Was it just yesterday that I was squirming as I listened to the game on the radio, thinking about how I was getting bored in these long August days of the baseball season? Hard to believe as I sit here on the off day, squirming as I read Reds news and wonder what to do with myself without a game to listen to.

Sad.

In random tidbits:

• Felipe Lopez is the player of the week. Good for Felipe.
• I love this photo. If he'd actually caught the ball, I'd be completely smitten.
• Hank Waddles sent me a link to this article he wrote about junior Griffey's return to greatness. It's nice, light reading.

I'll be more appreciative to have a game again tomorrow. Go Reds!

In a horribly dispiriting showing, the Stars were shut out and lost by the 10-run mercy rule to the Sluggers. The five innings lasted approximately 45 minutes late this morning in Indianapolis.

The Stars started off well, allowing just one run in the first inning, but suffered several misplayed balls in left field in the second to allow eight runs. In defense of the left fielders, the Stars get very little practice fielding fly balls, as most practices consist of scrimmage games against the other teams in the same county, who don't provide a lot in the way of practice for our outfielders. The Sluggers tacked on their tenth run in the top of the fifth when a ball rolled to the fence, allowing an inside-the-park homerun.

The Stars have vowed that fly-ball practice will be a top priority going into next season. As will practice at hitting, the lack of which was the single biggest hindrance to the Stars today. The Stars stranded six, with only on runner even reaching third base.

The Stars only real threat came in the bottom of the fifth when Jon led off with a hit past the shortstop. Wally walked, and Little Robert singled on a liner to center field. Then the wheels fell off when Robert popped up to the pitcher, enacting the infield fly rule. Bobbi also popped up in the infield, advancing the runners, including bringing in Jon from third. However, the umpire made all the runners return to their bases despite the fact that we have recorded proof that our runners have advanced on a ruled infield fly in a previous game. Second baseman Matt fouled out to end the threat.

There were a few bright spots. Bobbi pitched spectacularly with five strikeouts, four of which to end innings. The infield defense was stellar, even in spite of the fact that the infield (but not the outfield) was artificial turf.

The degree of disappointment and disgust felt by the Stars was indicative of how much we wanted and expected to win this year. We've been the victims of much worse games at state, but we've always been able to bounce out of the game with a cheerful “at least we got some good exercise!” kind of attitude. I think the mood of the team was summed up nicely by this conversation that occurred as the team lined up to receive our medals:

SO Official: (painfully chirpy) So, did you guys have fun?!
RF Jerry: (deadpan) No.
SO Official: (still ridiculously perky) Oh no! Did you win?!
RF Jerry: (still deadpan) No.
SO Official: (clearly sugared up or something) Well, as long as you had fun, that's all that matters!
RHM: (mumbling) Did we not already establish that we did not have fun?

So for now I'm just reminding myself that we're building team character and should function as a more cohesive unit for it. And I'm reminding myself that we're actually much better at volleyball, which should be starting next month.

Go Stars!

In news that I think we all saw coming, after belting out 17 runs yesterday the Reds could muster only two tonight to lose in the second game of the series against the Diamondbacks. The jaded part of me says they'll go on to lose tomorrow in another achingly low-scoring affair, and then all the news stories will talk about how they outscored Arizona over the three games but still lost the series.

Grumble grumble.

Just When You Thought You Knew the Definition of 'Foul Balls'
In news that's perhaps a little less expected coming from me, there's an interview with Jessica Canseco, ex-wife of Jose Canseco, in the September issue of Playboy. It's a pretty short article, so I'll take away the excuse you were going to use for buying the magazine and hit the high points right here and now. I bet you're very appreciative that I'm saving you $4.99.

The relationship began as all successful, long-term relationships do when Jose, already at the peak of his popularity, picked Jessica up in the Hooters where she worked. The very next day, Jose committed the famous ball-bounced-off-his-head-and-over-the-wall blooper, presumably because he was still absorbed with her visage. It had to be love.

Once they were together, Jose apparently cheated incessantly. He was an especially callous casanova, characterizing his lovers not by their names but instead by their hair color. Now, I kind of figured that when you signed on with a jock, especially a jock who was already a national celebrity, especially a jock who was already a national celebrity who picked you up in a Hooters, that you pretty much went into the situation with the understanding that, while you were the official other half of the duet, there was realistically a lot of other accompaniment going on.

