It’s 2011 Reds Team Baseball Card Set day (presented by Thompson Plumbing, Heating and Cooling), for all your Reds commemorating enjoyment.

You can add them to your pristine collection of unopened team cards sets, or, if your family is more like mine, you can find them all around the house after they are incorporated into your son’s imaginary game where the Paul Janish card teams up with the Drew Stubbs card to defeat the diabolical Bakugan on the Lego train.

If you closely at this picture, you’ll notice that they’re lying down like that to show off the shiny foil background. There are four of these super-special cards in the pack: three gold ones for the gold-glovers and one silver one for the MVP.

Why does a gold glove get you a gold card while the MVP only gets you silver? Probably because “gold” is in the name of the “gold glove” and so it would be weird the other way. If it helps, you can think of the silver as representing diamond. And not the lab-created ones; the ones people die for. Or platinum. Platinum is probably better.

Either way, it’s much easier to get the cards than any of those other precious materials. Just be one of the first 30,000 through the door to see the Reds take on the Pirates and get yours. Edinson Volquez is supposed to be back in action.

I saw this article about Joey Votto linked to earlier this week from Redleg Nation, and it’s the stuff that myths and tall tales are made of.

For starters, there’s the story about him asking for a pair of new batting gloves from the coach of his youth team, the Canadian Thunderbirds, every other day. They were free, but the constant need for new ones was suspicious. But young Votto wasn’t doing anything sly like selling them for cash. No, it wasn’t that. But the coach didn’t believe his answer.

So the two struck a deal. Every time Votto felt he needed a new pair, he had to trade his old ones in to prove it.

Not long after, the kid showed up ready for the first exchange. The pair he’d been given just a day or two before had holes in the palms. And blood stains all over them.

“They were from broken blisters,” Oswald says.

Votto swung the bat. A lot.

Also, don’t miss the story about Votto’s mighty throwing arm and the ball a teammate missed catching, and the time Votto eschewed metal bats and proved how his burgeoning awesomeness to a persistent scout.

I know it’s hard to predict the success of baseball players, but Votto’s intense focus has always been present. And I think all his practice might pay off soon.

Thank you, Milwaukee Brewers for also losing so as to offset the 2011 debut of Badroyo and keep the Reds in a one-game lead for first place in the division. I hope we can do it again sometime.

Of course, we the way we “do it again” is by both teams continuing to lose, we’ll have to start worrying about the Chicago Cubs. And, by extension, the end of the world.

The Cincinnati Reds started out this year with a bang and took an early lead in the division. With some really shoddy bullpen work from time to time, though, the Milwaukee Brewers are now just one game back. It wouldn’t matter if the Reds lost first place: the season is long and you don’t get bonus points for going wire-to-wire.

But it did have me thinking about the last time the Reds were in first place right out of the gate, and how long it lasted.

The most recent time the Reds even won their first game of the season (a requirement for this feat, unless every team in the division starts the season out of division and loses concurrently) was 2007, and the very next game they were knocked down to third in the NLC when they lost to the mighty power of Ted Lilly and the Chicago Cubs.

The next most recent time the Reds started off in first was 2005, that badass year when Joe Randa raked and Cincinnati totally owned the Mets through the whole first series. But it was all for naught, when they were out of first on the very next game, just four into the season.

The time before that was 2002, and we’re getting back into the very early days of my fandom here. I probably didn’t even know that there was a pitching rotation at that point (it seems natural to life-long fans, but the notion of a rotation is not obvious to the rest of the world). Again, the Reds had given up first by the fourth game.

And that’s it: the sum total of the times the Reds have even so much as won the first game of the series in the last ten years, and first place in the division was never held on to for longer than a week. No wonder people are so excited this year; this is uncharted territory, baby, and even if they lose it tomorrow (which, I guess they could only really tie for it) the baseball gods can’t jinx that away.

I have so many disjointed baseball thoughts this evening, that I am going to whip out a page layout mechanism I used to use all the time–bullets. They’re even shaped like little baseballs:

• Broadcast in Technicolor I *hate* watching baseball in standard definition. I want to blame DirectTV for the fact that tonight’s game looks like I’m watching it through wax paper, but FSOhio sent me an email last week talking about how HD wouldn’t be available, which I guess means it’s their fault. I had lunch with a bunch of tech geeks today, and they all seem to have gotten rid of their television service entirely in favor of streaming programming from the internet to their televisions. I wonder whether the internets has the game in HD. It would work over dial-up, right?
• It Wouldn’t Matter if He Crapped Autographed Gold Ingots The Cowboy felt the need to defend Paul Janish after he popped out with the bases loaded in this game. A completely badass defensive shortstop, batting eighth no less, needs defending when he’s batting .353 in his first 34 ABs? Only in Cincy.
• Wardrobe Malfunction The ump just stopped Jordan Smith to make him adjust his sleeves to show the same amount of red peeking out from both sides of the jersey. Fashion police anyone?
• Call Him Sunny D Joey Votto is a concentration machine. The fresh-squeezed orange juice he drinks in the morning comes out as frozen concentrate a half hour later. If you’re going to beat this guy, you have to be better than him because he’s not going to give away anything. I think that has to be influencing the rest of the team too; I mean, you can’t boot a ball and expect everyone to be all like, “hey, it happens to everyone” in this dugout. At best, it would be like, “hey, it happens to everyone except Joey.”
• Down Boy It makes me sad that no one on the TV broadcast has mentioned Chris Denorfia coming up with the Reds, let alone called him “Hearththrob.” For old time’s sake, I’ve barked like Dino whenever he’s come up to bat, but it just isn’t the same.

And a bonus bullet, not about baseball stuff, but just a real head-scratcher:

• I Wish for 1,000,000 State Farm Agents When your kitchen table and/or ornamental birdbath are pulverized by the magical appearance of the crap you wished for from your own personal State Farm genie, are the damages covered by State Farm?