Ok, I think my hiatus is done. I've gone on vacation, I've moved, and last night I got home from 5 days in Denver. And somehow, I managed to schedule my return for the biggest Brewer news day of the season.

Win Expectancy Graph
BR Box Score

First, if you haven't seen them yet, the specifics of the trade: In exchange for a 3 month rental of C.C. Sabathia and the increased potential of a long playoff run, the Brewers are giving up Matt LaPorta, Zach Jackson and West Virginia reliever Rob Bryson. They will likely also add Brevard Co. 3B Taylor Green.

Of course, some people have written about this:

Baseball Intellect has a nice overview of the trade, complete with a review of Sabathia's stuff, if you're not familiar with him.
In-Between Hops likes the move.
Phil Rogers says it's time to take the Brewers seriously again...so he ranks them behind All-Star arguments in his most recent power poll.
Thomas Wayne of Dugout Central pulls out the smallest possible sample size and says the Sabathia move won't help the Brewers, based on his 7+ ERA in four career postseason starts.

I think the most interesting Sabathia conversation has yet to start, though: Who does he replace in the rotation? Assuming Sheets and Suppan are safe, and Dave Bush is similarly safe based on his recent performances and Ned Yost's man-crush on him, then we're down to Seth McClung and Manny Parra. In the Fanposts, Badgermaniac suggests platooning them. What do you think?

A semi-related note: The Biz of Baseball has made a list of six GMs on the hot seat. If this move doesn't work out and Doug Melvin traded a large chunk of the future for a 3 month rental on a team that misses the playoffs, he'll likely be on lists like that next season.

Also, while I doubt he'll slide directly into Sabathia's spot in the rotation, the Indians signed Jeff Weaver yesterday.

Are the Brewers done dealing? Buster Olney, via The Brew Town Beat, says the answer may be no. They're reportedly still talking to the Padres about Randy Wolf and Greg Maddux.

Somehow overshadowed in all of this: The Brewers finished a 3-game sweep of the Pirates yesterday, and J.J. Hardy is hitting .468/.507/1.000 in his last 15 games with 9 doubles, 8 HR and 19 RBI.

All told, the last 24 hours have certainly been more interesting than sitting on the roof.

On injuries:

Braves reliever Manny Acosta injured his hamstring running out a sac bunt and has been DL'ed.
Braves P Jeff Bennett is on the DL after injuring himself throwing to first.
Lance Berkman missed yesterday's game with what sounds like a pretty nasty eye condition.
A's SS Bobby Crosby is on the DL with a strained hamstring.
D-Backs RP Juan Cruz is on the DL with a strained oblique.
Johnny Damon is on the DL for the first time in his career after injuring his shoulder colliding with the wall Friday.
Nats OF Elijah Dukes will be out 4-6 weeks after having arthroscopic surgery to repair damage to his patella.
Phillies reliever Tom Gordon is on the DL with elbow inflammation.
Orlando Hernandez pitched four rehab innings yesterday. It's unclear whether he threw the banana.
Reds OF Norris Hopper will miss the rest of the season after undergoing Tommy John surgery.
Braves IF Omar Infante is on the DL with a strained hamstring
Roy Oswalt's next start is being pushed back to give him time to recover from pain in his hip.
Troy Tulowitzki is on the DL after breaking a maple bat against the wall and slicing open his hand.

A quick maple bat story: Saturday night I attended my first game at Coors Field (worth seeing if you're in Denver, but don't go out of your way to get there). I was nearly reduced to tears by the inane conversation of two young women behind me, who showed incredible perseverance by hanging in there through 3 full hours and two rain showers despite the fact that they had almost no idea a game was going on. Some examples from their conversation, when they weren't too busy talking about drinks, hookups and drugs: The Rockies were up 8-0 at the time. The following quote came after a home run was inadvertently knocked back onto the field by a fan trying to make the catch: But, in the middle of all of that mess, they also said this: My point: Even the ditziest blonde in Denver recognizes the problems with maple bats. Major League Baseball, however, still says the matter needs more research.

Stories like this put our pitching conversations into perspective: Mark Mulder is starting for the Cardinals again.