Apparently athlete's bombshell-significant-others are just as naïve and romantic as all young inamoratas though, because the article goes on to describe some of the lengths to which Jessica went to try to keep Jose's affections to herself, including muscling up to the mortifying weight of 130 because he liked her to be “meaty,” arranging a ménage à trois with a friend, and submitting to his carnal urges anywhere and everywhere, Fenway Park being specifically cited (though she declined to give the row and seat number for fear that she would “get in trouble.”) It wasn't enough to hold Jose's attention, however, and the two were divorced in 2000.

Of course, no Canseco story would be complete without some discussion of steroids. This discussion didn't shed much new light, except that the substances left Jose so hobbled that Jessica would sometimes have to help him dress himself.

Oh, and that he apparently has no testicles left at all.

Just When You Think All The Good Ones Are Already Taken, You're Right
In news that's downright sweet, JD, the world's most beloved Reds blogger, got married last night. Smart getting married during the season, leaving open the opportunity for all manner of baseball-related anniversary presents. Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Reporter. Best of luck to you in the coming years.

And Just When I Was Starting to Find my Stroke
Finally, in news that is bittersweet, tomorrow is the big state tournament that marks the end of the Indiana Special Olympics softball season. From what we hear, the Stars have been placed in the fourth of six divisions. Each division has four teams, with the winners of the first two games playing to determine first and second place, and the other two teams both receiving bronze medals. Here's hoping we get to play two games tomorrow. I'd love to post a photo of something in the silver or--dare to dream--gold spectrum.

Go Stars! Go Reds! And, oh heck why not: Go JD!

I missed tonight's game for an appointment. When I was finally ready to come home, I called Jon to check in, and the following conversation ensued:

Jon: Hello?
RHM: Hi, honey. I'm finally done. I'm on my way home.
Jon: Great. You want to know the score?
RHM: (with trepidation) Um…sure.
Jon: 17-3.
RHM: Holey crap.
Jon: Yep.
RHM: Let me guess who scored the three. Let's see, Lopez, Kearns, and LaRue.
Jon: Nope.
RHM: Who then?
Jon: The Diamondbacks.
RHM: Oh. You meant 17-3 the good way.
Jon: Yep.
RHM: Holey crap.

Wowza. Let's see more of that tomorrow.

I hear Austin Kearns contributed two three-run home runs, which matches the RBI total of that three home run night I got to see while he was at Louisville, as I recall.

Speaking of Kearnsy, check out this rambling essay by John Sickles at Minor League Ball (thanks to Shawn for making its existence known). While you're there, ponder a point that seems to have been missed by Mr. Sickles and his responders: the difference in Kearns' performance pre- and post-send-down. With Kearns' recent return to form, it's easy to forget just how abysmal his start to the season was.

Which just makes his recent awesomeness all the more awesome, IMO.

Javy's catch on the step to the dugout got him the #4 Web Gem on Baseball Tonight. Someone started coughing as I was watching it so I couldn't hear all the commentary, but I'm pretty sure that the part I missed included John Kruk calling him “the LLM.”

Does the fantastic catch make up for the 0-for-4 afternoon with a strike out AND a GIDP? Dunno. But it does merit seeing the picture again.

Go Javy! Go Reds!

CINCINNATI, OH -- The day after Reds' Chief Operating Officer John Allen showed irritation over relentless trade rumors about Ken Griffey Jr. going to the White Sox, General Manager Dan O'Brien also loosed a torrent of anger on reporters.

“Look, I've told you a hundred times. We're not planning to trade any of our outfielders at this time,” O'Brien said from the second stall in the men's room near his office. “I also haven't found anyone to take Aurilia or a miracle man with the magic elixir to make the world's most potent offense produce on a regular basis. OK? Now can I have some privacy please?”

Undaunted, one reporter peeked over the wall and asked whether the Reds were going to acquire starting pitching.

“Does this team need pitching?” O'Brien asked sarcastically as he slammed the stall door. “I hadn't noticed.”

“I'll just pull an ace out of my [rear end] then!” O'Brien added as he stormed out of the restroom, toilet paper on his shoe.

No news yet on a similar outburst from Manager Jerry Narron, but several reporters are vigilantly poking him with a stick to see what happens.

“Hey,” said Narron. “Cut it out.”

If you don't think I'm going to point out every time that my August predictions were right, well, then you just haven't been reading RHM very long. And the Reds taking the two of the three-game series with the Brewers is no exception, though after they won the first two, I was kind of hoping they'd prove me wrong this afternoon.

Coming right up is the four-game series with San Francisco. I said the Reds would win three, but I'd like to point out that I'd be happy to be wrong if it meant a sweep.

Aside from a bullpen letdown the likes of which we've been spared lately, today's game was pretty lackluster. With so few highlights, I expect multiple “Sunglasses at Night” references in the game stories, what with rookie Corey Hart playing such a big role in the Brewers' win. So at least we have that to look forward to.

