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!

But according to Bill Batterman at Brewerfan.net, I'm also “unique and humorous.”

Thanks Bill!