It’s tough to watch a game like tonight’s and get psyched up about doing your part to Vote Votto, but then you see the progress that all of the Reds infield has made in the voting, and you see that you DO make a difference. And now, when the team is soggy and downtrodden by a less-than-stellar start, is exactly the time for you to dig deep and give a few more votes.

I just timed it: I can vote 25 times for an email address in about 6 1/2 minutes. That’s 230 votes per hour. Over 1,800 votes in a standard workday. All we need is 850 people to dedicate their workday to All-Star voting, and we’ll have Joey Votto caught up with Albert Pujols tomorrow.

Can’t shirk work all day? At least you can join in on the Vote Reds Lunch Hour:

Join me tomorrow (Wednesday, June 16) on Twitter for another Vote Reds Lunch. This time we’ll focus our efforts on one of the most exciting second basemen in the game – Brandon Phillips.

Vote Votto. Vote Reds. Where your button with pride!

Remember, you get 25 votes per email address. Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail are your partners in making your voice heard.

Voting by proxy is a legitimate procedure in Parliment proceedings and homeowners’ association annual meetings, and you don’t have to give away any personal information to do it. Send me a message from your email address to give me permission to vote on your behalf, and I’ll vote by proxy for your email address.

I promise not to send you any unsolicited email–I can’t promise MLB won’t though.

Clubbing a seal isn’t an option.

Over the weekend, the Reds dropped 2 of 3 to the Kansas City Royals. That’s right, they lost a series to the Royal. It’s not exactly the pounding of crappy teams we’ve grown accustomed to so far in this 2010 campaign.

In both losses, much of the blame can be pointed directly at the struggling bullpen. The bullpen did okay in the first game, allowing only 1 run over 4 innings, but that 1 run broke the tie in extra innings. In the rubber-match of the series, Sam LeCure again kept the Reds in the game, until the bullpen entered and every reliever allowed a run.

What was a strength of the team last year has not been this year. The only Nasty Boy is Arthur Rhodes, and at 40, no one would mistake him for a boy.

Help is needed. Fast. The St. Louis Cardinals have struggled, but seem to be finding their winning ways again. This is no time to keep running the same relievers out there. Unfortunately, as John Fay writes, there isn’t much help in the minors. Bill Bray and Jared Burton continue rehabbing in the low minors, and despite some promising signs, aren’t ready yet.

That leaves the option of a trade or moving a starter to relief. With the plethora of good young starters available, the latter seems like a no-brainer to try first. Sam LeCure, at the very least, should be given a relief opportunity once Homer Bailey comes back.

Fay talked to Walt Jocketty, who confirmed that Travis Wood and Matt Maloney will be looked at as options for the bullpen. Don’t wait too long, Walt. As Reds fans have seen in years past, a bad bullpen can destroy the soul of a team. And I don’t want to get off this ride yet.

While I Vote Votto 75 times on behalf of those those have sent me their emails and then read the homework for my Knowledge Management class, I thought you might like to see how the wonderfulness that is Jonny Gomes is pervading even those blogs not dedicated to the Reds.

Check out More Hardball, where they’re loving on Gomes today.

And then, to a Google image search on Jonny Gomes. Looking for a photo for this post exposed me to a first-page of search results, only half of which are apparently baseball related. I love to see a guy living it up, so long as he doesn’t come home with a DUI.

Working for a company that offers, among other things, email marketing software, I have above-average knowledge of and strong opinions about what good email marketing is. The number one rule is relevance. Even your crappiest email service provider can provide you with basic tools to send a personalized (read: team-specific) message to your subscriber, and not doing so is a message to your reader that you don’t give a shit about them beyond the cash you can suck our of their wallet.

Case in point, I received this email from MLB yesterday:

I’ll refrain from my soapbox speech about how MLB’s monopoly has made it a deformed, twisted freak of a business that would never survive in a free market, and instead get to the point about this email. I’m enraged at MLB for picking favorites in this contest where they should be impartial. I’m enraged that none of the guys getting this free promotion is from my team. I’m enraged to have this one-size-fits-all piece of spam crapped out into my inbox.

And I’m also terrified that if I don’t use this POS tool, I won’t be able to counteract the fact that other people will. MLB is counting on the fact that weak-minded are easily encouraged to support Albert-frigging-Pujols.

But my righteous indignation need not go unsatisfied! We can stick it to MLB and their amateurish marketing techniques by showing them that All-Star means who WE want voted in, not who THEY want voted in.

Remember, you get 25 votes per email address. Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail are your partners in making your voice heard.

I am willing to Vote Votto for you. Send me a message from your email address to give me permission to vote on your behalf, and let me know if you want the Votto-only ballot or the all-Reds package deal. I promise not to send you any unsolicited email–I can’t promise MLB won’t though.