Wow!

Since I have failed to report on anything in a while, let it be known that the days that I did not write contained mostly humiliating losses to the lowly last place Cubs and the not-so-lowly Wild Card leading Padres, along with a loss to the Astros. The one win over the Cubs in the duration was once again behind Bronson Arroyo's recently fantastic pitching.

Now onto something I actually saw (on TV) and can actually write about.

Holy crap! They won! Harang has 14 W's! The bullpen tried to keep it familiar, though. They certainly tried their darn'dest to blow the lead. Stormy came through to preserve the win, though, a 5-4 win. After Sunday's debacle it seemed impossible that the Reds would ever win again, but they did. Barely.

Houston scored first, when Luke Scott's RBI triple tried to kill Brandon Phillips (sure, it might actually have been Freel's throw that hit him in the eye, but I'm blaming Scott). Denorfia would have none of it, though, and quickly responded with his first Major League homer, a 2-run affair that put the Reds up by 1. They continued the scoring in the 5th, and by the middle of the inning Cincinnati was up 5-1. The Reds, however, failed to score again, and Cincinnati fans spent the rest of the game holding their breath.

Harang gave up a run in each of the 5th and 6th innings, bringing the score to 5-3. He ran into heaps of trouble in the 8th and handed the ball over to Schoeneweis, who allowed 1 run (credited to Harang) and didn't get anyone out. Weathers stepped in to finish the 8th and 9th rather uneventfully. The Reds scraped out a win and their fans finally breathed again. Is "breathed" a word? It sounds very wrong, but dictionary.com says it is right. Of course, some things that are right sound wrong anyway. Like "dived." Apparently "dove" is no longer a word, so instead of saying, "I dove into the water," you must now say, "I dived into the water." Who decides these things? I want to be on that committee. "Oscillate" must go.

Right, back to baseball. Bronson Arroyo takes the mound in Houston today at 2:05. It's on ESPN! Go Reds!