CINCINNATI, OH -- Amid discussions of the struggling Reds' hitters, starters, and bullpen, the beat writers are often forgotten, but they're scuffling like the rest of the team.

Friday, May 13 was one of those tough days for the Reds' writers. Cincinnati Enquirer reporter John Fay was the first victim of the slump. In his piece, Changes Coming? today, he committed an error when he incorrectly referred to Sean Casey as the team captain. Fay again faltered when he described Felipe Lopez and being “on his way” twice in the span of three paragraphs in his article Lopez Finally Coming Into Own. According to the official scorer the repeat was not an error, but it was a play that a veteran like Fay should have made.

Cincinnati Post reporter, Marc Lancaster, had a respectable showing today when he gave up just a couple hits on misplaced commas and the improper use of the indicative mood when the subjunctive was in order in his piece At Last, Fun for Dunn. However, teammate Joe Santoliquito at Cincinnatireds.com got off to a shaky start with overuse of alliteration in Harang Harasses Hitters. When, later in the same story, he gave up the tautology, “Harang's mechanics might not be any better than they are right now,” the game was as good as over.

It isn't surprising that the Reds' media is struggling to find the inspiration to create fresh copy when its subject matter is so consistently depressing. Reporters are searching for non-game-related content to even out the tone of their writing. Brian at Redleg Nation, for example, posted a long comparison of the 2005 season to the 1986 season in his attempt to brighten the weblog. Some bloggers are even resorting to poking fun at other writers to ward off the sobs brought on by watching and reporting on the actual games.

Blogger JD at Red Reporter summed up the mood among the reporters, “How many different ways can I say that the Reds are terrible?”

Hours of travel: 17.5
Hours of sleep: 2.5
Time zones visited: 4
Crappy seats on planes: 3

After my long-ass, red-eye trip home from Seattle that finally ended at 9:30 this morning, I was starting to stink up the place worse than the Reds' bullpen. But now I'm home, showered, and ready for action. Special thanks to Jonny for posting my stop-gap entries in my absence. I'll give you the high points of my trip.

Sunday, May 8 (Mother's Day)
There was no time for a leisurely brunch and a bouquet of flowers. I was up at 4 to get out the door by 5 to get to the airport by 6 to catch my 7 a.m. flight to Denver. From Denver I picked up a connection to Seattle to get me into town just in time to appear with the “panel of experts,” on which I fill the role of “the geek” (imagine that). I sat at the front of a room for an hour and answered a few questions about the software I use to write my online newsletter and thereby justified my trip. Good work if you can get it.

I was too tired to try to see any of the city on Sunday, so I headed back to my hotel right after the session and crashed for a couple of hours to the sounds of ESPN. I woke up sometime in the first inning of the Reds game and struggled to stay awake to see them lose to the Dodgers in unspectacular fashion. I guess my threat of jabs from 2000 miles away didn't carry much weight with the guys.

One interesting thing did happen on Sunday: on the Denver-Seattle leg of my flight, I found (and pilfered) a copy of Rockies: Official Scorecard Magazine of the Colorado Rockies that was inexplicably in all of the seatback pockets on the airplane. It was fascinating to read the PR of a team that has even less to work with than the Reds. Specifically, I learned that the Rockies' rookie catcher, JD Closser, is from a little town in Indiana no further than 10 miles from where I am sitting right this moment. Wild to think that I've almost certainly unwittingly passed by him or his family at our towns' collective cultural center: the local Wal*Mart.

Monday, May 9
After an exhausting day of trying to figure out which sessions would be good based on the titles and getting free pens from the scores of translation companies advertising in the vendor expo room, I headed out to see some of the city. I called Jon before I left, and he told me that the Reds were up 5-0. Cool, I thought.

I walked a lot and saw a lot and ended the evening at the only sports bar in the world NOT to play ESPN on any of the televisions: the Fox Sports Grill. I got there late and when I noticed the game on the ticker of one of the televisions, I was surprised to see that the Reds game is tied at 5 in the bottom of the ninth. I asked the bartender to put the game on, and the first image I saw was Danny Graves throwing something in the dugout. I knew that something hadn't gone well.

It took two 20-oz beers to get through the remaining four innings to see the Reds finally give it up. I was disappointed, but I was even more concerned about my wobbliness as I walked backed to my hotel room. I noted that I should average fewer than 10 oz of beer per inning in the future.

Tuesday, May 10
After going to these conferences a few years in a row, the sessions start to sound the same, so you try to find ways to mix up what you attend. On Tuesday, I attended a session based solely on the fact that one of the presenters' names was Freel. It turned out to be as good a way to choose a session as any.

