It's hard to imagine a better way to kick off the mad dash to baseball's trade deadline than with the Brewers and Cubs pulling trades for big-name pitchers within two days of each other. Of course, those moves raise a pretty big question: who's the favorite to win the division now? Let's break it down.

Definitely not favorites: Pirates, Astros, and Reds. The Reds are young and exciting but at least a year away, the Pirates seem to be meandering down the right road but they're still way down the path in the wrong direction, and the Astros are a disaster area.

The Cardinals: This team perplexes me. By all accounts they shouldn't be very good, and yet they've still got the second best record in the NL and are ahead of the Brewers in the Wild Card standings. They probably won't join in the arms race with the Cubs and Brewers, but they get Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter back from the DL in pretty short fashion. Still, they're short on offense besides Albert Pujols and Ryan Ludwick, it's hard to know what to expect out of Carpenter after missing most of a season and a half, and Kyle Lohse is a prime candidate to turn into a pumpkin.

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

Chicago Cubs (52-35) at St. Louis Cardinals (49-39) - 3:55 PM ET

It's sad to see a friendship go south as apparently the one between Tony La Russa and Jim Edmonds has now that Edmonds is with the Cubs and La Russa is playing ultra-sensitive. But in reality, La Russa and Edmonds are mere players in the larger war that is Cubs vs. Cardinals, with first place on the line and growing ever so further away from the Cardinals. Today, Kyle Lohse is going to have to continue his 2008 magic (remember when nobody wanted Lohse? Yeah, well now he's 10-2) against Ted Lilly.

Albert Pujols, in a game that's still going on, has just hit his 300th career home run against Bobby Howry of the Chicago Cubs. Pujols had today and tomorrow to hit the home run to become the fifth fastest to that milestone, and he did it.

Here's the odd part about the home run that was just touched on in the broadcast: the home run went off the fair pole and on to the field, which at the time would have avoided a whole "will the fan who catches the ball give it back or try to extort a little money off of it" dilemma. But Cubs left fielder Reed Johnson took the ball and flipped it into the stands. So he basically gave a winning lottery ticket to a lucky fan! Not that it was a 756th or even a 500th, but still, that was Pujols' ball and Johnson threw it away.

But the fan who caught Johnson's toss was caught by a Cubs fan. And true to Cub fans, threw the ball back to the field. Crisis averted.

You might have noticed that tonight marked the first time since Jim Edmonds became a Cub that he played in St. Louis wearing blue and red. So Edmonds received the inevitable questions about coming back to St. Louis. What followed? War!

Miffed by Jim Edmonds' comments that he was happy to be with the Cubs and tired of talking about his past, La Russa said Friday he'd ignore the four-time All-Star in his first visit as a member of the team's biggest rival.

"I wouldn't clap or boo or anything," La Russa said before a three-game series matching the NL Central's top two teams. "He wants to put his Cardinal days behind him, so I think you've got to respect that, and just ignore him."

You're kidding me, right? Tony La Russa is getting huffy?

Edmonds said La Russa, his manager for the best eight seasons of his career, would do so at his peril. The two have always had a good relationship.

"If he ignores me, I'm going to punch him in the mouth," Edmonds joked. "I think he's trying to stir it up. He gets a little excited about this rivalry."

I think we have enough to promote "FanHouse Baseball Wrestlemania" here. Edmonds vs. La Russa can be the undercard to Chacon vs. Wade and Reyes vs. Hernandez. We need a women's match though ... ooh! Cynthia Rodriguez vs. Madonna! Quick, get Eric Bischoff on the phone.

At first glance, the line seems like a fairly innocuous one: 1 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 K. It becomes more extraordinary with a glance to the left in the name column: Mark Mulder. After all of his setbacks this season, he's finally back in St. Louis and his first outing wasn't a complete disaster. Unsurprisingly, he sounds more relieved than anything:

"This whole process has been up and down, so now what's the point?" Mulder said. "I'm out there. ... That's what matters. Of course, I want to be starting. But right now, I could care less. It's just a relief to be out there again."

[...]

"You know what? I'm back pitching," Mulder said. "That's enough. If I do that for the rest of the year, then that's OK. If there's more, that's OK. ... It's enough to be back."

In the same article, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put his fastball at between 88 and 90 mph, which isn't great since it was a relief outing, but is more than it seemed like Mulder was going to be able to muster earlier this year. The Cardinals seem pretty content to use him as a reliever for now and given his ugly rehab stints, I'm sure they'll take things slowly, but everyone seems pretty happy just to have him in St. Louis for now. Given all he's been through, it's pretty easy to see why.

