Smoking

Ok, forget about getting swept by the Indians (a good team) or by the Pirates (a not-so-good team). Let's think back to happier times, back to last weekend, when we all weren't screaming for the beheadings of Jonny "Outomatic" Gomes or Edinson Walkez. Remember sweeping the hated Taint Louis Deadbirds? Well, here is an MS Paint/Photographic/Musical recollection of the fun we had then. We will have it again, I'm sure of it!

Make 7 Up Yours

First Place version 5.0

It is 92 degrees right now and the trees are still awesome summer green, but the afternoon light is waning and there's a rustling through the leaves that whispers August's impending death. One more month and I won't be sitting outside in shorts, a tank top, and flip flops. This beer I drink is Sam Seasonal, but it has changed from the fruity summer ale to the Oktoberfest variety. Oh.

But what a festive Oktober it will be.

For the last month, I've been writing about how I can't believe this is happening, how I expect it all to collapse like it always does. But it persists, this thing large cities call "first place," and it is swelling into something that can bring us immense pleasure. There is a whole generation of first place virgins that have been waiting for...I, uh, should leave this metaphor before I am excommunicated from this holy church...

Five games. Thirty-two games remaining.

Five games.

FIVE games.

We're talking magic number territory here, and today I have never appreciated the number 29 so much. I am right at this moment recalling a feeling, a vague childhood memory of the Reds smiley face on the front page of the Dayton Daily News with a quotidian reading of magic numbers. I am remembering the feeling of newspapers, Hal McCoy articles in his prime, turning my hands black with newsprint. I can feel the first cool nights, the crispness that accompanies pennant races, playoff baseball sans Tim McCarver or Fox or tea parties or terrorism when mudslinging wasn't laced with toxins and Americans were just Americans and not "real Americans" versus whatever the opposite of "real Americans" is. I have just experienced a return to childhood in my head, when the Cincinnati Reds Baseball Club was a respected franchise, families sat down together for nightly dinners, you could arrive at airports and just get on your plane, and the internet was not yet a weapon of mass destruction.

Ah, the times they are a changing. Good thing, because if time weren't changing, it'd mean we're dead.

The excitement - or whatever is the chemical in my brain that reacts to the success of my tribe - is pumping through my body, producing physical sensations unknown to me or forgotten, unknown to all of us for a long, long time. I don't pine for the innocent days of childhood one bit, however. Innocence = ignorance, and ignorance, while perhaps producing a state of temporary bliss, only compounds our troubles in our lives. I, for one, would rather know and work towards solving the problems of the world rather than ignoring them and then fearing things I don't understand when they begin to affect my life. And though not being ignorant can result in worry or sadness at times, we have things like the beautiful game of baseball to give us respite.

What better way to experience that respite than to enjoy the fruits of the divine favor of the baseball gods who have finally forgiven Pete Rose for his transgressions and have ended our long suffering.

Unless they are just playing a cruel joke...

No Sweat

Psst…it’s August. August 4, 2010, to be more precise. The bank sign says 99 degrees. I’m pretty sure it’s wrong, though, because aside from the sweat rolling down my back, it’s pretty comfortable. What? You don’t think sweat rolling down your back can be comfortable? You’ve been spending too much time inside air conditioning. Here’s a little secret: sweat is your body’s very own built in cooling mechanism. Without it, we would have died out a long time ago, like the dinosaurs and the dodo bird and common sense. Here’s another secret: if you don’t use your air conditioning all the time, hot doesn’t feel so hot. Honest.

Hot doesn’t feel so hot. It’s August 4, 2010 and the Reds are in first place. But it doesn’t feel like first place. I mean, yeah, we’ve gotten kind of arrogant and expect to win every game now and we’re filling up a baseball stadium, but the seesawing is like sun then thunderstorms then sun then thunderstorms then light drizzle then partly cloudy then night then day then a rain delay. Oh sure, it’s fun and we can write real time comments with a lot of exclamation marks every time a Reds player does something good, but the minute Caca Cordero walks someone, it feels like someone has bombed the Promised Land.