I called home after the sessions were done to talk to Jon. The game had already started, and our conversation went something like this:
“There's good news and bad news in the game,” Jon tells me.
“What's that?” I respond.
“The good news is that Aurilia got injured and can't play,” he tells me.
“Jon, that's not good news,” I say, chastisingly.
“Yes, it is,” he responds, undaunted.
“Well, maybe it is,” I tell him, “but it's not nice to say so. What's the bad news?”
“Claussen was pitching well but he took a ball in the arm and twisted his ankle,” he went on. You can tell that we have the sort of deep marital bond that allows us to start off conversations with the really important baseball happenings and let petty things, like the well-being of our child, wait.

It's important that I get off the phone because the game is already in the fourth, and I need to get over to the Fox Sports Grill. I got there earlier in the game and I managed my beer consumption much better, so I had even more than the win to feel good about as I walked back to my hotel after the game.

Wednesday, May 11 and Thursday, May 12
Wednesday's game was at 9:35 a.m. Seattle time and not televised, so I was pretty much stuck missing it. After the day's sessions I was at the airport by 4 p.m. to start my craptastic trip home when I heard from Jon on the phone that the Reds had lost. I wasn't surprised: losing is pretty much what they do.

Except to amuse myself with thoughts of fake stories I could write, I didn't really think about the Reds much during the trip until I was boarding the plane to take me on the overnight trip from Salt Lake City to Atlanta. One of the flight attendants noticed my Reds sweatshirt and announced, “the Reds? They lost today.”
“Yes, I know,” I muttered as I dragged my suitcases back to my seat on the very crowded plane. I can't begin to imagine what kind of positive reaction the flight attendant thought he was going to get from me with a comment like that at 12 midnight when I already came from a place where it was 11 p.m. going to a place where it was 2 a.m. en route to a place where it was 1 a.m. I couldn't even figure out what damn time it was; I sure as heck wasn't going to come up with some pithy comment about my team losing.

From Atlanta it was finally on to Indianapolis where my hubby and son picked me up to drive through an hour and a half of rush hour traffic to get back to our house. At home, they had awaiting me the most fantastic baseball-related Mother's Day present ever, and I'll just have to get a photo up as soon as we have it hung on the wall.

Diligent me, of course, then got on the computer and wrote up a summary of my trip. After it was all done, an exhausted fat-fingering of apple+a as apple+q sent it out spinning into the abyss. On the brink, I decided it was time to take a nap and get a fresh perspective. The re-write is probably better anyway.

But now tonight's pre-game is just an hour and a half away. I'm too tired to come up with anything pithy to say except: Go Reds!

COLUMBUS, OH -- Researchers at Ohio State University believe they can now scientifically explain why catchers in general, and Jason LaRue in particular, are more often hit by pitches.

“The 'ball magentism' phenomenon is a revolutionary breakthrough for the science of baseball,” said E. Lensherr, professor of physics at Ohio State. “It has long been observed that catchers are more likely to be hit by pitches. Until this study, it was widely believed that they were just desensitized to pitches coming toward them and were therefore less likely to shy away.”

The project required LaRue to stand in a simulated batter's box connected to voltmeters while hundreds of cameras around the room recorded a precisely calibrated pitching machine sending balls his way. The cameras detected a slight shift in the flight path of the balls toward LaRue in response to an electric current running over his skin.

“The baseball collects electrons as it rushes through the air,” explained Lensherr. “I hypothesize that the brain of the catcher releases a hormone that ionizes his skin, attracting the ball toward him, increasing the incidence of hits-by-pitch.”

But if LaRue actually attracts pitched baseballs to himself, why does he have so many passed balls? And why has his bat been unable to find the ball of late?

“Some things even science cannot explain,” said Lensherr.

One of the greatest pleasures I've derived from writing Red Hot Mama has been the information provided by the good folks over at Site Meter. I will stare at the graphs of the days of the week people visit, or pore over the details of the countries they came from and browsers they used, but by far my favorite is to check the referrals to see the search terms people use to make their way to my not-so-humble abode.

There are, of course, the people who just happen to search for terms that I happen to use. For example, people have made their way to Red Hot Mama by searching for information about those red contact lenses that Ken Griffey, Jr. has been trying out. Lately, it seems like I've been getting a disproportionate number of hits from words and phrases like Danny Graves, comments, and doofus.

More exciting for me is when it looks like someone has done a search looking specifically for me. Some of these searches might or might not be Mama-specific; for example, when a person searches for Austin Kearns + hair, there's no way for sure to know that they're looking for my site, but on the other hand, who else in the world is talking about Kearns' hair? Other times, it's quite clear, like a search for Hot Mama + Cincinnati. In these latter cases, probably people are Googling to find me because my URL is too lame and generic to memorize, but I like to hold onto the idea that there are people out there talking me up to their friends, family, coworkers, and total strangers, encouraging them to search out the new wisenheimer lady-blogger for the Reds. That would be fantastic.

