Totally agree that Lohse has a history of losing it fast.

Saving graces thus far have been Adam LaRoche’s unusually hot start; Ian Desmond’s hacking resulting in lots of hits; and Jayson Werth’s return (thus far) to something more like his Phillies’ performance. And BTW, Espinosa has displayed a surprising ability to draw walks.

Plus, if a move has to be made, I like Salas in the eighth inning role. Sure, he had a couple of shaky outings earlier in the season, but he seems to have regained his velocity and I trust him more than Boggs.

There are a few quality 2B out there currently, and before we expose Boggs and Greene to the rest of the league as “all talent, no brains” kind of guys, how about moving the two of them in one package and bring in a right-handed hitting second baseman and a left hand hitting catcher.

I’d love to understand the motivation for these types of moves….unless the motivation was, “well we have this bullpen and they need to pitch”, which is a strategy designed to win fewer games.

I’ll never understand removal of an effective, untired starter just because it happens to be the 8th inning…

Meh. Thus Spake Zarathustra was just The Prophet on steroids.

I have witnessed some awful ball and strike calls in my day, but I must admit, and Umpire Ron you should too, especially with that last name, that a pitch from John Lester to Ian Kinsler that was judged a strike was so egregiously erroneous that at first, much like Kinsler, my first reaction was utter disbelief.

Next I couldn’t do anything but laugh. I believe Kinsler wanted to argue, but he couldn’t muster up a sound, since the shock was still reverberating through his finely trained athletic neurological recognition system. It was almost like an out of the body experience, that a pitch so far removed from what has commonly been judged a ball, was now called a strike.

Maybe somewhere, somehow there is a plausible excuse, but I am going with an extra dimension/time warp explanation, cause nowhere in the reality that I am most familiar with did that pitch even remotely approach the strike zone.

Yeah, it may sound greedy, but this was hardly a satisfying victory. The Reds seem listless, luckily for the Red Birds, cause a team on a roll would have beaten them. So many wasted opportunities. Ahead in counts, with runners in scoring position, and hittable pitches either fouled off or popped up. Hopefully the LOB futility was used up in one evening and a return to productivity is in the offing.

A couple of good outings by Garcia and Wainwright could bury the Reds in an early season hole.

Yeah, I’m pleasantly surprised as well, though their early schedule hasn’t been the most challenging. The pitching has been pretty much as advertised (good), as has the offense (not so good).

Ozzie & the Fish come to Natstown for the weekend, a matchup of trendy NL East picks. Looking forward to seeing Ozzie get thrown out of at least one game.

In other news, Brett Lawrie is turning into a monster. What a steal he was, Shawn Marcum or no Shawn Marcum.

The Hanster is on a roll, having now raised his average from .135 to .286 in the past three or four games, and driving in the GWRBI (it climbs out of its coffin at dusk, which is why you no longer see this stat promulgated for day games) two consecutive nights in a row – which, not coincidentally, happen to be the first back to back wins the Feesh have posted this season. He’s startled Tommy awake twice in two nights now, and Tommy is beginning to get pissed off. We continue to speculate about how the Hanster has managed to rid himself of Scrooge McLoria’s accursed .342 amulet – we have considered the possibility that he threw it into the Soufriere volcano, but…..could he possibly have entombed it in a cement vault beneath Tommy itself?

The return of Slobbering Ozzie was an anti-climax, what with one – count ‘em, one – septuagenarian looking protester shuffling cantankerously around outside the stadium, in addition to the one – count ‘em, one – loudmouth in the second deck on the inside, who was apparently oblivious to how much of a putz his very unanimity, not to mention his impending laryngitis, made him appear. On the other hand, the body count was something like 24,000 and change last night, the lowest of the season at Macondo Banana Massacre Field so far. Was it Ozzie or the so-called “Tuesday Night vs. the Cubs Effect” (TNvtCE)? In other words, what has gotten old fastest: Slobbering Ozzie’s incipient comsymp proclivities, or the Cubs’ century-and-change prion-vectored neurological disease Die Vloek an der Geitbok-engendered Hapless Harry act? No doubt the busloads of sociology grad students flocking to Macondo Banana Massacre Field to research these questions, pockets filled with government funding that they can spend on overpriced tube steaks, empanadas and beer, will offset the limited number of Cuban dinosaurs who boycott the games in the hope that the attempted sacrifice of one loudmouthed idiot of a manager will offset sixty years of utter foreign policy futility.

Incidentally, Ozzie dropped Mi…er, Giancarlo Stanton to sixth in the lineup to give his gimpy-kneed slugging right fielder a little breathing room in the order to get his bat up to snuff after sitting out most of spring training and the Iron Giant responded with a booming double of the left field wall, although he hasn’t got a dinger yet this year. That ball he crushed in the eighth inning last night indicated that he’s finding his range, though. And of course Josh Johnson seems to have found his angel in the wilderness and pitched what would have been a decent game for anyone else, though still subpar for JJ. But it sure beat the batting practice performances of his first two games.

Providence provided the Astros and Cubs to give the Feesh some leeway to find their legs (feens?) and they seem to be ready to evolve into air-breathers at last. Go, sarcoptyregii!

Hey! Old Gator was at the game! How about that!