Good morning, baseball fans! I’m not generally a morning person, but today the sun is out and I’ve got a whole list of baseball-related topics to talk about. What a great way to start the week.

Did you see Saturday’s game? I didn’t. Not that I’m bitter.
If you watched Saturday’s game on t.v., you know you had to turn to your local FOX affiliate rather than FSOhio because the national level decided to air the game. Only, in my area, they decided to air the Cubs-Diamondbacks game instead, so the Reds weren’t available on t.v. at all. Jerks.

That part, at least, made some sense though: here in Indianapolis, we’re pretty evenly split among the Reds and Cubs with a few Cardinals fans thrown in. Our baseball team is the AAA affiliate of the Pirates, so there’s a certain interest there as well. However, when the Cubs’ game was delayed and they aired the Yankees-Bosox game instead of switching to the Reds, there was no one happy in Indy.

This particular year I don’t know how happy anyone really would have been to have seen the Cubs game, anyway. The Reds and Pirates are locked in a heated struggle to differentiate themselves in a outrageously difficult-to-top NLC, while the Cubs were 12 games back and taking on the winningest NL team in the west. It was a shellacking.

Saturday’s game was also the one where Brandon Phillips got hit by a pitch in the eighth inning that caused some concern that he might have broken his arm. No break, thank goodness, but he was out of the line-up yesterday. The injury page on Reds.com says he might be back until Friday.

Time to make time to Vote Reds
They start the All-Star voting crazy early in the season, but June 1 is the earliest I’m ready to begin contemplating the season’s halfway point. Saturday was June 1, so here I am, already feeling a little wistful.

If you haven’t already cast your vote, you can go to MLB.com and vote up to 25 times. When I followed this link, it told me that, since I was logged in, I got 10 extra votes. I didn’t log in, so I guess they must still have me logged in from last year.

Damn Cardinals
The last item in this weekend round-up is this photo of Yadier Molina.

He got ejected from the game on Sunday when he threw his helmet after striking out in the third inning. Manager Mike Matheny got himself tossed over the same incident.

Recently, I asked a friend who’s a Cardinals fan whether they could really sustain this pace. It’s frankly unbelievable to me, especially considering the state of the Cards’ starting rotation. Their injury list contains 6 pitchers! He told me that he thought Matheny must have made a deal with the devil, since the team is winning despite poor management.

Well, I’m not sure whether the Cardinals losing a game where Matheny gets kicked out supports that notion or not. On the one hand, if it was his deal with the devil, the fact that he wasn’t in the game might mean that he was too far away to share his tainted good fortune. On the other hand, since his ostensibly poor managing choices weren’t being made, perhaps the Cards should have won anyway.

Myself, I think it’s not Matheny but Molina that made the deal. He even looks kind of possessed in this picture.

Cincinnati Reds fan, Duane, is best known for initiating the shouts of “woo!” you’ll hear occasionally during games.

He’s made a song about the woo.

The crackling fire in the background really sets the mood.

The Cincinnati Reds are 33-21. Their .611 winning percentage would be enough to lead the NLE and the NLW, but here in the NLC, they’re a sad third place.

They can’t all three keep this up, can they? Surely someone’s got to crack.

At the time of this writing, after the Pirates won, but while the Cards were still delayed, the Reds trail them by 1.0 and 3.0 games, respectively. Sure, it’s not at all fair that the Reds drew the Indians for their inter-squad weekend while the Cards were beating up on the abysmal Royals, but the Pirates didn’t have it any easier against the Tigers and they still managed to gain a half game on the good guys.

And things are about to get real in this division. If the Cards haven’t fallen back to earth by next weekend, the Reds will be chipping away at their lead.

But before then, and even now, the Reds are headed to Pittsburgh to start a three game series there. Johnny Cueto (RHP, 2-0, 2.76 ERA) will face off against a familiar foe in Wandy Rodriguez (LHP, 6-2, 3.58 ERA). With that 3.58 ERA, Rodriguez ranks near the bottom of the Pirates’ starters, so now is the time to strike.

On Sunday, in the Reds’ last game of a series against the Cubs, many less-than-ideal things happened: Logan Ondrusek blew the save, Joey Votto didn’t have any RBI, and the Reds lost in extras. But the one thing that made the news was a sixth-inning pitch Johnny Cueto let fly that didn’t pass by in front of Cubs’ centerfielder David DeJesus so much as three feet over him.

I had the good fortune to actually be at that game, and I didn’t think much of the pitch. The Cubs had already hit Todd Frazier in the fourth, so I wasn’t surprised when the umpire warned both benches. I was surprised when Shin-Soo Choo got hit in the bottom of the ninth and the Cubs’ reliever wasn’t ejected; I though there was a rule now that said any HBP after a warning was automatic ejection.

But neither of those plunks made the news because Cubs’ starter Matt Garza was spouting off to the media about Cueto’s not-so-near miss:

I took total disrespect out of that. [DeJesus] has never done anything wrong, he just plays the game the right way. If Cueto has any problem, he can throw at me, and I’ll definitely return the favor. I didn’t like that one bit. We don’t retaliate. We take it game by game. Hopefully, he learns to grow the hell up. That’s totally uncalled for.

Here’s a video of the whole comment. The media outlets cut out the rambling, so you really need to see it for yourself to get the full experience of a grown man calling another grown man “totally immature.”

I first found out about this story on a Cubs blog, and I saw in the comments someone bringing up the brawl with St. Louis lo these many years ago. In fact, that brawl was a theme that came up in the comments on EVERY story about this non-incident. It’s like a guy can’t even miss you by a mile without everyone bringing up the time he kicked someone in the head and that guy didn’t play anymore.

I’m not going to be another person pointing out that Cueto was pinned against the wall or that Jason LaRue knew full well what he was getting in to by piling on. I might point out that LaRue’s career was really over already, and that it wouldn’t be out of character for Tony LaRussa to use the incident as an excuse to vilify Cueto, fire up the rivalry, and give them an easy way to let LaRue go, but that’s not what has me noodling on this either.

No, the reason I’m still thinking about these comments a full three days after the batter wasn’t hit is that I’m wondering how long the statute of limitations is on a brawl. That brawl happened in 2010–that’s three years ago now–but nothing else that Cueto has done in that amount of time seems to count when these people evaluate his character.

I don’t like the implications. I’ve pulled some real bonehead move in my time, and the fear that I can’t ever escape them keeps me up at night. Maybe it’s naive, but I cling to the hope that people are defined not by a single incident in their life but by a collection of all of their works, and that the good ought to have a chance to outweigh the bad over time.

On the other hand, there might just be no way to stop people from casting the first stone. Maybe you just have to recognize that self-righteously hating minor celebrities from afar is a part of fandom for some people.

And maybe you just stop reading the comments on news stories. Honestly, where do they dig those people up?

The Reds need to do this every game.

I love seeing all four mascots on the field, being silly as they compete in a race.