Sorry this is so late, everyone. I had to register myself before I could feel good about posting it here

Register now for your chance to purchase tickets for potential Cincinnati Reds Postseason games to be held at Great American Ball Park! Registration ends on September 9, 2010 at noon ET for the Division Series and will remain open for the National League Championship Series and World Series.

As part of a continuing effort to make tickets available to as many Reds fans as possible, the online drawing gives fans additional chances to experience October baseball in Cincinnati. Since there are a limited number of Postseason tickets available through this opportunity, applicants must fill out and submit a registration form to participate in this opportunity to purchase. In order to be eligible for this opportunity, you must be eighteen (18) years of age or older at the time of entry.

Fans will be randomly selected from the registration and sent directions on how to purchase tickets for each round. A random drawing will be held on or about September 10, 2010 to determine Division Series winners. Winners will be notified via e-mail and will have from Tuesday, September 14 at 9:00 a.m. ET to Wednesday, September 15 at 11:59 p.m. ET to purchase tickets.

Only fans that have completed the Ticket Opportunity form and have been selected to participate will have the ability to purchase tickets. Notification of selection and receipt of email does not guarantee tickets for any of the games. Tickets will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis, subject to availability.

See the lovely email that Reds.com sent, in all it’s marketing-message glory.

The RHM crew were there in Spring Training for one of Aroldis Chapman’s appearances. And we caught one of his performances with the Bats when they stopped by Indianapolis. We weren’t in Cincinnati for his Major League debut last night, but we were glued to the television. Dusty Baker said it best, “We weren’t disappointed.”

No, no we were not.

Aroldis Chapman came on in the 8th with the Reds holding a comfortable 8-3 lead. It was the perfect opportunity for him to get his feet wet, and if he wasn’t sharp, the damage could be controlled. There was no need for damage control. Chapman’s first pitch was a 98 mile-per-hour fastball strike to Jonathan Lucroy. Next was an 86 mph slider that Lucroy swung and missed at, followed by fouling off a 102 mph fastball, before striking out on another 86 mph slider. Lucroy just became Chapman’s first big league strikeout.

Chapman’s pitch count ended up being 8 for his inning of work. 7 of them were strikes. After the initial strikeout, he got groundouts from Craig Counsell and Carlos Gomez, all while continuously throwing 100 mph or above.

What a debut. The crowd was on their feet for the 8th inning, to see the marvelous Cuban pitching phenom. And I sat at home, visions of Chapman mowing down postseason opposition in my head. A long time ago I worried about Chapman getting some terrible injury before he ever made it to Cincinnati and how hard I thought it would be to be the people in charge of deciding when Chapman was called up. Kudos to them. They’ve done a perfect job.

In what’s becoming a recurring theme of the 2010 season for the St. Louis Cardinals, Tony La Russa is again complaining about something that happened in the game against the Washington Nationals yesterday.

In the 9th inning, Nationals rookie reliever Drew Storen lost control of a fastball when pitching to Matt Holliday. The pitch sailed behind the batter. La Russa said, “If somebody throws the ball behind you, you’re not happy. Especially up in that area. If you don’t have that kind of command, it wasn’t intentional, then you don’t belong in this league.”

La Russa has made similar complaints before. I remember him making even harsher statements once when Reds pitcher Aaron Harang threw a wild pitch. Strangely, I never hear of other teams managers making the same criticisms when Cardinals pitchers throw wild pitches.

Of course, this is coming from a manager with a DWI on his record. I could make a cheap shot about how someone who can’t control their alcohol consumption doesn’t belong in the league. However, I’ll instead sit back and enjoy the Cardinals meltdown this year. For all of their “bitching and moaning” seems to do nothing more than cause them to lose focus and fall further and further behind the Reds. They lost that game to the Nationals yesterday.

