Red Hot Mama is a forum for light-hearted and irreverent commentary on NLC baseball. Content is primarily authored by me (Amanda) with several other highly insightful and dearly valued contributors.

I began Red Hot Mama in April 2005 to rediscover my sense of humor after spending three years in a horrible job that made me hate my life. It was entirely dedicated to the Cincinnati Reds in the beginning: we had planned a family vacation to Sarasota, Florida, which got me started, content-wise.

I was relatively new to baseball fandom–finally just getting to a point where I felt comfortable being sarcastic about it–and one of my goals with Red Hot Mama was to create a place for new fans to get acclimated to the sport where people didn’t take it so damn seriously. In my imagination, a young woman up-and-coming as an executive in her company would win points with the vice-president of her division by repeating something sassy she’d read on Red Hot Mama.

In February 2006, we introduced the Red Hot Broadcast, the podcasting counterpart to the smart alecry of the blog. Those first episodes were painful, but we made it through. A few months later, Jon joined me in the recording booth, and the quality of the content went through the roof. We’ve had several notable guests, including Tom Browning, John Allen, Tom Shearn, and Rich Aurilia.

In 2007, I suffered a severe case of taking things too damn seriously, which, if you’ll recall from two paragraphs ago, is what I was trying to avoid in the first place. It was a pretty grim year, culminating in a genuine rage at the Reds failing to follow through on their promise to perform a proper manager search in favor of hiring the only guy they talked to, Dusty Baker.

In protest, I expanded the scope of Red Hot Mama to include all NLC teams. Though I’ve since re-discovered my ability to enjoy a losing team, I think that expanding the scope was a good thing. It is, however, a work-in-progress, and the majority of our readership continues to be Reds-centric, the majority of our commentary tends to comes from the Reds point-of-view, and the majority of the team t-shirts we wear sport Reds logos (though I do have a cute little Astros number from our recent trip to Houston).

Going forward, my time to spend on Red Hot Mama content is threatened. My son is getting involved in more and more activities, I’m pursuing lofty career goals, and I’m considering starting my MBA later this year. However, I don’t intend for that to mean that Red Hot Mama dies away; I just need to get more creative about how I find time to create content. Already we’ve added Twitter to the sidebar so I can text in little snippets of comedy gold when they occur to me.

My involvement with Red Hot Mama has made me a better, more educated fan. It’s opened doors to get to interview players, appear on a Cincinnati sports program, and be featured on a scoreboard segment. And, most importantly, it’s introduced me to some great friends that I never would have met otherwise.