The Deadbirds are panicking. They’re only half a game out but they’re already juggling their rotation with a couple of nice round juggling balls and a few sticks that are on fire. They just trashed their not-as-potent offense for a little pitching. (I vaguely remember a certain team trashing a quarter of their offense for a little pitching a few years ago…that didn’t turn out too well.) And why are they panicking? Because they know what winning is like and we’ve forgotten and so even though it’s enjoyable and the sight of Cincinnati atop the standings and Votto atop every offensive category is orgasmic, there’s always that nagging thing in the back of our minds wondering when it’s all going to end.

I asked my Phillies phan phriend about the first year the Phillies started winning and he told me much of what I am feeling is the same as what he felt back then. The logical part of my brain knows this team, even with its holes, is good, maybe better than the Deadbirds (without Pujols, they aren’t that great.) It also knows we play the Padres in San Diego during the last week of the season and that we have another West Coast trip a couple of weeks before that. The emotional part of my brain can’t handle even the thought of the disappointment I will feel if we don’t go all the way. And disappointment is something we know a little bit about.

The lowest rated All Star game in television history (since we kept track)

I had only completed my freshman year of college the last time the National League won the All Star game. It was the first year of the new Bank€€$ dynasty. It was the fourth year after realignment. It was a year after the Reds went to the NLCS. It was two years after The Strike.

The last time the NL won an All Star game, Hank Aaron was the homerun king, cheating meant a corked bat, and the Br€ad $ox hadn't won a World Series since before women were given the right to vote. It was before no one came to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates or the Kansas City Royals. It was before big screens in every room, before there was a word "blog," before the great game of baseball drowned in the corporatocracy of €mperor Selig.

Last night, the All Star game received the lowest television ratings since we've been keeping track. Why is that? I'd like to throw out the possibility that it's because MLB has allowed €$PN and Fok$ to dictate to us which teams we can watch for more than a decade now, and people are exposed to the same teams, the number which you can count on both hands, and those teams didn't dominate the field. The Br€ad $ox were hurt and there was only one Bank€€ in the starting lineup. There were four Cincinnati Reds and four San Diego Padres on the NL team. (Gasp! They have TEAMS in those cities?)

How else do you explain it? Maybe everyone just turned it off because they thought the game would never start after that five hour pre-game show. Or maybe everyone's electricity went off in thunderstorms. Or maybe everyone is unemployed and had to sell their televisions. Is there a new Harry Potty movie that came out last night that I don't know about?

Meanwhile, the ratings were way up in Cincinnati, and we thoroughly enjoyed watching our guys. That victory felt like a Reds victory for me. It was exciting, it was worth watching, it was fun. How awesome was it to see Rolen and Phillips on the same All Star infield or to watch Votto and Rolen bat back-to-back? (You may have missed Votto if you blinked during either of his two ABs.)

So when the Reds are playing at Great American Ball(p)ark for Game 1 of the World Series against the Texass Rangers, will no one in the country outside of Cincinnati and Ohio expats and Dallas watch? (Who DID shoot JR?) Will €$PN and Fok$ and NB¢ conspire to destroy these two teams to ensure they don't make the playoffs and lower their ratings? (My tinfoil hat has a wishbone C on it.)

Major League Baseball thought it was making baseball more popular by promoting a handful of teams while ignoring the rest. In the end, it's going to kill it. Only 36% of Americans say they follow the "national pastime." Why should someone from Milwaukee or Oakland or Houston who wasn't born a baseball fan follow baseball in their hometowns (even when their teams are winning) when it's like those teams don't even exist on a map of America?

Who except us diehards knew Matt Thornton or Martin Prado or Evan Meeks or Matt Capps or John Buck or Omar Infante or Cory Hart (the other one) or Ian Kinsler or Andrew Bailey or that Ryan Braun is in reality bad at defense? I mean, people don't even know one of the best players in the game - Joey Votto - or the best non-Chutley second baseman in the game - Brandon Phillips. How would they? They're never on national television, and the major sports sites rarely give them any attention.

The Reds are going to be good for a long time, but will there be a bandwagon? Most people don't know that Cincinnati had the first professional team or has won more World Series than all but five teams (and tied with two others, plus Boston won all but two of theirs before the existence of the Soviet Union, so do they really count? Also, the Reds won an American Association title in 1882 when the AA was considered a Major League. They were only in it because they got kicked out of the National League for selling beer and playing on Sundays.)