With a name like Red Hot Mama, of course, a steady number of the hits I receive come from searches that were obviously intended to result in porn. I get a surprising number of hits from the ungrammatical search string hot womans, though hot assed woman, hot red heads, and pitchers of hot woman bring in their share too. And soon they'll start bringing in even more, now that I've gone and actually listed those phrases in a post.

I can understand why my blog would appear in the results for such a search, but what I can't understand is why a person who was obviously looking for porn would click on it. The description of my blog would not exactly mislead a person to believe that this is a place where you're going to see a lot of pictures of naked ladies (there's another porn search I'll start appearing in the results of).

So what goes on here? A guy out there in less-than-pants is looking to check out some hot red heads and notices in his search results the description “A Smart-Assed Woman's Perspective on the Cincinnati Reds” and think to himself “hey I could go for some fake baseball news about now. I guess I'll just zip back up here.” Even scarier, maybe he's NOT zipping back up. You never know. Austin Kearns' hair is pretty hot.

I said before that I had a strong feeling that it was important for me to go the game today, so I went and they won. I think we can all see what's going on here: the Reds play better when I'm present. It is in the club's best interest to hire me on full time with a pretentious title and a generous expense account to sit in the stands. I'm sure that just knowing I'm there makes all the players put forth their best effort, lest they make some rookie mistake and get lampooned by the razor-sharp wit of The Mama. Red Hot Mama may receive only 65 hits per day, but now that I see what power I wield with the players, I am confident that I can account for 40 of those hits.

Or maybe they were just due. Either way.

It was a fantastic day for a ballgame, though I think I was spoiled by the two week's of spring training games I attended because the stadium felt cramped and crowded, and I had forgotten about the remarkable timing of the beer vendors to pause right in front of me just as a play was going down.

The kid sitting on my left seemed like a good kid; he was probably 11 and had an enormous head. He was old enough to be very enthusiastic about the game, but not old enough to have developed a sense of personal space, so I repeatedly ended up with his elbow on my ribs and his thigh rubbing against mine. Just think, in 8-10 years, Winter will be the one making borderline inappropriate physical contact with strangers and leaning his gigantic noggin forward to effectively block the entire view of the plate for the people next to him.

The kid a row up and a seat to the left was the one I was really glad not to be sitting next to. He arrived at his seat with a big pink ball of cotton candy, but instead of pulling pieces off to eat them, he proceeded to lick the entire surface of the ball until it was a dissolved slobbery wad, mostly on his face. When he was done, he and his father disappeared for a few innings, and I thought they had left, but in fact they returned, the boy's face washed but a brand new blue ball of cotton candy in his hands. I watched and laughed at him with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. When he was done he and his father walked off again, for good this time, and not a bit of the boy's face was unaffected: there was cotton candy on his forehead.

We were treated to just about the entire conversation of the people just behind us. The man was fairly knowledgable about baseball in general and the Reds in particular, but the older woman he was with, probably his mother, was apparently deaf, forgetful, and clueless. We would hear him go into a description of the play that just occurred and she'd shout back, “What just happened?”

The woman to our right was very nice and shared her Pal gum with us. I blew bubbles for Winter's amusement and promptly covered my face in little pink clumps, which is exactly when they started playing YMCA. Winter and I danced, and we have been on the Jumbo-Tron before, but I was glad they passed us over this time, lest my lack of bubble gum prowess be exposed to the entire stadium in living color.

So, as you can tell, a trip to Great American is more than just a ballgame: it's a stadium experience, and a great one today. After long last, perhaps I should hit the high points:

- The pitching was absolutely, positively, adequate. High praise for this group lately. Ramón Ortiz gave up 3 runs in 5 1/3 innings, which isn't great, but beats the heck out of his last outing of 6 runs in 2 innings. The Reds ran out just about every reliever who hasn't completely bit hard lately, Weathers, Mercker, and Wagner, and they all put up zeroes. They even avoided playing Graves, which spared me the ethical decision of whether to boo him.

- D'Angelo Jimenez came into the game to provide three pivotal hits, all left-handed. He also seemed to be trying harder at second, though one play where he made a decent stop followed by a big sweeping pirouette to throw to first struck me as a tad over-dramatic. Later, on the radio, they were saying that players respond to the fear of losing their jobs. I can't imagine being effectively motivated by fear, but watching Jimenez, I have to wonder whether there's not something to that.

- On the flip side, Ryan Freel made at least two great plays at second, and after they moved him out to right, he acknowledged one of the respectable plays made by Jimenez. I thought that was pretty sweet, considering all of the intra-team competition. Nevertheless, from my vantage point just behind the baseline on the right field side, it's a much better view to have Freel at second.

Tomorrow I get up ass-early to catch a plane to Seattle, but I don't want the Reds to think they're off the hook just because I'll be spending the next four days in the relentless pursuit of technical writing knowledge. I'm never too busy to post something scathing if the situation so requires.

That is my job, after all. Now let's talk expense account…