I missed tonight's game for an appointment. When I was finally ready to come home, I called Jon to check in, and the following conversation ensued:

Jon: Hello?
RHM: Hi, honey. I'm finally done. I'm on my way home.
Jon: Great. You want to know the score?
RHM: (with trepidation) Um…sure.
Jon: 17-3.
RHM: Holey crap.
Jon: Yep.
RHM: Let me guess who scored the three. Let's see, Lopez, Kearns, and LaRue.
Jon: Nope.
RHM: Who then?
Jon: The Diamondbacks.
RHM: Oh. You meant 17-3 the good way.
Jon: Yep.
RHM: Holey crap.

Wowza. Let's see more of that tomorrow.

I hear Austin Kearns contributed two three-run home runs, which matches the RBI total of that three home run night I got to see while he was at Louisville, as I recall.

Speaking of Kearnsy, check out this rambling essay by John Sickles at Minor League Ball (thanks to Shawn for making its existence known). While you're there, ponder a point that seems to have been missed by Mr. Sickles and his responders: the difference in Kearns' performance pre- and post-send-down. With Kearns' recent return to form, it's easy to forget just how abysmal his start to the season was.

Which just makes his recent awesomeness all the more awesome, IMO.

Javy's catch on the step to the dugout got him the #4 Web Gem on Baseball Tonight. Someone started coughing as I was watching it so I couldn't hear all the commentary, but I'm pretty sure that the part I missed included John Kruk calling him “the LLM.”

Does the fantastic catch make up for the 0-for-4 afternoon with a strike out AND a GIDP? Dunno. But it does merit seeing the picture again.

Go Javy! Go Reds!

CINCINNATI, OH -- The day after Reds' Chief Operating Officer John Allen showed irritation over relentless trade rumors about Ken Griffey Jr. going to the White Sox, General Manager Dan O'Brien also loosed a torrent of anger on reporters.

“Look, I've told you a hundred times. We're not planning to trade any of our outfielders at this time,” O'Brien said from the second stall in the men's room near his office. “I also haven't found anyone to take Aurilia or a miracle man with the magic elixir to make the world's most potent offense produce on a regular basis. OK? Now can I have some privacy please?”

Undaunted, one reporter peeked over the wall and asked whether the Reds were going to acquire starting pitching.

“Does this team need pitching?” O'Brien asked sarcastically as he slammed the stall door. “I hadn't noticed.”

“I'll just pull an ace out of my [rear end] then!” O'Brien added as he stormed out of the restroom, toilet paper on his shoe.

No news yet on a similar outburst from Manager Jerry Narron, but several reporters are vigilantly poking him with a stick to see what happens.

“Hey,” said Narron. “Cut it out.”

If you don't think I'm going to point out every time that my August predictions were right, well, then you just haven't been reading RHM very long. And the Reds taking the two of the three-game series with the Brewers is no exception, though after they won the first two, I was kind of hoping they'd prove me wrong this afternoon.

Coming right up is the four-game series with San Francisco. I said the Reds would win three, but I'd like to point out that I'd be happy to be wrong if it meant a sweep.

Aside from a bullpen letdown the likes of which we've been spared lately, today's game was pretty lackluster. With so few highlights, I expect multiple “Sunglasses at Night” references in the game stories, what with rookie Corey Hart playing such a big role in the Brewers' win. So at least we have that to look forward to.

In completely unrelated news, I saw this article on Yahoo! Sports via a thread on RedsZone. The story talks about talking, the kind that goes on during a baseball game. This paragraph in particular caught my notice:

That doesn't even count the around-the-batting-cage banter between opposing teams, or the constant discourse that takes place in the bullpen and on the bench, which tends to be eclectic, raucous, obscene, politically incorrect, pithy and trivial - often all at once.

I have to wonder whether this sort of stuff is among the reasons that baseball seems so reticent to involve women in any meaningful role in the sport. Women have been traditionally pretty righteous about this sort of conversation, and I can see why guys would not want to open themselves up to castigation, or perhaps worse, smack down by a member of the gentler sex. But I can assure you that many women actually partake of plenty of this kind of badinage, though usually rather cattily about third parties, not about each other.

For example, Bellyscratcher and I will be participating in some mild smack talk over at her place as we discuss the finer points of the Cardinals v Cubs game this very evening. Stop on by if you'd like to take your turn at jabbing at the Cards or Cubs. Or at me. I won't cry. Much.

The Reds take the second game in the Milwaukee series to bring their winning streak to five and lift themselves just one and a half games out of third place in the division. They've already won with Luke Hudson and Ramón Ortiz starting; tomorrow afternoon we see if they can do it with Brandon “Pickle Man” Claussen on the mound.

Speaking of Ortiz, wowza! What a performance from him tonight. Two hits and no runs over the course of six inning. Nicely done, Ortiz.

The bullpen was equally effective tonight, with Matt Belisle, Jason Standridge, and David Weathers each putting in a scoreless inning. I have no complaints, though I do keep hoping that they'll put in Standridge in a bases-loaded situation so he can get out of it unscathed and we can start calling him “Jason Strandridge.”

Ryan Freel had a great offensive night tonight going 2-for-5 with a couple RBI, after that awful 0-for-19 draught leading up to that lead-off homerun in Chicago on August 10. He was the subject of the post-game interview, during which he said “you know” 21 times.

Dunn broke three bats during tonight's game. I'm sure there's some fake news there somewhere: something along the lines of the logging industry sneaking into the equipment room and sabotaging his bats to up their share prices.

In other Dunn news, I initially thought he was just sleeping in too late on this road trip to get around to shaving before the games, but when I noticed how neatly manicured his stubble was, it occurred to me that he's purposely growing full-on facial hair. Is it an effort to look less like Will Farrell? Or to look more like Austin Kearns, who also appears to be going down that path. Like most things, it looks better on Kearns, but I don't think it'll necessarily turn out to be a bad move for Dunn either. The timing could be bad with them both doing it at the same time, though. They're just asking people to start calling them Beard Buddies.

Let's see the second consecutive sweep tomorrow, fellas.

Go Reds!