A sunny Wednesday heading into a four-day weekend makes it hard to not be in total mail-it-in mode.

Of course, I could argue that every day for me is a mail-it-in mode kinda day.

I doubt you'll disagree.

*Reds win, so I have to say nice things about them. And there are plenty of nice things to say about last night.

Tanner Roark chucked the ball better than his final line would indicate.

The bullpen was spectacular. What was that you were saying about being overworked?

Joey Votto came up with one of his biggest hits of the season. Granted, that might not be saying much, but still....

And you'll have a hard time convincing me that Matt Albers was the right guy for Craig Counsell to ask to face Votto in such a critical situation.

The headliner though, was Yasiel Puig. First was the homer in the seventh, then the baserunning that ended the tilt in the 11th, a fantastic piece of alert baserunning mixed with pure hustle that represented the kind of play some of us were told we wouldn't see much of from Puig.

Those who told us that were wrong.

I agree with this morning's prevailing sentiment, that while Yasiel's bat hasn't always provided the pop we'd hoped - and 18 homers before the break isn't awful - the defense has been spectacular and the effort has been admirable. It's not easy for a fan to watch a ballplayer and hand down a definitive verdict on how much a guy really gives a shit, but after a half a season on watching Puig almost every day, I can conclude that this dude cares.

He's come off as team-first, and aside from one or two wayward throws from right field, he's shown higher baseball intelligence than the whispers from LA ever gave him credit for having. He's played hard, he's played smart, and whatever it was about Puig that made some view his departure from the Dodgers as addition by subtraction, we haven't seen it.

We saw the exact opposite of it last night.

*I don't have much else, and I'm crunched for time on a mail-it-in Wednesday. Allow yourself the pleasure of these reads...

‘There’s no checklist, no book’: How one GM dealt with the in-season death of a player, by C. Trent Rosecrans.

Sliding doors: How the Knicks did and did not botch free agency. I guess there's ways of looking at what this garbage franchise did from a more optimistic point of view.

This is a good look at how FC Cincinnati's season has been a total disaster.

A local PR firm just made a really good hire.

Follow me on Twitter:@MoEgger1530

Email me:mo@espn1530.com