Ortiz (1-1, 3.75)
Erickson (1-1, 7.80)
To avoid inflicting needless pain on the Sportsblogs servers, I will skip the mention of Pamela Anderson and Anna Kournikova, wrestling naked in a vat of chocolate, originally slated to appear in this column. The reason for this, is that I discovered AZ Snake Pit is ranked in the top ten at MSN.com for the term "Palo Verde Beetle" - purely on the basis of one off-hand mention earlier in the week. Go figure. I remain perpetually amazed by the searches that bring people to the site.
Moving on. Tonight, we face Scott Erickson, and it's advantage Arizona, because we slapped the Dodger around last time he faced us - seven hits, four of them homers, and six runs in 4.1 innings. Mind you, that was back in the day, a long time ago, when we actually had an offense. [After the past two weeks, I seriously wonder if imagined the whole thing.] We lost that one despite scoring ten runs, so here's to a better result today.
We send up Russ Ortiz, who will be bidding to extend our ongoing streak of quality starts - he went seven innings last time, and allowed two earned runs. A repeat of that will do very nicely. Anyone care to bet against our fourth straight two-run victory? Comments welcome - if anyone has got past the opening sentence. :-)