I know the All Star game is a circus these days. I know I complain about this small market stuff all the time. I know the Reds were awful for the last decade. I know the Bank€€$ have been to 40 of the 105 World Series that have been played and their dominance is nothing new. It seems something about the game has fundamentally changed, and the lowest rated All Star game in television history is an indication of that.

But baseball has always been a business. It's just enshrouded in nostalgia and mystique and childhood memories that keep it pure in our minds.

Is this the real life? Is it just fantasy?

I chose to watch the Reds game on E$PN last night for a national perspective and just to watch it on a big television screen rather than the tiny computer screen.

The beginning was a Joey lovefest. Joe Morgan interviewed him before the game and Joey couldn't stop smiling. He is clearly loving the attention, even if he says it doesn't matter - he looks like a kid at Christmas. And wow, he really was upset - rightly so - in not making the All Star team. I hope he mashes the Phillies this week.

I have the Rockies-Deadbirds game on right now, cheering for Colorado like I actually cared about that team. Dexter Fowler is a hero. Jimenez is, too. I don't think twice about these guys for 156 games of the year.

The season began ho-hum enough. Like a lot of Reds fans, I didn't have the same level of enthusiasm for the start of the season as I had in the past. It didn't seem like the team had tried to improve much, and I knew better than to be fooled for the tenth season in a row. Losing on our Holy Opening Day was just icing on the ho-hum cake. April seemed pretty crappy - the team went 12-11 and there was still a long season ahead. Then suddenly it was June 1 and we were in first and everyone was looking for signs that it was all a fluke. You know the Texas saying (maybe it's Tennessee), "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...uh...uh, you can't get fooled again."

We passed the halfway point in the season a few games ago and now we're three games up on the Hated Deadbirds and find ourselves wondering what the heck is going on. How are we supposed to act? Why are we watching a Rockies-Deadbirds game and cheering as the Rockies go up 4-1 in the 5th? Why did we just spend a great deal of time in the last few days voting for a fourth Red for the All Star team? Four? Really?

Last night's E$PN game seemed like they were introducing the Cincinnati Reds to America. From the Joey interview to the in-game commentary that was much more about the Reds than the Mets, it seemed like E$PN was showcasing our team for much more national attention to come.

Is this the real life? Or are we going to be let down like we have been so many seasons in the past decade? It certainly feels different. It certainly feels legit. And god, is it fun.

Let's go all BP on the Deadbirds!

It's 12:05am on a Saturday morning. I'm lying in bed wondering why I still have the air conditioner on when it is a decent night, as relief from the oppressive heat has come to us with the full moon. The machine rattles loudly, violently. The television that came with this apartment is on - I had the Nationals-Orioles debacle on earlier, but that ended an hour ago, and I've turned it to the movie Seven though I am not watching. I turn the volume up, but a commercial comes on and blasts noise across the room, through the walls, down the hall. (Why are they allowed to do that?) I have an empty Sam Adams bottle on the nightstand - I'd get another but I feel comfortable, comforted. The Reds defeated the Indians handedly in what people pointlessly call the Ohio Cup. I did something strange after watching the game online tonight. I turned it to the Deadbirds game.

I'm scoreboard watching in June.

Are we pathetic because we are watching the scoreboard so early in the season (the season is halfway over next weekend)? Is this what winning teams do? Or have we been so deprived that we just forget what winning feels like?

I went to Baseball Reference.com to see if the 2010 Cincinnati Reds were legit. I mean, we've been in first place during the decade of losing, only to be let down miserably, our hope sucked from our souls and our interest drained from our brains until we just couldn't bear to watch a game in August or September.

You know what I found? We've been in first place or up to 1.5 games back since May 12. It is now June 26. That's 45 days, and 27 of those we've been in first place. (INCLUDING TODAY!)

Dude, that's nearly a whole month!

I mean, we knew our farm system was good, and they have arrived, but it's just...so...difficult...to...believe!

Let's enjoy it and root against the Deadbirds like Big Oil roots against birds and other living creatures and oceans and the planet in general!