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

L.A. Angels of Anaheim (48-33) at L.A. Dodgers of L.A. (38-42) - 4:10 PM ET

The final day of interleague play, or as ESPN has needlessly re-branded it: "AL/NL SHOWDOWN!" (like it's a western gunfight or something) will feature a good pitching matchup between John Lackey (5-1, 1.65) and Derek Lowe (5-7, 4.05). Of course, it can't be better than the one between Chad Billingsley and Jered Weaver last night, where Weaver combined with Jose Arredondo for eight innings of no-hit baseball, but lost. After coming back from an early season injury, Lackey really hasn't had a bad outing all season. So if anyone can continue the no-hit parade for the Dodgers, it's Lackey.

In the two weeks Albert Pujols has been on the disabled list, the Cardinals have gone 6-6 and only lost a game on the Cubs in the NL Central standings. So even though things weren't nearly as bad as they could've been, I'm guessing they're more than a little happy to get their slugger back ASAP. Lucky for them, Pujols sounds like he's ready to play against the Tigers tonight:

"If I'm ready to play first base, I think I'm going to play first base," Pujols said, adjusting his stance of the day before. "If I feel the same way I feel today, I think I'm going to be playing (Thursday).

"Something crazy has to happen ... for me not to play."

It sounds like Pujols has no intention of DHing and that he's headed right back into the full swing of things. So he's playing with one elbow and a strained calf and he's probably still going to get right back into the swing of things and pick up where he left off with his .475 OBP and .631 SLG. He says that something crazy would have to happen to stop him from playing, but i bet he goes 3-for-5 even if he gets abducted by aliens this morning and is makes a Space Jam-esque return on a spaceship five minutes before game time.

Earlier today the news broke that the Cardinals were planning on having Mark Mulder start a game this weekend. As someone that's followed the Mulder story all year, I thought that was pretty odd. He's been having really weird arm problems and been getting hammered in his rehab starts. It seemed insane to me that the Cardinals wanted him to start a Major League game.

Turns out those plans are going to be on hold as Mulder was scratched from his last rehab start with AAA Memphis tonight and is listed as "day-to-day." There's no word on what that means, exactly, but if I had to bet I'd be laying money against Mulder making his start against Kansas City this weekend. If he can't make a rehab start, I don't see why he'd be making a big league one.

My gut feeling is that the Cardinals are simply stalling here. A player can't make an indefinite number of rehab starts and Mulder's time is up, but he's nowhere near ready for the bigs. In his last rehab start, he got pounded for 10 hits and six runs in less than four innings. I'm guessing this is all going to end in a DFA for Mulder, followed by a full-time AAA assignment. Without a major revelation, I doubt he's going to be seeing the mound in St. Louis anytime soon.

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

Chicago White Sox (41-32) at Chicago Cubs (46-28) - 1:05 PM ET

Friday was the first time that both Chicago's baseball teams entered a series against each other in first place. The initial game did not disappoint, with Aramis Ramirez smacking two home runs, including the walk off extravaganza in the ninth to win the game for the Cubs. But the Cubs have more surprises for the White Sox. Before the game yesterday, Ozzie Guillen took another shot at Wrigley Field, saying that under the right field bleachers, there are "rats out there are lifting weights" while the assembled media laughed. Little does Guillen know that Lou Piniella is thinking about using a couple of those rats in key pinch hitting situations today. Then ... who will be laughing?

With the wheels starting to fall off of the St. Louis Cardinals season (they just got swept by the Royals!), they're certainly a team that could use some good news. They've had a couple ugly weeks of injuries and setbacks, but they finally got something to smile about when the results of Chris Carpenter's exam with Dr. James Andrews in Birmingham came back. Carpenter himself relayed the news to the local media:

"All of my tests were fine; my ligament and my reconstruction looks good," Carpenter said Tuesday at Busch Stadium, cataloging what Dr. James Andrews told him the day before. "My elbow looks good, and everybody reacts differently at different times to this surgery.

That sounds to me like there's no need for additional surgery for the Cardinals' once and future ace and that the original target return date of around or just after the All-Star Break isn't changing. No one seems to be taking charge in the NL Wildcard race at the moment, and having Chris Carpenter around can't be a bad thing for the Redbirds.