When Dusty Baker was still managing the Chicago Cubs, he did a lot of things that Cubs fans just didn't quite understand. One of the things Baker did that drove most of the Cubs fans I know crazy was his seemingly undying devotion to Corey Patterson. Patterson was touted as a five-tool superstar in the making as a Cub, but he never developed into one, and instead spent most of his time striking out on forehead high fastballs or flying out harmlessly.

It was enough to make some people wonder if Corey had some kind of dirt on Dusty, and was blackmailing him for playing time. Then when Baker went to Cincinnati to manage the Reds, guess who he brought with him? That's right, Corey Patterson. Now after Reds fans were forced to watch Patterson play all season and hit .206 (not to mention the sparkling .241 OBP), they've come up with their own ideas for why Corey is sticking around. Rumors Dusty felt the need to refute publicly.

There's been a persistent rumor floating around the Reds that Baker's 28-year-old daughter, Natosha, is dating and/or engaged to outfielder Corey Patterson.

Baker finally had enough when players on the Astros asked him about it.

From the Windup is FanHouse's daily, extended look at a particular portion of America's pastime.

Unless you're a Red Sox fan, the best story in baseball this year is the Tampa Bay Rays. By now, everyone likely knows the story but let's recap. In 1998, the Rays came into existence. In every season between 1998 and 2007, they won between 61 and 69 games, except for in 2004. They won 70 that year.

This year, though, is a different story. With last night's win over the Red Sox, they've got 90 wins and a two-game lead in the AL East, a division that seemed to be locked in a deep stranglehold that the Yankees and Red Sox would never let up. The amazing part is that everyone saw this coming in some form. GM Andrew Friedman has rebuilt Chuck LaMar's mistake from the ground up and the Rays are winning because they're good, not because they're lucky.

Baseball is cyclical and every couple of years, a young team bursts on the scene and surprises everyone. Who among baseball's long suffering franchises is next? There are seven franchises that haven't made the playoffs since the turn of the century; the Pirates, Nationals, Royals, Brewers, Blue Jays, Reds, Orioles, and Rangers (sorry Mariners and Giants fans, you've been good this century and that disqualifies you from this exercise), so let's take a look at them and see if we can't figure out who might be in line for the next turnaround.

On Deck is FanHouse's look at the day's most intriguing baseball matchups.

Chicago Cubs (88-58) "at" Houston Astros (80-67) - 8:05 PM ET

When is a home game not a home game? Well, when Hurricane Ike (and Bud Selig) force you to go to a domed stadium located conveniently in Milwaukee for a Houston Astros home game against the Chicago Cubs, who reside about 90 minutes away from Miller Park and will no doubt be represented well in the crowd for games there tonight and tomorrow afternoon. And it's not like Brewers fans are going to show up in droves to support the Astros, who are 2.5 games behind them in the wild card. If anything, Brewers fans will show up and they'll root for the Cubs too. Too bad the Packers aren't playing the Sunday night game ... then maybe Brewers fans would all have their portable TV's handy to watch the Pack and cheer at completely random times during the baseball game and confuse everyone involved.

In April, this guy was their best pitcher and their best hitter. But in September, the Diamondbacks have made him the player named later in the Adam Dunn trade.

It was a poorly kept secret, so the actual announcement is a bit anti-climactic. But Micah Owings has moved on to the Cincinnati Reds after an injury initially kept him from being moved as part of the Dunn trade. He went 4-0 to start the season with a 2.42 ERA. But since then, he's gone 2-9 with an ERA of 7.09 before going down with a shoulder injury. Now that he's healthy, Dusty Baker gets to put him in the rotation (Dusty should be very familiar with pitchers who have had shoulder issues.)

Owings is going to the perfect division, where three teams have batted their pitcher eighth. With five career home runs in a season and a half and a career .895 OPS, Owings could raise the bar for NL Central pitchers and bat sixth.

The Reds have reveled in their role as NL Central spoiler in the past couple weeks, doing solid work beating up both the Brewers and Cubs. Last night, they pulled out a thriller against the Brewers, holding off a late Milwaukee rally to beat the Brewers in the eleventh. The game winning hit came from Brandon Phillips. Immediately after he finished enjoying the high of the walk off, Phillips got bad news; he broke his finger early in the at-bat that produced the game-winning hit and is done for the year.

When it's all said and done, I think Phillips probably has to be happy with the results. Walk off hits are always a rush, and doing it with broken finger leaves Phillips with one awesome story to tell people. He's out for the rest of the year, but only because the rest of the year is about 20 games . With the Reds out of contention, it's not like he's missing much.

Of course, the most interesting thing about Phillips' gutsy hit is that it shrinks the Brewers wild-card lead to just three games over the Phillies, with the Cardinals and Astros right on their tails. According to the BP Playoff Odds Report, the Brewers have gone from a 93% playoff certainty to 73% in just seven days. Today CC Sabathia starts against the Reds, who have won four of their last five against the Cubs and Brewers. Think Ned Yost wishes he spent less time worrying about that no-hitter now?