One of the perks of the Cincinnati Reds Reds Heads Kids Club is that the kids get to go to one of six autograph sessions with one of the Reds players. This season, my son Winter has been interested in collecting Reds signatures on the back of his 2010 Reds Heads jersey, and yesterday was the session he chose.

The player for each of the signings is never announced too far in advance. It’s impossible to know which player will be with the team and healthy for each signing. I overheard one of the workers talking about a previous session where the player was sent down to the minors just before the signing, leaving them scrambling to find someone else. Yesterday, no such scramble occurred. A day after his first Major League home run, Chris Valaika was signing for kids club members in the Reds Hall of Fame.

Valaika’s signature gave Winter his 13th signature this year. They’ve been collected all over, including Reds Caravan stops, Spring Training, and Opening Night. If he wants to do the same thing next year, we’ll definitely want to spend some time with him at RedsFest.

Boxscore

The St. Louis Cardinals have been having a terrible time of it lately. First, they lose a series to the last-place Pittsburgh Pirates. Yesterday, they headed to Washington, D.C. to take on the last-place Washington Nationals and again fell. Although this time, it took them 13 innings to lose.

Chris Carpenter, who will no doubt have difficulty explaining the loss to his child, started for the Cardinals. If it weren’t for the unearned runs, he would have had a quality start, as he pitched 6 innings and allowed 3 earned runs. Unfortunately, Felipe Lopez is an everyday player for St. Louis. And as Reds fans remember all too well, he can have problems throwing the ball, as he did in the 3rd, which led to 3 unearned runs scoring.

St. Louis did take the lead back after that error, thanks to Albert Pujols’ 400th career home run. But it wasn’t enough. Carpenter and the bullpen could not keep the Nationals from scoring. Going into the top of the 9th, Washington was ahead 8-6. It was time for another of the Cardinals patented come-this-close-to-winning comebacks.

Except that this time, the Cardinals actually did take the lead. Brendan Ryan doubled in a run, Matt Holliday was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded to tie it, and then Randy Winn drove in a go-ahead run and an insurance run with a single.

It wasn’t enough for closer Ryan Franklin, though, who allowed the Nationals to tie it on a 2-run shot by Roger Bernadino. The game went into extras and nobody scored until the bottom of the 13th when Ian Desmond hit the walk-off single.

The loss drops the Cardinals to 4 games behind the first-place Reds. They have now lost 3 in a row. Most troubling may be that 2 of those games were started by their big guns–Adam Wainwright and Carpenter. Their record for their last 10 is 3-7.

Boxscore

Wow. Two games in a row that weren’t worth staying up until tomorrow for. Thank goodness I didn’t.

The San Francisco Giants again beat down the Cincinnati Reds, hard and fast. This time Travis Wood was the starting pitcher to get rocked. He did last quite a bit longer than Volquez did the night before, but it was still a horrible outing, with 7 earned runs over 4 innings. Mike Leake made his second relief appearance and was also terrible, and did nothing more than supply the Giants with brass knuckles. Over 1/3 of an inning, Leake allowed 6 runs on 6 hits, 2 of which were home runs. The outing was so bad that there’s now talk of shutting him down for the season. Recent callup Sam LeCure got in on the run-allowing action, too, giving up 3 in his 3 innings. Only Nick Masset showed competence last night.

Well, that’s not entirely true. The offense was solid. At least, I think 5 runs is a good showing. Heck, they scored 3 to get within 2 in the 5th before Mike Leake came in. In the 5th, Brandon Phillips hit his second solo shot of the evening. Then a few batters later, Scott Rolen launched a two-run home run. That was all for the rest of the game. I imagine the massive amounts of runs the bullpen was leaking didn’t provide much incentive to score.

This marks the first series the Reds have lost since being swept by the Cardinals. The good news is that this road trip had just one game left, the Reds will have a winning record on it, and that they will return home in first place. The season isn’t over; the Reds have simply had 2 bad games in a row. It happens, and if past performance is any predictor of the future, then this team will bounce back. And hopefully, it’ll be today.