In completely unrelated news, I saw this article on Yahoo! Sports via a thread on RedsZone. The story talks about talking, the kind that goes on during a baseball game. This paragraph in particular caught my notice:

That doesn't even count the around-the-batting-cage banter between opposing teams, or the constant discourse that takes place in the bullpen and on the bench, which tends to be eclectic, raucous, obscene, politically incorrect, pithy and trivial - often all at once.

I have to wonder whether this sort of stuff is among the reasons that baseball seems so reticent to involve women in any meaningful role in the sport. Women have been traditionally pretty righteous about this sort of conversation, and I can see why guys would not want to open themselves up to castigation, or perhaps worse, smack down by a member of the gentler sex. But I can assure you that many women actually partake of plenty of this kind of badinage, though usually rather cattily about third parties, not about each other.

For example, Bellyscratcher and I will be participating in some mild smack talk over at her place as we discuss the finer points of the Cardinals v Cubs game this very evening. Stop on by if you'd like to take your turn at jabbing at the Cards or Cubs. Or at me. I won't cry. Much.

The Reds take the second game in the Milwaukee series to bring their winning streak to five and lift themselves just one and a half games out of third place in the division. They've already won with Luke Hudson and Ramón Ortiz starting; tomorrow afternoon we see if they can do it with Brandon “Pickle Man” Claussen on the mound.

Speaking of Ortiz, wowza! What a performance from him tonight. Two hits and no runs over the course of six inning. Nicely done, Ortiz.

The bullpen was equally effective tonight, with Matt Belisle, Jason Standridge, and David Weathers each putting in a scoreless inning. I have no complaints, though I do keep hoping that they'll put in Standridge in a bases-loaded situation so he can get out of it unscathed and we can start calling him “Jason Strandridge.”

Ryan Freel had a great offensive night tonight going 2-for-5 with a couple RBI, after that awful 0-for-19 draught leading up to that lead-off homerun in Chicago on August 10. He was the subject of the post-game interview, during which he said “you know” 21 times.

Dunn broke three bats during tonight's game. I'm sure there's some fake news there somewhere: something along the lines of the logging industry sneaking into the equipment room and sabotaging his bats to up their share prices.

In other Dunn news, I initially thought he was just sleeping in too late on this road trip to get around to shaving before the games, but when I noticed how neatly manicured his stubble was, it occurred to me that he's purposely growing full-on facial hair. Is it an effort to look less like Will Farrell? Or to look more like Austin Kearns, who also appears to be going down that path. Like most things, it looks better on Kearns, but I don't think it'll necessarily turn out to be a bad move for Dunn either. The timing could be bad with them both doing it at the same time, though. They're just asking people to start calling them Beard Buddies.

Let's see the second consecutive sweep tomorrow, fellas.

Go Reds!

But according to Bill Batterman at Brewerfan.net, I'm also “unique and humorous.”

Thanks Bill!

Compared to the first half, August has been pretty good for the Reds. So much so that I actually don't find myself too shell-shocked to look ahead with guarded optimism. Even so, I feel like I ought to prepare myself for what's to come. Should I get excited about the possibility of surpassing the Cubs, or prepare myself for the hook in the eye of falling back below the Pirates?

Looking ahead to the next three weeks turned out to be a lot more typing and arithmetic than I'd anticipated (and I definitely wouldn't recommend checking my math unless you want to obliterate the fictional dream), but it was good late-night research fun nonetheless. I hope that the “research” part doesn't outweigh the “fun” part too much, but either way, I'm sure you'll see the impact of the “late-night” part as you read my

PREDICTIONS FOR THE REMAINDER OF AUGUST

8/12-8/14 - Reds Play Milwaukee

Though the Brewers were also swept by their opponents in their series this week, they didn't just roll over and die the way the Cubs did. To be fair to the Cubs, beating people in grand form has been something that the Reds have excelled at this season, when they do get around to winning.

So let's say that the Reds will take two of three from the Brew Crew, bringing their record up to 54-63. Still nine games under .500, but since the Cardinals will be busy taking three of four from the Cubs over the same few days, the end of August 14 will find just a half game separating the Reds and Cubs.

8/15-8/18 - Reds Take on San Francisco

The Giants aren't even good in the NLW, so I think that qualifies them for the category of teams that the Reds can trounce. But this will be a four-game series, so for the sake of conservativity, let's say the Reds will take only three. That'll bring their record up to 57-64, just seven games under.

