Tonight, in honor of Ryan Freel, I'm writing this drunk off my ass. Well, having had a couple beers, at least, which would be enough to get him drunk off his ass. No, really; I've seen it myself, in person. I was at Applebee's that night when the WLW people had him on.

It was the twilight zone of the workday afternoon, and I needed to check out some Reds news to break me out of the trance I was quietly slipping in to. First, I went to cincinnatireds.com where I saw a new story about Dunn. Easy.

I read through the story, and when I came to the tiny subhead, buried under all that text, my jaw dropped: Freel arrested for DUI. A moment of numbness was followed by a sudden sinking feeling. I hadn't been so shocked and horrified since the time in 2003 when Sean Casey jumped into the brawl with Adam Dunn and the Phillies. In that case, though, Casey managed to vidicate himself in my mind when he explained that he was coming to the aid of someone who was being held down by one person and punched in the head by another. I've been trying all afternoon to come up with a way that Freel can vidicate himself in my mind, but I have yet to find a way that driving drunk is honorable or going to save the life of a puppy or something.

But still, just as happened with the aforementioned brawl, my shock and horror quickly turned to fascination and humor, and soon I was searching for as much news as I could and laughing myself silly. The best part was the actual police report. If you have been out to the WCPO ABC 9 website to read the PDF, I highly recommend it. The description of the alphabet test had me in stitches.

Time heals all wounds, and I'm sure ol' Freel's pride will be back to healthy form when he's stolen 25 bases before the All Star break. In the mean time, let us raise our Zimas and say a toast to the little guy who is far too much of a lightweight to have a flask of whiskey in his car:

Here's to you, Ryan Freel
Whether it was from celebrating your team's win or lamenting your own lack of involvement in it
You've certainly made a name for yourself, one way or another.

After two weeks of following the Reds around Florida and then up to Louisville, it did seem a little anticlimacic that I didn't get to watch opening day in person. But not all of us get to play a game for a living; some people have to be responsible for keeping our economy running. Some of us have to do the real work: growing the grain, building the cars, staffing the hospitals, teaching the children and, as in my case, writing the online technical documentation. Or, to be more specific, sifting through the 117 email messages that had accumulated over the course of my two-week road trip, at least 15 of which being email messages telling me that I had too many email messages.

Nevertheless, I still had opening day jitters as I awaited my opportunity to mutter quietly to myself while I waited for the MLB.com gamecast to load. The only other baseball fan in my office is 1) out of the office for the next week , 2) a Red Sox fan, and 3) my boss, so I don't really have the opportunity to cheer or give high fives when the Reds do something not horrible. The best release I have is a move I have named The Amanda Dance, in which I stir-the-pot while turning around my rolling office chair. It's killer, but fortunately for my esteem among my coworkers, no one at work has actually caught me doing it yet.

I had a couple of minor opportunities to do The Amanda Dance during today's opening game, and I was shocked. I don't know about you guys, but I absolutely anticipated the Reds getting trounced. I thought Paul Wilson was going to get beat around like a 17-year old with a clumsy prom date.

I was prepared for the disappointment, but I absolutely did not call it. In a surprising move, the Reds utterly failed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as they demonstrated so often in 2004.

And now I'm all confused. Sure, I guess I'm having fun now, but I'm just too afraid to commit. You see, it's really complicated; I just got out of this serious relationship with a Reds team. They looked good at first too, but before I knew it, I was hurt bad. It took my heart the whole off-season to heal, and I don't want to end up on the disabled list of love again so soon. I'm just not in that place yet, you know?

Still, deep down I want to love again, and maybe this will be The One. Maybe this year, I'll flash a quietly smug grin at my Red Sox fan boss. Maybe this year the whole office will see me doing The Amanda Dance. It really is killer.

It has often been observed that the size of a man's penis is inversely proportional to the flashiness of his car. A guy who has a fast, expensive car is presumed not to have a lot going on downstairs. On the other hand, a fella who feels secure in his falic presence probably doesn't have such a showy vehicle.

On a seemingly unrelated topic, Sean Casey made $6.8 million playing for the Reds in 2004. Yet, according to ESPN The Magazine's article “Mighty Nice Casey,” published in 2004, Casey still drives around his 1995 Honda Accord.

A 1995 Honda Accord.

I'm just sayin'.

On Saturday, April 2, we took our Florida-acclimated tushies to the relatively freezing cold Louisville, Kentucky to see the last Reds spring training game of the spring.

It felt weird to be back in the midwest after so long in Florida. At the beginning of our trip, we never would have thought that we'd grow accustomed to, even miss just a little bit, the constant need to apply sunblock, the bizarre restaurant hours, and the mysterious odor of wet dog that had, in our minds, come to mean vacation. Friday night spent at the Marriott in downtown Louisville was lovely, with its comfortable beds utterly free of unidentifiable stains and its fuctioning drawers with nonbroken handles, but it just wasn't the same knowing that there weren't 300,000,000 giant cockroaches scurrying around just outside our door.

Nevertheless, we were able to push through our nostalgia on Saturday morning to make it over to the Louisville Slugger stadium to watch the Reds play the Blue Jays. As usual, we went in as soon as the gates opened, almost two hours before game time. We staggered around the stadium, trying to find places to keep warm while we waited for the game to begin. The gift shop was one such place, and was doing a bustling business selling tons of miniature bats, presumably for fans to burn for warmth.

Finally the game was starting and we huddled together under a blanket in our seats right there beside right field. Seated right behind us where a gaggle of teenaged girls who were hooting and giggling at all the players they thought were cute. The Blue Jays' right fielder wasn't anyone they seemed to know, but they thought he was cute anyway and tried to get him to look their way.

The giggling girls redoubled their attention-getting efforts when the bottom of the inning rolled around and the real object of their affections, Austin Kearns, took his place in right field. I rolled my eyes and grinned as the girls tried to get up the courage to shout to Kearns about what a hottie he was, but getting embarassed at the last minute and turning their shouts into barely more than what we could hear in the row in front of them.

That was probably why I was so surprised when Kearns turned over out direction and waved.

Two of the girls caught the wave and swooned. The third had missed it and, emboldened by what they thought was encouragement from Kearns, started calling to him to wave again. I rolled my eyes again. He's got a game to concentrate on, I thought. There's no way he's waving again.

That was probably why I was so surprised when, a couple pitches later, Kearns turned our direction and waved again.

The same two girls swooned. The third had missed it again, apparently not finding Kearns actually hot enough to check out for more than a pitch or two, or possibly just having the attention span of a gnat, as teenage girls are known to have. Since the girl had missed the wave yet again, the group again started yelling out for him to wave again, this time assisted the adult woman who had accompanied the teens to the game.

It was the sort of display that makes you suddenly understand why so many of the players suddenly take a serious interest in their shoes as they walk onto the field. So many of the fans don't just see these people as entertainers; they start to see them as puppets, as trained monkeys on whose strings they can tug and expect to see a trick. Oh the arrogance!

I, of course, am not so arrogant as to think that I have the right to just demand that any entertainer, any person at all, hop around for my personal amusement. I am, however, arrogant enough to think that Kearns was actually waving at me. Well, us. We had, after all, just spent the last two solid weeks going to all of the Reds games in tiny little stadiums where the players absolutely could have seen and even come to recognize us, and we *did* usually sit on the right field side.

Stupid, maybe. But even if it's a total hallucination, it's a hallucination that makes me feel that much more connected to the game and the players. It was a fantasty that gave me a fuzzy warm feeling, warm enough to stick out the rest of the nine innings, long after the ashes of my souvenir bat had smoldered and gone out.