Suddenly, in the second inning of last night’s 7-2 win over the Braves the story of how scheduled Braves’ starter Jair Jurrgens fell down some stairs leaving the visitor’s clubhouse on Tuesday night wasn’t so funny.

Jurrgens sprained his ankle so severely that he couldn’t make the start.  His replacement, Jeff Bennett was cool with letting the Cubs score at will, but took a little something for himself when he hit Alfonso Soriano in the hand with a pitch.

With the Cubs cruising along at (now) 42-24, the only things that could possibly stop them from world domination are injuries.

Ahh, we’ve seen it before.  The Cubs playing well, only to be derailed when Mark Prior dry humped Marcus Giles in the second baseline, or when he caught a Brad Hawpe line drive with his elbow, or when he…(oh fer chrissakes, I could write a novella about Prior’s injuries alone).

And so, on June 11, the Cubs season ended with the best record in baseball and a two and a half game lead in the Central Division.  They can’t possibly win without their best player.  Oh, well.  It was a fun two and a half months.

Well, except for the fact that a) he’s not their best player, and b) they’ve won without him before, as recently as April, in fact.  This year they’re 9-6 when he doesn’t play.  Last year they were 12-15.  Could be that they’re better this year than last?

But you can’t discount just how good he’s been since he came back from the DL on May 1 this year.  He’s hit .338 with 13 homers and 38 RBI in that span.  He hasn’t been nearly as good in June, hitting .256 with a .318 on base average, but we know how streaky he is.

That’s why putting him on the DL for a couple weeks isn’t the end of the world.  He’ll have two week stretches during the season when he’s about as productive as if he were on the DL.  But for six weeks?  Well, you’re going to miss him.

Six weeks in the course of a long season doesn’t seem like that much.  Except that we’re talking nearly August before he comes back now.  His target date for a return would be July 23.  That only gives you eight days before the trading deadline to figure out if the injury has sapped any of his power.

It shouldn’t, considering that it’s the back of his hand, not his wrist (like in Derrek Lee’s case) and it’s the knuckle over the ring finger (not the index finger, like Ryne Sandberg).  The problem is that Soriano is famously slow to bounce back from injury.  Not the recuperation–no, he’ll work his ass off to get back, like he did with the quad injury last year that should have cost him at least four weeks, probably more and instead only put him out for three.  But getting him back on the field, and getting 100 percent of him aren’t the same.  It took him nearly six weeks after his return from a calf injury to trust himself to actually run hard.  Maybe his hand won’t be as big of a deal.  It’ll give him an excuse to drop flyballs.

Anyway, he’s going to be back, likely with more than two months to go in the season, so this doesn’t doom the Cubs to anything.  They averaged 7.2 runs per game without him in April (thanks in large part to six home games with the Reds and Pirates in which they scored 49 runs).

The question is more, what will the lineup look like while he’s out.  Now that Lassie has shown he actually has a baseball pulse, will Lou feel free to take Fukkake out of the middle of the lineup and put him in the spot he was seemingly born to hit in?

Is that something you might be interested in?

[Youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoX8goAROOw]

1. Fukkake rf
2. Theriot ss
3. Lee 1b
4. Ramirez 3b
5. Soto c
6. Hoffpauir lf
7. Lassie cf
8. DeRosa 2b

Your three players who routinely see the most pitches batting 1-2-3.  That’d be nice.  Especially now that Derrek is showing signs of coming out of his baseball coma.

If the Cubs play Hoffpauir most of the time in left (no safe bet there) you run into a very un-Cublike dilemma of trying to figure out how to spread out three lefthanded hitters in your lineup.

If you don’t move Fukudome up to at least the number two slot, you end up with all three of your lefties in a big clump near the bottom of the order.  Something like:

1. Theriot, 2. DeRosa, 3. Lee, 4. Ramirez, 5. Fukudome, 6. Soto, 7. Hoffpauir, 8. Lassie (or vice versa)

Lou likes Fontenot, we know that.  Hell, we were reminded last night when Soriano got hurt and Comcast showed Reed Johnson putting a helmet on to get ready to pinch run.  That seemed logical.  Reed’s your backup in left.  But Mike Fontenot came in, moving Mark DeRosa to left.  So you could very well see this quite a bit in the rest of June and July.

1. Theriot, 2. Fontenot, 3. Lee, 4. Ramirez, 5. Fukkake, 6. Soto, 7. Lassie, 8. DeRosa

I like Mike Fontenot as much as the next guy, but he’s not a player I want to see out there four or five times a week.

