ll bet you any amount of money that Brock Forsey makes the Bears.

Troubling trend of the night. The Bears are 0-4 on third and short and threw passes all four times. Sigh.

I know that Rex Grossman’s performance was not artful, he had some passes dropped and two of his biggest completions were on bad calls by the side judge who ruled that the receiver (Justin Gage both times, I think) would have landed in bounds. But you can’t really argue with the results. He made two great plays where he scrambled to buy himself a couple more seconds and threw bullets for first downs. He didn’t look confused or rushed. He looked like a real quarterback. In fact, all three Bears quarterbacks did. Who knew?

All in all, it was just like every other preseason game. You have no idea if your team is any good, and the guys who played the most probably won’t make the team, and if they do, they’ll be covering kicks and punts.

—

Two guys you may have heard of, Sammy Sosa and Mark Prior led the Cubs to a win yesterday.

Sammy is thinking about being a free agent after the season, and Rafael Palmeiro is hoping to keep his streak of never playing in a World Series streak alive.

Stevie Loiaza has 15 wins and the Sox are steaming up the Royals’ rear view again.

Sexy Rexy is his own worst critic. That’s good. A little self-flagellation never hurt anybody. Oh, except for that guy from INXS. Never mind.

Today seems like as good as any to start a showdown. Cubs. Astros. Be there.

Dick Jauron has healthy man love for Brock Forsey and he refers to Anthony Thomas as “Train.” Who knew?

If you’re Maurice Hicks and you’re battling future-Hall of Famer Brock Forsey for the last tailback spot, you can’t drop the ball.

Look, I think we all know that Brian Urlacher is a great player, and all Bears fans are happy he’s on our side. But he’s no Dick Butkus. Dick Butkus may just be the single greatest defensive football player of all time. Mariotti puts down the doughnut to argue that Urlacher’s better. Mariotti, is of course, a moron.

Robbie Alomar is teaching the Sox some lessons. Like how to get paid a lot of money to pout and not play hard and hope you get traded to a playoff contender.

The Bears love Kordell. This, is of course, a good thing.

Sports Guy cranks out his top ten underrated movies of all-time. I agree with two of them. I love “Night Shift”, just a great flick and “Fast Break” is a classic. You didn’t ask, but how can you have an underrated movie list and not include either “Nobody’s Fool” (with Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, etc.–just rent it sometime, you’ll thank me) or “At Close Range” (Sean Penn, Christopher Walken, Mary Stuart Masterson)?

Sports Guy even shares his honorable mention movies, but inexplicably he includes a movie with a full-frontal MALE nude scene. In his honor, I will now light myself on fire.

I think most people lost a lot of respect for Rafael Palmeiro over this “I want to say in Texas and help the Rangers get to .500, thing.”

Gerry Fraley from the Dallas Morning News is beside himself.

Ah-nuld is campaigning, and wants to free California from the wrath of Gray Davis. Honestly, how can you lose to anybody who can’t spell Gary right?

Who says America’s in decline? Teen prostitution is up!

You wonder why they’re recalling Democrats in California? Read this. They’re a little ‘out there.’

A two year old driver an over a grown man. The kid was in a toy car for chrissakes.

The world’s greatest newspaper says that a Baghdad man claims that painting Saddam Hussein cured his hiccups. Well, that’s…great?