I had this fantasy that my first recap would be the Diamondbacks winning a 12-0 no-hitter. But reality frequently falls short of my fantasies. Fortunately, tonight didn't fall too short.

In fact, it was a pretty fantastic game....

Although the start could have made you nervous. Rodrigo Lopez loaded the bases, despite some solid defense (and, yes Upton has an arm), in the first. But no harm, no foul. The main worry looked to be pitch count. But a nice 1-2-3 second helped.

It was anybody's game until the third. Lopez notched another 'nervous' "0", and then our bats woke up. Our LaRoche got a 2 RBI hit, driving in Lopez and CoJack. The bases got loaded the hard way, with a scary HBP on Reynolds hand. And our Chris Young hit a popup...into the seats. A CY grand slam, six-nothing. Yeah, that Chris Young...the one some folks gave up on.

Two more runs in the fourth, with LaRoche almost scoring another one at the plate. Wait until he gets warmed up.

Lopez seemed to settle in with the lead, finally yielding a run in the sixth. If he can keep this up, he'll fill the fourth/fifth starter role quite nicely.

Nice numbers:

Chris Young 3/4, 5 RBI, GS HR

Adam LaRoche 2/3, 2RBI

Miguel Montero 2/4, 1RBI

Kelly Johnson 2/4

Rodrigo Lopez 6 inning, 6 hits, 1 ER.

And the bullpen: Vasquez, Rosales, and Howry each with a scoreless inning.

TV broadcast gave us Luis Gonzalez on color commentary, which was a pleasant change of pace. While Luis was low-key, his observations were astute.

Not sure how to do the roll call, but over 900 comments as I'm finishing this. Sorry to see the streak of  quad digits end, but we were running slightly short handed.

[Edit by Jim] Nice victory! And good to see Lopez all but shut down the Padres. I think his next start is against LA, which might be a slightly more difficult task... Anyway, here are the fangraphs and rollcall, thanks to pygalgia for his work on the recap - it'll be on the Yahoo, etc. pages shortly, so you can call up all your friends and point it out to them. :-)

Master of his domain: Chris Young, +19.8%
Honorable mentions: Rodrigo Lopez, +19.1%, Adam LaRoche, +10.7%
God-emperor of suck: Miguel Montero, -6.1%

Present in the Gameday Thread: Wailord, kishi, hotclaws, NASCARbernet, katers, Zephon, mfan2010, DbacksSkins, SenSurround, pygalgia, Jdub220, BattleMoses, unnamedDBacksfan, Trogluddite, ibdb (welcome to the Pi!), Rockkstarr12, brian custer, eel, Fiona, LoveMyDbacks, SeanMillerSavior, txzona, Azreous, soco, DKuon, emilylovesthedbacks and singaporedbacksfan. 'Skins was the Chris Young of the night, with NASCARbernet in the role of Rodrigo Lopez, and the part of Adam LaRoche was played by wailord.