The Phillies have taken an opportunity to drive up the price of closers, and rewarded Brad Lidge's half-season of effective bullpen work with a 3-year, $37.5 million extension.

Oh, and by the way, I hate the X-Games with the fire of a thousand suns, but I love Darkmane.

Drink up.

I've got a lot of tabs open right now, which means there are a lot of links to get to.  Let's get at it.

• FanGraphs Win Probability graph
• BR Box Score
• BDD Daily Recaps
• BP Postseason Odds: 84 wins, 26% shot at the playoffs.

The big news this morning is that it's official, Turnbow is DFA'd and Dillon is back.  It's disappointing that D-Bow hasn't been able to turn it around, but I do think it's well past time we cut our losses here.  One interesting thought that has been popping up a little bit lately is that Melvin is too slow to cut the cord on his reclamation projects--Podsednik is a similar case that comes to mind.  Branch Rickey was famous for saying it's better to trade a player a year too early than a year too late, and while you get bit occasionally for making that mistake, it's better than being saddled with someone as ineffective as D-Bow is right now.

A few writers at The Hardball Times ganged up to write a massive profile of Ben Sheets, including pitch f/x data, mechanics analysis, and injury commentary.

The Junkball Blues looks at how the Crew has done against closers.  It's interesting work, but he draws the wrong conclusions.  In 13 closer appearances, we've been shut out 7 times and have scored 6 times.  That's astonishingly good, to my eyes.  Would you happy if your team's closer gave up a run or more every other appearance?  That's essentially what we're turning opposition closers into.

Some injury news:

• Troy Tulowitzki will be out for a month, maybe two.
• Phil Hughes has a broken rib , and will probably be out for at least two months.
• Jimmy Rollins won't be back as scheduled, and there's no clear timetable for when he will be.

I'm not going to wade very far into the muck of the Bissinger/Costas/Leitch controversy, but I will point you to this great piece by Joe Posnanski, who straddles the blogger/reporter divide quite gracefully.  And I'll say one more thing.  Bissinger may have been honing his craft for 40 years, but his LaRussa book, Three Nights In August, was truly dreadful.  Possibly the worst baseball book I have ever read.  There is nothing more insulting than a quasi-analytical hagiography about an overrated, self-aggrandizing figure like TLR.

A couple of ex-Brewers notes.  Richie Sexson hit his 300th career home run, and Greg Aquino cleared waivers (big surprise--his ERA is roughly the same as Turnbow's) and is headed to Norfolk.  I don't remember seeing this in an earlier Mug, but Brady Clark is also in AAA--he talked about retiring, but has opted to spend some quality time with Claudio Vargas in New Orleans.

I think the Nationals Enquirer had too much to drink.  Careful kids: drinking and photoshopping don't mix.

Derrick Goold has a nice article about Rick Ankiel and Pat Jordan's writing about him.  When we played the Cards recently, I was thinking about the stories in baseball today that we'd still be talking about 40 or 50 years from now, and Ankiel is definitely one of them.

It's amazing how rarely I agree with Richard Justice.  A couple of days ago, he decided to rip on the Astros FO for choosing Max Sapp, a high school catcher, in the first round of the 2006 draft.  Amazingly, he uses the phrase, "they blew it" to describe the results of a draft pick made two years ago.  True, Sapp is struggling in A ball, but dude, he's two years out of high school.  He's younger than a lot of the guys who will be drafted this year.  And anyway, first-round picks fizzle sometimes.  We're doing just fine without the services of Jeremy Jeffress, who we chose well before the Astros picked Sapp.

Finally, a happy story.  John Wilson is a 53-year-old senior at Penn State Altoona, and a key part of their baseball program.  He's friends with Dusty Baker, too, though I guess I can forgive him for that.

Drink up, but don't drink it too fast.  This cup runneth over!

MLB's blackout policy just about led to a broken TV last night. I was excited for a Brewers/Cubs game on ESPN and had planned my evening around it. Unfortunately, being in the Brewers "home market" apparently means I'm not allowed to watch them. Because I'm in the home market, the game on ESPN was blacked out. BUT, because I'm in NE Iowa, not Wisconsin, I also don't get FSN Wisconsin. As it turns out, it sounds like I didn't miss much.

