Brewers 3, Reds 2: Brought to You By the Letters GOGO

WP: Former Closer #1 (4-6)
LP: Ol' Brox (1-1)
SV: New Closer (2)

HR: Dioner Navarro (1), Carlos Gomez (10)

MVP: GoGo (.402)
LVP: Corey Hart (-.120)

FanGraphs Win Expectancy Graph and Star of the Game Voting

Hey hey! A sweep of the division leaders -- the first NL team to accomplish that feat, by the by -- in the first week of August, including back-to-back wins against Cincinnati's two best starting pitchers, with timely hitting and a couple of clutch performances by the bullpen?

WE CAN BUILD ON THIS!

Don't look now, but following the sweep, the Crew stands ... oh. Fourteen-and-a-half games out in the Central. Balls. Anyway, it's better than a sharp stick in the eye, amirite?

The particulars, if you're interested: Randy Wolf was the Randy Wolf we've come to know and blarg in the 2012 season, breezing through the first two innings before running into trouble in the third: following a single by No. 7 hitter Miguel Cairo, Dioner Navarro launched his first home run of the year to give the Reds a 2-0 lead. Things were on the verge of getting real silly when Mat Latos followed Navarro's homer with a single and Brandon Phillips singled to put men at first and second with two down, but Wolf somehow coaxed a groundout out of Brewer killer Jay Bruce, whose streak of consecutive games with a hit with RISP against Milwaukee ended at 497. (That's a rough estimate.)

Wolf was in control after that (6.0 IP, six hits, two walks, seven Ks), but the Brewer bats looked content to go quietly into the late afternoon against Latos, who worked around a walk and a couple of singles (including Jean Segura's first major-league hit) to blank the Brewers through five. But the Carlos Gomez Show kicked into high gear in the late innings of the game, as GoGo got the Crew off the schneid with a homer in the sixth inning, plated the go-ahead run with a two-out single in the eighth, and then came around to score on Ryan Braun's first hit of the series, a double to left center off a very, very sad Jonathan Broxton.

From there, the new Designated Saves Collector claimed his second save in as many days, despite a brief and hopefully short-term bout with the wildsies that put the tying run on base with two out.

The Crew is off tomorrow before starting a three-game series with The AA Team Formerly Known as the Houston Astros on Friday.