This week I got together for lunch with a high school friend, and when I asked the waitress to turn the game on, the conversation turned to baseball. My friend doesn’t follow the game like I do, but she did used to consider herself a Cubs fan (poor thing) back when we were in school.

She told me that she was recently out at a bar with friends where the Cubs were on, and she noticed for the first time in some 20 years the state of baseball players’ uniforms. In her recounting of the story, she became a little agitated:

“Why are his pants so baggy? They didn’t used to be that way!” she told her friends. Alas, none of them was a baseball fan. Two didn’t follow any sports at all and the other, Chris, a guy we also went to high school with, was strictly a football fan.

“Chris, you watch sports. Baseball pants didn’t used to be like that, did they?” she said, hoping for some vindication for her reaction. But Chris left her hanging. He used to do that to me sometimes, too, back in high school.

I assured her that baseball pants, indeed, have not always looked like a pair of sweatpants that some lazy lardo wears to Wal-Mart.

“And it’s a shame, too, because these guys are athletes, and most of them have something worth looking at,” I told her. “Most, but not all. You can pretty much count on a center fielder to rock a tight pair of pants, but it’s really hit-or-miss with, say, first basemen.”

At that point the lunchtime conversation turned to something other than baseball, but later I found myself thinking about the attractiveness level that you can expect from each position in the field. Not that the rules are hard-and-fast, but there are some general trends for sure.

You know how people rank each other’s appearance on a scale of 1-to-10, like, “she’s a total 10.” Maybe you could make a similar scale based on baseball player positions. Then, you might hear one of those women who go to bars to pick up visiting-team players say something like, “Yeah, when I was younger I could land a second baseman any day of the week, but these days I’m lucky to get a catcher.”

Man, why didn’t I ever become one of those women? Well, there’s the ethics, sure. And the fact that, even at my cutest, I probably couldn’t have scored much higher than a platoon third baseman. (You absolutely have to be blonde to go above that.) These days I’d have to set my sights on a middle reliever or below, and no one wants to see that.

Still, maybe I’ll find my second wind in my cougar years. I once had a Reds insider tell me that Marty Brennaman had “digits to every nursing home in town,” so I guess there’s always hope.

You know that the Cincinnati Reds are an inspirational team because once someone gets started writing songs about them, the hits just keep on coming. It’s like they’re the muse of the National League.

Here’s the latest from The Cincinnati Reds Wooo Guy. Myself, I perhaps don’t find Marty quite as venerable, but checking out the song’s still a good way to spend two and a half minutes on a Friday afternoon.

The couple series the Reds have had against the Padres recently have had me thinking about Chris Denorfia. These days, Denorfia is a backup outfielder for the Padres, but he came up with the Reds, and I was always very fond of the guy. The Reds traded him to the A’s for 2 players to be named later in 2007. At that time he was in the middle of an injury that had him out for the year, making it a most stupid time to trade him, like selling Apple stock before Steve Jobs returned in 1996. Stupider, actually, because Denorfia was always expected to return; all the MBAs in the world wouldn’t have seen that Jobs thing coming at the time he left.

I was pretty mad about the trade at the time, and people said I was overreacting, but time has proven me right. The two PTBNLs were Marcus McBeth and Ben Jukich. If you don’t know who those guys are, I’m not surprised. Whereas Denorfia has provided 7.8 WAR in the time since he left the Reds, McBeth contributed -0.1 WAR in his 23 games with the Reds before he never played in the majors again. Jukich, on the other hand, never cracked the majors in the first place. McBeth got picked up off waivers while Jukich retired after three years in the minors: the Reds didn’t get anything out of either of them.

So, it was clearly a trade that the Reds lost. And it’s too bad, because we could have used another outfield option in the time since 2006. His .264/.324/.387 this year might not make him stellar, but Chris Heisey’s line is .206/.254/.369. Denorfia is only making $2 million this year.

I have a key business connection in San Diego, so I have reason to travel out there from time to time. It occurred to me that it would be funny to go to a home Padres game wearing a Denorfia Reds jersey. The idea amused me enough that I started looking for one, without any luck. None of the likely online retailers had anything for me, so I dropped a line to a memorabilia dealer in Cincinnati whose website made me think this would be right up their alley. The guy there got back to me right away and said that, not only did they not have such a thing, but in fact he’d never even seen such a thing.

That got me wondering whether such a thing was likely to exist. I pulled up Denorfia’s baseball-reference page to find that he’d actually been with the team a very short amount of time. Just 18 games in 2005 when he wore #19 and 49 games in 2006 when he wore #27. With that little service time, it seems improbable that they generated any replica jerseys. No, the only Reds Denorfia jerseys out there were probably the ones he himself wore.

And even those would be few. I don’t know what the lifespan of a major league jersey is, but with that few games, I could imagine he never had to replace them. Home plus away plus Sunday alternate times 2 years equals just 6 Reds Denorfia jerseys that have ever existed.

