Today is Ryan Freel's 30th birthday. In his honor, Red Hot Mama is proud to present The Race for Second Base, a sophisticated computerized simulation of the heated competition to be the Reds' opening day second baseman. Give it a try now to find out how the keystone situation will shake out.

Run the race!

(Game modified from a Flash template provided at Flash Kit.)
Get the latest version of Flash here.

If you haven't made it over to see The Grady's Ladies Sisterhood website, I highly recommend it. It's the kind of effort that I'd like to see for more of our guys. Maybe something like:

• The Women of Treasure Belisle-land
• Dunn's Honeys (or perhaps Adam's Madams)
• Looking for a One-Night Standridge
• Javy's Red Hotties

If you're a Reds groupies and like the sound of any of those sites, please feel free to run with it. Except for the last one. I might want to hold on to that one.

My crack technical staff is working on something special for the big 3-oh later today, but I wanted to send off a happy birthday wish as soon as it was relevant.

On March 27, the book Game of Shadows, written by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, will hit the shelves everywhere. The book details the extensive steroid use of slugging superstar Barry Bonds since 1998. An excerpt of the book is available on SI.com and will appear in the March 13 issue of Sports Illustrated to hit shelves tomorrow.

This article from Sports Illustrated about the book already gets into plenty of interesting factoids. Did you know, for example, that Bonds' took a women's fertility medication in an effort to spur his natural hormone production? I don't know that anyone's really surprised to be presented with evidence of Bonds' steroid use, but to have it all laid out in graphic detail is a tad overwhelming. So go read it now!

My thoughts on the matter fall into three categories:

1. How will major league baseball deal with this revelation? Bonds is a big fat cheater, after all.
2. How will his reality show deal with this revelation? Could be ratings gold, if they can roll with it.
3. How will Barry Bonds deal with this revelation? Here's a quote from the SI article:

When informed of the book this morning and asked if he was concerned about it, Bonds told a group of reporters gathered around his locker, “Nope. I won't even look at it [the book]. For what? I won't even look at it. There's no need to.” He then walked away.

Apparently he already knows how it ends.