With baseball's winter meetings starting next week and the arbitration deadline here and gone, action on the free-agent market should pick up soon.

Is it time to panic if the Cubs or White Sox miss out on their top free agent targets? Hardly.

Wow! I'm almost left speechless after watching the Cubs undergo yet another amazing collapse.

Cubs fans can't completely give up on their team until the final out is recorded, but the squad's sudden lack of character and confidence is stunning. The Dodgers look like the far superior team in every facet, and the events of the first two games of the series offer very little hope that the Cubs can come back. Unless the Cubs suddenly regain their swagger, this season is over.

With Lou's crew 27 outs from another crushing postseason loss, it's never too early to begin reflecting on the latest promising season that ended in flames.

Here we go. Game 2. It's pretty much do or die for the Cubs. Is everyone as nervous as I am right now? If we win today then we go to L.A. and get to play in warm weather. That'll help our sluggers. Let's go Cubbies...

Like many others in the area, I've been a die-hard Cubs fan my whole life. Never before have the Cubs have this good of a team and never before have the expectations of ending the 100-year drought been so high. I would have much rather seen the Mets, but we gotta play the Dodgers - one of the hottest, if not the hottest team in baseball. Join me throughout the game today for what figures to be one heck of an emotional rollercoaster.

Chicago provided enough support to its two baseball teams that both reached the playoffs. The same can be said of Los Angeles.

As for the self-proclaimed "Capital of the World," New York won't have any playoff baseball coming through this year.

It's October and there will be plenty on the plate in the Chicago area the next few weeks. It can't get any better than this for an area baseball fan.

May the best team win.

I'm guessing that White Sox and Cubs fans can agree on one thing when it comes to who they'd like to have doing play-by-play during the most important games of their teams' baseball seasons. Not Dick Stockton.

Milwaukee is the place where hysteria surrounding the Cubs goes to die.

When the Cubs visited the Brewers at Miller Park in late July, the sky was falling for Cubs fans because their team had just been caught for first place in the National League Central. What did the Cubs do? They promptly swept four games and regained command of the division for good.

Then the Cubs made the journey to Milwaukee on Sunday to play a pair of games against the Astros that were rescheduled due to Hurricane Ike. With the Cubs struggling through early September, whispers of an imminent collapse were growing louder leading up to the series. What did the Cubs do? They sent Carlos Zambrano and Ted Lilly to the mound, and the duo gave up one hit in two games as the Cubs reasserted themselves as the team to beat in the National League, and perhaps in all of baseball.

The Cubs have one more regular-season trip to Milwaukee on the last weekend of the season. If the trend continues, they might come out of that looking so good that any talk of curses will be put to rest, allowing a restless fan base to prepare for a coronation.