So my funny idea is pretty much DoA now. Sure, I could have a 2006 replicate made up with his name on it, but that be stupid-expensive for a throwaway gag that all of a half dozen people might recognize. Plus, that much dedication smacks just a little of creepy stalker, and San Diego is too far away for me to really commit to a creepy stalker role properly.

Thankfully, the more recent trades with the Padres have worked out better for the Reds. Heaven knows there’s no difficulty getting a Reds Latos jersey.

Saturday, we did something we haven’t done in years: decided in the mid-afternoon to make the drive out to Cincinnati for the 7:10 p.m. game. Even though we’re driving from Indianapolis, it used to be no big deal to make this kind of spontaneous trip, but a few years ago we started getting burned when games started selling out while we were in the middle of the 2-hour drive. #winningteamproblems

To avoid the whole scalper situation–or worse, the dreaded standing room only–I went to purchase tickets using my phone while my hubby drove. Buying tickets is painful on any device, so I won’t use this forum to bitch about that (though, honestly, how many CAPTCHAs does a person need to fill out??). I’ll just say that I eventually got through it with tickets in a section I’d never heard of. I believe it was 410WC.

Two things I later learned about section 410WC: first, the WC stands for “wheelchair.” I think the mobile interface could have been more clear on that. Second, it is an All-You-Can-Eat section. The mobile interface didn’t mention that part at all.

Regarding the wheelchair part, I understand that lots of people who don’t need wheelchairs sit in these seats all the time, and it’s just fine. I walked by dozens of able-bodied people in these seats while I was walking around the stadium and I didn’t judge them at all. That didn’t change the fact that I felt terrible about being one of them. I don’t even like to be a person sitting on a crowded bus; I couldn’t stand the idea of taking up a wheel chair accessible seat. So, we went over to fan accommodation to see if they could do anything for us.

“You paid extra for the All You Can Eat seats,” the woman said as she looked for reseating options. I think her name was Lisa.

“Yeah, about that: I didn’t mean to,” I told her. I didn’t go on to explain that I don’t see how I could ever really enjoy an AYCE section. I’m either going to end up feeling like I got taken advantage of, money-wise, or waddle out feeling bloated and full of self-loathing.

She presented us with a couple possibilities: a couple seats in the 400 level with the AYCE or upgrade to couple seats on the 100-level where you have to pay for your snacks like a chump. That’s the option we took, and since the only food the two of us ate the whole game was to share a bag of peanuts (and we brought home half of that), I think it was the right call.

So, while I give a big thumbs down to the Ticketmaster mobile interface (and frankly everything about Ticketmaster), I give an even bigger thumbs up to the Fan Accommodation folks at Great American Ball Park, who made it so we got to have this somewhat less distant view of a Reds win and who might just inspire us to make another impromptu visit soon.

A few familiar names are back on the Reds’ active roster at last, putting pressure on some different people for a change.

Ryan Hanigan came off the DL on Friday. He’d been out since July 11 with a left wrist sprain. To make room for Hanigan, they put Corky Miller on the DL with a “right quadriceps contusion” or, in other words, one of our heroes sustained a slight bruise to the upper arm. Lucky thing for the Reds that their catchers are so cooperative in scheduling their injuries to make sure there’s always someone for the rotation to throw at.

Jonathan Broxton made his first post-DL appearance on Friday. He’d been on the DL since June with a strain in his right elbow. He’s looked good in his appearances since then, and no one is complaining that they had to send down Pedro Villarreal to make room on the roster. (Well, Villarreal probably is, but that’s to be expected.)

The same cannot be said for Derrick Robinson, who was optioned to Louisville yesterday to make room for the returning Ryan Ludwick. He’s been filling in for Ludwick since the second game of the season. Reds.com quoted Dusty Baker as saying:

“That was a tough decision to send Robinson back,” Reds manager Dusty Baker said. “But he will be back in a couple of weeks and on our playoff roster. His shoulder was bothering him some and we gave him a couple of days off. He was the only one who had options. Sometimes, you can’t make the moves that you want.”

That’s sort of surprising from Baker. He isn’t often so direct in saying, “there’s someone else I wish I could send down.” The same story on Reds.com implies he was Xavier Paul he was talking about, who hasn’t performed as well defensively. But Paul was a hero yesterday, tying the game with a pinch-hit 2-run home run. And besides, he’s been doing better than Chris Heisey. Baker’s put him in more games (82 to 55), and Paul has hit better (.239 to .209).

Whatever the team wished they could have done, they’ve got Ludwick on the roster now and with him comes all Reds fans’ hopes for a division run. Finally we’ll have a right-handed hitter and a guy who can maybe knock in a run once in a while. But don’t try to take it all on yourself, Luddy. We don’t need you to add shoulder problems to your list of potential ailments.