At the same time, Chicago will be playing Houston, and while the match-up is certainly in Houston's favor, the Cubs are going to be making hay trying to prove that they are not tired, so I'm going to give them two of the games in the Houston series. Milwaukee will be playing in Colorado in a true beer war, and since, if I have to drink domestic beer, I'll drink Coors, I'll give them two of the three games. On the 18th, Milwaukee will start a series at Houston. I'll give that one to Houston, who will not be suffering the ill effects associated with the day after a beer war.

Pittsburgh will be playing at New York. It probably won't work out well for the Pirates, but at this point the Pirates become pretty much irrelevant to the rest of this discussion anyway, so let's just give them last and get on with it, huh?

So the end of the day on August 18 will see Cincinnati tied for fourth place and nipping just a half game behind Milwaukee's heels. They will still, however, find themselves 21 games back from St. Louis, who will have just taken a couple in the series against Arizona.

8/19-8/21 - Reds versus Arizona

The Reds, riding high after sending San Francisco packing with three losses, will stumble against the Diamondbacks. They'll drop the first two, but come back to take the final game, bringing their record to 58-66, just eight games under. The Reds will be continuing to move in the right direction.

During this same timeframe, Houston and Milwaukee will continue to beat up on each other, with Milwaukee taking two of the final three games over an exhausted and overheated Houston club. That keeps the Reds a game and a half out of third. The Cubs will continue to stay close through the rest of the month, but won't get the kind of surge that they'd need to make themselves a factor again, so I'll stop doing the math for them as well.

Meanwhile, the Cards, tired of the tedium of just winning all the time, will drop two of their three game series to San Francisco, just to see what it feels like to lose a series to someone they ought to trample. At a team meeting after the series they will agree that it's scary but exhilarating. They will still be 79-45.

8/23 - 8/25 - Reds Face Washington

The Reds, in an effort to teach them some manners after they manhandled Kenny Kelly, sweep the Nationals in what will turn out to be the start of a 6-game winning streak. They will now be 61-66, unheard of territory for the 2005 Reds.

Meanwhile, the Brewers will play Florida and, after taking two against Houston, will see no reason they can't do the same for the Marlins and bring themselves up to 62-66. They will now be just a half game up on the surging Reds who will be threatening to take control of third place. Reds fans everywhere will be truly overwhelmed that their team is threatening a bona fide mediocre team.

Continuing up the division, the Astros will drop a couple to the Padres who will be riding high on the heroics of Joe Randa who will have finally regained Super-Joe form. The Cardinals will roll over the Pirates, sweeping the four game series, to knock on the door of 40 games over with a record of 83-45 that leaves the Reds still 21.5 games back.

8/26 - 8/29 - Reds are Present in the Vicinity of the Pirates

The Pirates will bring back Craig Wilson early especially for this series, where he will hurt himself again and prepare to move permanently to Indianapolis where he is doomed to remain rehabbing for all of eternity. The miserable Pirates, having just been swept over a four-game series, will similarly give up all four games to Cincy, boosting the Reds to 65-66 and respectability. There will be an odd silence on the Reds blogs and message boards as fans everywhere ponder the existential quandary of what it really means to acheive .500.

At the same time, the Cards will complete a three-game series with Washington and play the first game of a series with Florida. Washington will have shaken off the sweep by the Reds and will manage to take a game from the Cards, as will Florida.

The Astros, apparently exhausted, will lose a couple games and the series to the Dodgers, of all people, bringing their record to 68-62. The Brewers will have been playing the Braves, a team that couldn't lose if doing so would cure Cancer and end world hunger (unless, of course, they're in the play-offs), so Milwaukee will see their record drop to 63-68, eliminating the need for me to do the math for their last series in August.

8/30 - 8/31 - Reds Against the Houston “Did We Really Just Lose a Series to the Dodgers?” Astros

The Reds will take the first game against Houston to bring themselves to 66-66, and then, as startled by reaching .500 as a young child is to realize that his dad let go of the bike and he's riding all by himself, they will crash into the nearest available tree and drop the second game to end August at a game below .500. The end of the month will see second-place Houston with a 69-63 record, just three and a half games up on the Reds.

Meanwhile, the Cardinals will have pulled themselves together in Florida to take the second and third games, bringing their record to 87-47 and leaving the Reds a scant 20.5 games back.

So there you have it: the last three weeks of August are going to hold 14 wins and just five losses for the Reds. That's totally plausible. It's not even a big deal.

September's first week will see the end of the losing season and the sudden establishment of our favorite team into the top half of the division. Amazing. Never would have seen that coming in May. Or even earlier this week.

Go Reds!