Which brings me to another scary thought.  What if Jim Hendry decides that six weeks is long enough to justify trading for an outfielder.  That thought in itself isn’t scary, it’s probably pretty prudent.  It’s who is available that scares me.

He won’t cost much in dollars or players, he’s a leftfielder and a leadoff hitter, and he’s on a team that is getting its spate of injured outfielders back right now.

Guh.

For those of you who felt guilty last night, thinking that karma had penalized you for the schadenfruede that you enjoyed on Tuesday night for this:

Don’t.  Losing Albert for three weeks (Three weeks?  Sure, whatever.) hurts them a lot more than the Cubs missing Alfonso for six.

The Cubs lost the fourth best hitter on their team. The Cardinals lost the best one in the league.  I can live with that.

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Today is the long-awaited (by someone, I’m sure) throwback game between the Cubs and Braves and the novelty of seeing the Cubs in old tymey uniforms should wear off by the bottom of the first, but WGN-TV is taking this way to seriously.

They’re going to show part of the game in black and white without any graphics.  Len and Bob are going to dress up in ’40s garb (and the first guy to use the word garb on the broadcast gets a foul ball off the roof of his car) and, they took great lengths to get in the spirit of the time.

They spent yesterday morning doing the one thing that entertained boys in the 40s more than anything else.

(No, not JOing to the bra section of the Sears catalog–although…)

No, they went to a grammar school and took turns dipping girls’ ponytails into the inkwell.  Oh, now that’s a hoot!

Yeah, it’s going to be a great day.

Yawn.

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Yesterday’s response to Gordon Wittenmyer’s half-assed “101 reasons not to get too giggly about the Cubs in June” column was pretty strong.  Intrepid reader RV wanted Gordon to see it so badly that he cut and pasted it into an e-mail and sent it to Gordon.

But nobody felt as strongly about it as Intrepid Reader Mike D.  I’ll let him explain.

Oleg had a buddy of ours–guy who lives like 4 blocks from Wrigley– print out your Wittenmyer piece and bring it to the park.  It took Oleg nearly 3 innings to read it–he was reading it between innings naturally–and then he gave it to me.  Took me another 3 and then I came up with an idea.  While Gordo lives and works in the digital age, he might not readily come across the kind of stuff you published today.

So at the conclusion of reading your Dose in paper form, I looked up from my seat–2 sections behind where the douchebag in the turtleneck sat, you’ve sat there yourself–and glanced into the distance to my right, and up, at the press box.  And the thought occurred to me “Wouldn’t it just be a great idea to get this printed out copy of the Dose to Gordon Wittenmyer himself?  Even if he trashes it right away?”

I asked Frank, the octogenarian usher (really–is there any other kind at that place?) to borrow his pen.  By now your stapled, 35 page Dose had been folded and creased vertically and I took Frank’s pen and wrote, on the outside of the printed-out Dose, folded in half:

TO:  Gordon Wittenmeyer

FROM:  E. Hartig

Then I grabbed Oleg and, after the 7th inning stretch, we began our hike to the press box.  We made it to the upper deck and then headed toward the press entrance.  I spotted “Avis”, an elderly white woman, who clearly seemed in charge of the press box.

With Oleg as my witness, I walked up to Avis and said, “This is gonna sound a little weird, ma’am.  My Uncle Ed, who lives in Skokie, asked that I deliver this to Gordon Wittenmyer?  He’s a writer for the Sun-Times, I guess.”  Avis then told me I had to wait for “Keith” who was apparently the attache to the fat fucking writers.

After a few minutes of patiently waiting, your diatribe from “E. Hartig” in my hand, while seeing Dempster mowing down the Atlanta hitters in the 8th,  I started to worry that the game would end without Gordon receiving it.  Avis didn’t seem to be addressing my urgency.  So I walked up to her and said “Avis, I really want to head back to my seat.  I’m only doing this for my uncle.  I don’t even know who Gordon Wittenberg is.”  It was then that Avis more urgently summoned Keith, a graying, doddering old gentleman (seriously, nobody in security is under 85 I’m pretty sure).  I went into my spiel with Keith, who was a nice guy, and I  handed him  the “paper” Dose, he acknowledged that he knew who Wittenmyer was and looked me in the eye and said, “I’ll make sure Gordon gets it.”

Of course Gordon probably opened it up, saw his picture on a douche box, read two paragraphs, and tossed it in the can.

But I’m sure he was wondering why Ed Hartig is out to get him.