The Professional Cheerleader blog has a nice write-up about the Reds cheerleaders on Opening Day this year.

And there's a picture of Gapper. I know, not as scintillating as the cheerleaders, but I hadn't seen him in a while and was beginning to worry that furry mascot hunting season had been declared.

I'd say that it's like the division turned upside-down to have the Pirates in first and the Cardinals and Astros bringing up the rear, but I don't like what that would mean about the Reds at all. Our boys can start setting things straight tonight.

C. Trent's got the line-ups:

The Buccos
Chris Duffy CF
Jack Wilson SS
Jason Bay LF
Adam LaRoche 1B
Ronny Paulino C
Xavier Nady RF
Jose Bautista 3B
Jose Castillo 2B
Paul Maholm P

Your Cincinnati Reds
Ryan Freel CF
Brandon Phillips 2B
Adam Dunn LF
Edwin Encarnación 3B
Ken Griffey Jr. RF
Jeff Conine 1B
Alex Gonzalez SS
David Ross C
Matt Belisle P

Maholm doesn't exactly suck and Belisle is pretty untested; this could be a tough one. The sub-freezing temperatures won't help: a frozen ball can't absorb as much energy from a bat. But they've been boning up on their small ball, so it should be all good, right?

The Pirates are coming to town, which means chatting with some of the most passionate bloggers in the sport. Let's see what they're up to anyway…

Pat at WHYGAS? looks at the drafting habits of the Pirates through recent years. By 2003, I was laughing so loud that I woke up the cat.

Bucco Blog previews the series and talks about the reasoning behind the Vegas odds. Apparently the Pirates are underdogs going into tonight's game because, among other reasons, they're 1-5 in their last six Friday games. Who knew the day of the week was so essential? What's their record for the last six games on the sixth of the month? Or the sixth of April?

At Bucs Dugout, they must be feeling pretty good about sitting atop the division, because they're taking some time out of their busy schedules to create an All-Overpaid Team and compare it to the overpaid team that appears on ESPN's Page 2. The Page 2 bit does have a rep from the Reds, but I probably didn't need to tell you that. Furthermore, they include Jason LaRue in a group of players that they say the Royals are overpaying, but I think they forget that it's actually the Reds who are paying him.

Major League Baseball is investigating Angel's pitcher Francisco Rodriguez after this blog post appeared on The Cheater's Guide to Baseball Blog, complete with still shots of Rodriguez rubbing this pitching thumb on a foreign substance stuck to the bottom of the bill of his cap.

And here I thought that Major League Baseball disavowed any relevance of blogs. Way to go Derek!

CINCINNATI, OH--The Knothole Club of Greater Cincinnati will stop allowing bad athletes to participate in little league games because of the negative effect that sucking has on a child's self-esteem.

The decision was made by a group of concerned parents, coaches, and umpires in response to reports that a 7-year old player was seen crying after tripping on the base path and scraping his knee.

“The humiliation of being such a bad runner is far more painful than the injury,” said the boy's mother, Helen Hamilton, who admitted she hadn't actually talked to her son about why he was crying. “These are children. They'll never learn if we let them fail.”

The decision comes on the heels of an earlier announcement that any kind of negative chatter had been banned after some heated exchanges led to fights and hurt feelings. “If you're saying, 'Swing, batter,' and this poor little kid is swinging at everything, he feels bad and maybe he turns to the catcher and gets mad,” Knothole president Dave Epplen explained. “This move was the natural next step in protecting children from learning to deal with the feelings that they might have.”

The fact that the decision would exclude about 75 percent of the participants didn't bother Epplen. “Keeping these bad players out of games, heck, out of interactions with other human beings, is for their own good.”

Other measures under consideration include wrapping players in bubble wrap and replacing games between teams with single-player virtual reality in which the child plays only against CPU opponents programmed to lose.

“I like the idea,” said Hamilton. “The best thing I can do to ensure that he makes good choices as an adult is to shelter him from everything right up until the day I decide to leave him to his own devices.”