Coming off a trip to Cincinnati, I have a few things to get off my chest.

Cincinnati is not a good baseball town. In fact, it's a terrible baseball town.

I have to hear about it every time I go to a Cubs/Reds tilt on Cincy -- as I did Saturday night. The Reds fans are "good baseball fans" or "Cincinnati is a great baseball town." I don't even understand how anyone can say this with a straight face. The team that only sells 62 percent of their seats in resides in a good baseball town? Those same fine citizens allow their overrated stadium to be overtaken by legions of Cubs fans every time the North-siders visit town, bolstering attendance numbers higher than they really should be.

This isn't the seventies, and you can't live off supporting a dynasty forever. It's easy to support teams when they are good. Show me support through adversity before you proclaim your superior fandom (I should note, that if you are reading this, you're likely exempt from this rant -- reading Reds articles in September of this season means you aren't part of the problem).

It's not every day that a ballpark worker organizes a high-profile electronics theft. After all, most people keep their cell phones under close watch when they're at the ballpark. They know the maintenance folks, the beer delivery people, that guy carrying the Super Ropes -- all budding criminal conspirators with no respect for the law.

One Reds fan learned the hard way, until this weekend, when his perpetrator was caught ... Red-handed. Bum bum bummmm:

A man who works at Great American Ballpark has been charged with stealing a fan's cell phone while he was working. Fifty-three-year-old Paul Pawkey is charged with theft after being arrested early Wednesday morning at the ballpark. It's alleged late last month, he stole the phone and had been making calls on it in the days since. Pawkey allegedly admitted to the theft.

Of course, had I been advising Mr. Pawkey, I would have told him that only in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City does stealing a cell phone and later using it to make calls not hasten one's entry in prison. That's just not very smart.

(HT: Shysterball)

Isn't it infuriating watching a player do something stupid? There's not much that drives fans crazier than a player getting picked off while not paying attention or forgetting how many outs there are or throwing to the wrong base. This afternoon, Chris Dickerson got picked off of first while walking back to the bag with his head down. When asked about it after the game, he had a simple explanation:

"I was being lazy," he said. "I dropped my head. It was lackadaisical, lazy on my part. It's so basic, so fundamental: Know where the ball is at all times. I lost sight of that."

I guess it's easy to get upset over a player being lazy, but isn't that honesty refreshing? It's a long season, the Reds suck, Dickerson's mind wandered off for a couple of seconds, and he doesn't make excuses for it. I think, "I was being lazy," is way better than, "The lights flashed off of a fan's watch and I got distracted for a second."

After giving up a single run in the first inning last night, Roy Oswalt shut down the Reds over the next six, picking up the win. I know, I know, it was really quite shocking. In his 27th career appearance against the Reds, he improved to an amazing 22-1. That's not a typo: twenty-two and one!

Here's John Fay of the Cincinnati Enquirer (before the win was officially wrapped up) trying to wrap his head around Oswalt's pure and utter domination:

Studying the numbers from Oswalt v. Reds, it's hard to understand how he's 21-1. He was great against the Reds in his first three starts -- 23 innings, one run. Since then, he's been good. He has a 3.08 ERA. That's only slightly better than his career ERA of 3.19. But he's 102-62 against the rest of baseball. That's a .621 percentage. Again, good. But not an other-worldly .955.

How good is .955? The next best by someone with 20 decisions or more against the Reds is .696 (16-7 by Bob Welch).

Looking at Oswalt's 27 games as a whole, he's posted a 2.50 ERA against the Reds. In his 23 games against the Pirates, on the other hand, he's posted a similar 2.57 ERA but has a relatively pedestrian 11-6 record to show for it. Obviously there's some luck at play, but it makes you wonder if he has something against the fair city of Cincinnati. Did he eat a bad batch of Skyline Chili? Did Pete Rose welch on a bet? Did Carson Palmer fail him in his fantasy football playoffs? What's the deal?

When Dusty Baker became the manager of the Reds, one of the primary concerns was how he was going to handle their young pitching staff. Given his history in Chicago and even San Francisco, it was certainly a valid concern. Still, he and his staff have handled Edinson Volquez and especially Johnny Cueto very carefully this year. Look at the team response to removing Cueto after just three innings in his last start:

Cueto complained of stiffness and soreness in the back of his right arm - near where the triceps tendon connects to the elbow.

"It was purely precaution," trainer Mark Mann said. "With Johnny being young, we wanted to err on the side of caution."

I love the specificity in describing the injury. It's like the Reds are screaming, "IT'S ONLY NEAR HIS ELBOW!" Still, with Cueto's inning count creeping pretty high (his 155 innings this year is close to his 161 and 1/3 from last year), I'd expect the Reds to really limit his pitch counts over the next month. They don't have anything left to play for and having a talent like him blow his arm out in meaningless September games would be nearly criminal.