Win Expectancy Graph
BR Box Score
BDD Recaps
BP Postseason Odds: 82.5 wins and a 14.6% chance of winning the Central.

(Normally scheduled Mug starts in approximately eight paragraphs. Feel free to skip ahead.)

I've been doing my best to stay out of the blogger v. mainstream media debate, because I feel like there's a lot of hyperbole on both sides and, in all honesty, I'm more interested in continuing to do this job and entertain readers than argue about my own morality for daring to step into the world of writing without credentials. (By the way, I do have a journalism degree, if anyone would like to see it.) I intentionally avoided the clips from the most recent "Costas Now" until this morning, when a couple popped up in my daily reads.

After seeing Pulitzer Prize winning author Buzz Bissinger say, "blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty," I was tempted to write a paragraph to open today's Mug that really was dedicated to cruelty and journalistic dishonesty, involving a bodily orifice, an umbrella and an accusation that Bissinger might enjoy it. Instead, I found this post from Sam Mellinger's blog that's a little more reasonable.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before all of this came home to roost. My dad called this morning to make sure I'd seen Anthony Witrado's mailbag on the JS website. I hadn't. Adam of Milwaukee sent in the question that sparked the following exchange:

I'm glad Anthony doesn't think there's anything wrong with what we do. He certainly could've said worse, but he raises a point I've mentioned in conversation but never in this space before: I think the mainstream media is too close sometimes.

Certainly, Anthony, Tom H. Jim Powell, Brian Anderson and others have access to info we don't. Certainly, they'll always be useful as a source of information, and certainly their hard work is appreciated. I link to it multiple times daily. But they're also on the team plane. They're in the clubhouse. They're around the team more than their families sometimes. And that makes it really hard to be as honest as we can be on the web.

I don't want to question these guys' journalistic integrity, because I have no problem with any of them. But I will pose a question: Would it be harder for any of us to be honest in our criticism of Ned Yost, Doug Melvin or others if we had to ride on an airplane with them and work with them daily? I think it would. And I think honest criticism, the ability to speak our mind without having to think twice about who will object, and the ability to step back for perspective is what's occasionally missing from the mainstream media.

(Regularly scheduled Mug begins.)

Perhaps the most interesting storyline from last night's game was Derrick Turnbow's continued inability to get outs, even in a zero-pressure situation. This morning, Tom H. asks if Turnbow should be released. I think, if Bush cleared waivers to be sent down to Nashville, Turnbow would almost certainly clear too, especially after last night, and that may be the best thing for him.

Baseball Digest Daily notes some similarities in the substance suspensions and denials of Mike Cameron and Braves prospect Jordan Schafer, and wonders what it would mean if their denials were true.

Jim Powell, among others, notes a new Sports Illustrated survey ranking Miller Park second in all of baseball.

Over at The Hardball Times, Jeff takes a look at the Brewers brief run with a 14-man bullpen.

The Cub Reporter ranks J.J. Hardy as the second best shortstop in the Central, and wants your opinion on it as well.

On injuries:

Mike Hampton left his rehab start yesterday with pain in his pectoral muscle.
Yankees P Phil Hughes is on the DL with a mystery oblique strain.
Rangers P Jason Jennings left yesterday's start with an irritated nerve in his elbow and will be placed on the DL.
Troy Tulowitzki has been placed on the DL with a quad strain.

Also, umpire Jerry Crawford, who left Tuesday's game because he wasn't feeling well, has been released from the hospital. Apparently a bad reaction to medication was to blame.

On a former Brewer note: Just a few days removed from beating the Nashville Sounds on Sunday, Jorge de la Rosa is headed back to the big leagues with the Rockies.

Looking for work your nerdy friends will be jealous of? The Diamondbacks are hiring an Audio/Video Specialist. Yeah, it's a cheap joke, but I'm still pissed about the blogger v. mainstream media thing. I should've trusted my gut and stayed away from it.

Drink up.