NL Central

The St. Louis Cardinals' impressive hot streak on offense came to an abrupt stop as the team entered a pitching battle today against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Chris Carpenter started the game for the Red Birds, facing off against the Dodgers' Chad Billingsley. Carpenter gave up zero runs in his seven innings, and Billingsley responded with eight scoreless innings of his own.

You gotta love early-season baseball statistics.

At Jonny Gomes' current pace, he will end the 2011 season with 58 home runs and 150 RBI. It would go down as one of the greatest seasons of all time, and Gomes would be celebrated as a hero around these parts.

I'll make a fearless prediction, and say he falls somewhat short of that.

However, at least in the early going, Gomes is displaying a different approach at the plate that reflects in his numbers.

Heard This Blog ranked the top five Jewish current baseball players

Begin Slideshow

CINCINNATI—The Reds scored a season high seven runs in the fifth inning, including Ramon Hernandez's sixth career grand slam, and Cincinnati obliterated the Pittsburgh Pirates 11-2 on Saturday.

The Cubs finished up their first two home series against arguably the two worst teams in the National League even at 3-3. They should certainly have gone 4-2 against these teams and probably 5-1.

The outcome is not a cause for panic, but still a disturbing sign.

Entering the season, the pitching staff for the Astros was suppose to be a strength for this team but after two weeks the results have not been good outside of Brett Myers. The Astros have a team ERA of 5.57, which makes the team 28th out of 30 teams.

This was partially expected as some of the Astros pitchers, like Wandy Rodriguez and Bud Norris, is perennially slow starters and usually get it together the second half of the season. However, there are some pitchers within the Astros organization that could potentially help the Astros pitching staff.

July 14, 2008. A night for the history books.

A night for redemption.

Sparky Anderson was one of the managerial greats in baseball. In his storied career as a major league baseball manager, Sparky won two World Series with the Cincinnati Reds during the "Big Red Machine" era and won a third World Series with the Detroit Tigers.

Just in case you don't follow me on Twitter (@FrostyAustin), which I do not blame you, considering you are already reading this—following me on a social network may drive you to insanity 140 characters at a time—you missed out on this tweet brigade inspired by Sean Marshall's 7th inning heroics last night.

The recent home series against the Colorado Rockies wasn't much fun.

The consolation was that it didn't count for as much as some others, being against a division leader in a different division. There will be no more home games against this opponent and only three more (road) games in the season.