Marlins send ace versus visiting Cardinals

Baseball Betting Lines

08/07/2010 - (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - In what has been a great year so far for pitchers, Florida Marlins ace Josh Johnson certainly has done his part. Johnson will take the mound tonight against the St. Louis Cardinals in the second portion of a three-game series from Sun Life Stadium.

Johnson is 10-4 this season with a 1.96 earned run average over 22 starts, but is 0-1 with a 4.26 ERA in his past three trips to the mound. He last took the hill in Sunday's 5-4 loss at San Diego and yielded a season-high five runs on seven hits and four walks through 5 2/3 frames.

The All-Star right-hander, who is 7-2 in 13 home starts, will face St. Louis for the fourth time in his career. Johnson is 1-1 with a 3.20 ERA over the first three appearances, all of which have been starts.

Florida has dropped five straight and could use just about anything right now to end its woes. In Friday's 7-0 loss to the Cardinals, Adam Wainwright tossed a two-hitter to outduel Marlins starter Ricky Nolasco, who was raked for seven runs and 10 hits in five innings for the loss.

Hanley Ramirez and Brett Hayes had the only hits for the Marlins, who were outhit by a 13-2 margin and sit nine games off the lead in the NL East.

"We're flat, there's no way around it, we're just flat right now," said Florida second baseman Dan Uggla. "We gotta dig deep inside of us and find that competitiveness we had on the road trip."

Wainwright, meanwhile, improved to 16-6 with a superb effort and recorded seven K's with three walks in his fifth complete game of the year.

"I'm taking it one pitch at a time. I drill myself on my bullpen sessions and each game I pitch to make sure I focus on the pitch I'm throwing at the time," said Wainwright about his approach when he takes the hill. "I have experience in the past where I get ahead of myself and it always backfires. I just worry about what I can control at that very instant."

Albert Pujols finished 3-for-5 with a home run and four RBI, while Jon Jay posted three hits, three runs scored and knocked in a run for the Cardinals, who have won two in a row and five of their last seven games. St. Louis is just a half-game behind Cincinnati for NL Central supremacy.

The Cardinals will hand the ball to newcomer Jake Westbrook, who joined the club via trade with Cleveland last week. Westbrook made his St. Louis debut in a 9-4 loss versus Houston on Monday, as he recorded a no-decision for giving up two runs and four hits in six innings with seven strikeouts.

Westbrook went 6-7 in 21 starts with the Tribe before re-locating to St. Louis, and will face Florida for the second time in his career. The righty beat the Marlins on June 9, 2004 with eight innings of one-run ball to help the Indians to an 8-1 victory.

The Marlins and Cardinals split a two-game series back in May, but St. Louis has won five of the past eight meetings between the two clubs.

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FOOTBALL TRASH TALK

NFL Football Trash Talk

Trash talk has a place in every competitive endeavor (except baseball; those stirrup-wearers are too busy chewing on their sunflower seeds and their supplements to worry about what their opponents are doing).

Fantasy sports is no exception. Any intelligent discussion of the subject would probably start with a thesis statement or a definition of terms. Thankfully, this wont be an intelligent discussion.

Let me just say that I am happy to take a place in this space alongside my talented colleagues, even our commissioner. (You should see how she bleats like a demented paper boy about league fees on our fantasy site).

Trash talking, I would argue, is primarily about amusing your friends, their sheeplike demeanors and sloping foreheads notwithstanding. The best place I have found for football trash talking is at www.SportsAlarm.com.

Beyond the entertainment factor, though, I would recognize that the sophomoric ritual has one advantage, when properly applied. It magnifies your fantasy triumphs and mitigates your fantasy failures by transforming the eventual point total into an afterthought. Winning makes it seem like your opponent really is a truss-owning, lapel-pin-wearing nitwit. And in defeat, trash talk can be the air bag to break the fall from your hyperbolic heights. The plug-necked yahoos on your team, you can say, will be sacking groceries by the end of the season.

The best trash talk, in my view, is layered and nuanced. And it doesnt focus only on your opponents team. It picks apart your opponent. The idea is to create a shock-and-awe-scale blizzard of nonsense, and the goal is to make your opponent drop his hands from his keyboard in exasperation.

What team does your opponent root for? Accuse a Giants fan of having a Joe Namath pillowcase. Wheres your opponent from? Give a look of concern no matter his reply, then say, I'll try to type slower for you next time. Is your opponent into politics? Label everyone a tax-and-spend corporate shill.

Cap all that with a liberal application of irrelevance. For instance, dont just conclude by saying your opponent is a twerp who drafts like my grandmother. Say that your opponent is a sweater-wearing, eyebrow-plucking twerp who drafts his team about as well as Zsa Zsa Gabor gave acceptance speeches at the Oscars. By the time your foe makes sense of that, his starting running back will have had puppies.

But what about you? Hmm? Recall a memorable slam? Have a tried-and-true technique? Know someone who seems impervious to insult? Take a moment and tells us about it. Put together some (fit-for-publication) thoughts. You wont be too busy returning phone messages from your friends, Im sure, to reply.

In addition to the trash talking, the Sports Alarm has a huge gallery of high resolution pictures of beautiful women and models in bikinis. The most popular models are: Lindsay Lohan, Carrie Underwood, Alessandra Ambrosio, and Paris Hilton.