Reds v. Brewers, Cubs, Yanks, and FireFox

Remember how the Brewers started 5-0? Well, did you know that they're currently 8-9, and that the Reds are 11-6? The Reds are Brewers are currently doing battle at Miller Park. Actually, they were doing battle, but now they're just playing around. Here's a classic pitcher's duel for you:
Dave Bush, (MIL): 7IP, 85 pitches, 1 hit, 0ER, 2BB, 9K's.
Brandon Claussen, (CIN): 3IP, 86 pitches, 8 hits, 9 ER, 3 BB, 3K's.
In the fourth inning, Bill Hall homered off Claussen. Damian Miller followed with a 2-run shot. Brady Clark followed with a 2-run shot. J.J. Hardy followed with a solo shot. Chris Hammond came in for relief. Prince Fielder followed with a solo shot. That's 7 runs scored on five HR's in one inning, and in case you're wondering, that does tie an MLB record. Yikes. It's currently the bottom of the 7th and the Brewers are up 10-0. As for Dave Bush, you may remember him from Toronto. He's 26. He's on a decent team. He doesn't have a terrible track record for a guy his age. And with today's game, he has an ERA of 3.81 so far. Bush finished the game allowing 4 hits, 2 walks, and 9 K's in 115 pitches. I think that as the season progresses he'll turn in more and more quality performances.

Can someone tell Dusty Baker how to use a double switch? I know I rag on the Cubs more than any other team. That's because it's fun and it's easy, and I'll never get sick of that picture you see to your left. I don't watch a lot of NL ball, but I've seen enough Cubs games to know that Baker doesn't really know how to use the Double Switch. That is, he never used it. At least not until today, when he managed to remove the lineup's second and third best hitters - Todd Walker and Matt Murston - with two. I've been watching the Cubs v. Cardinals game for a few minutes now and I've already seen three double-switches. On top of that, one such double-switch brought Scott Eyre in the game. He's still alive? After the beating he put on D. Lee, practically ending the Cub's season? Surprising that no one has called his shot in the death pool, (I don't participate in the death pool nor do I think it's tasteful, but you should know it's out there). In addition, Baker informed us that all walks are good for is "clogging the bases," which is why three of the six runners his pitchers put on for free scored. On the 'information' front, Kerry Wood was set to throw on the side yesterday - but complained of pain in his armpit. Of course, the Cubs have nothing else to say regarding when he will return, or if he still does, in fact, pitch. Ditto for Mark Prior. And Wade Miller was moved to the 60-day DL. Also, Cubs 'pitching' coach, who is more deserving of the title "Minister of Information," had this to say about reliever Bob Howry: "He's got the cool, calm demeanor of an assassin. He wants to go out there and pitch every day." That's bad news. Howry probably has, at most, one month left before he's run down by overuse and experiences some freak accident... and oh great. Izzy came in to 'shut' the door against the Cubs, and he ending up dropping a routine toss from Pujols as he was running towards 1st, allowing Jacque Jones to reach 1st on the error, and now there's a man on 1st with one out instead of empty bags with 2 down. That's a concentration error. Dude dropped an easy, soft toss directly to his chest for no good reason. Ended up not making a difference in the game, but still - that's not gonna win you any goodwill in this town.

Yanks won today. Watched that game for a little bit as well. Who would've thought Shacon would come back from getting skipped in the rotation to allow just 4 hits, 1 run, and 3 walks over 7 IP? Strange, especially after we saw Wang get owned last night. This win was also good news for the Yanks because, not only did our number 5 hold a team to one run, but we one without the big home run. In fact, Matsui's double was the only extra base hit we had. Only 7 hits, but 7 walks. That's big, and by putting men on base like that, you manage 6 RBI's.

I also want to talk about Mozilla's FireFox browser. I'm obviously a fan. I switched over about two months ago and I love it. It's especially useful now that I've started reading a variety of different blogs. This involves what's called RSS feeds. For those of you stuck in IE, RSS means nothing to you because you can't use it unless you have one of those aggregators or something. With FireFox, all you have to do is hit an orange button in the address box, and it adds this feed to your bookmarks. It looks something like what you see on your right. It's very easy to access blogs this way, and all you have to do is hover over the link to see what's new. The feed automatically updates, which is what makes it so valuable. Instead of checking all of these sites yourself, all you have to do is check to see if there's a new headline up there through your favorites, as IE users may know them. It's also great for tracking simple news feeds, such as RxSN Baseball (almost every MLBlogger is featured on this site and probably doesn't know it,) or Deadspin. FireFox is also, in my opinion, a much better browser than IE. FireFox is gaining in popularity very quickly; of the last 100 visitors to BHGM, 29 used FireFox and 67 used IE, (in case you're wondering, Opera and Safari were also on the list.) There are very few compatibility issues when using FireFox - the only website I have trouble with is the auto-updating Fantasy Scoreboard on CBSsportsline.com; every so often the scripts will stop running. There are also thousands of add-ons, which are little 'extensions' created by other programmers for FireFox that do little useful things. For example, an in-browser Gmail notifer and in-browser media controls which can be easily downloaded and immediately applied to the browser. In any case, you can get FireFox right here. And there's always a link in the site tools section at the bottom of my sidebar.