Continuing our series of Human League posts about the Reds All-Star vote-getters, tonight I ponder the wonder and glory that is Scott Rolen.

What I love about Scott Rolen is maturity as a genuine role-model for those who have lacked demonstration of how to comport themselves. I love that perspective and experience make him confident in his righteousness to bitch at umpires in just about every game.

What I love about Scott Rolen is the relief I feel when he steps into the box after Joey Votto. I love that, as potent as one infield corner is, there’s a mirror of it on the other side, protecting each other while at the same time challenging.

What I love about Scott Rolen is singing, “Rolen, Rolen, Rolen…Keep this inning Rollin'” when he’s at the plate. Since the Ryan Parker song, I now sometimes also sing, “Rolen on the River.”

What I love about Scott Rolen is how, through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, he has fought his way here to take back what injury had stolen. I love that the Cardinals gave up on him before he finished that quest and the Reds are the ones to see the return to greatness. It’s about time it worked that way for a change.

What I love about Scott Rolen is that my mom likes him. She’s not even a baseball fan. He’s just that lovable.

If you, too, love Scott Rolen, do your part to spread the word by voting. The All-Star game deserves his presence.

At long last, I find myself again entangled in that romantic ardor of fandom that I haven’t known lo these five years of blogging. The kind of baseball love affair that makes you want to write sentences like that first one.

In honor of the five Reds in the top spots in All-Star voting, I’m going to share with you my poetic musings on these paladins of the plate in a new Human League segment called “What I Love About.”

What I love about Jonny Gomes is the eagerness he brings to the game and to life. The intensity in his gaze hints at a man uncontent to drift through life like common mortals, intent instead to live every moment to its fullest. It also hints at a man who might be capable of the kind of frenzy displayed by Danny Bateman in The Replacements. “Get me the base, Jonny!” “I GOT THE BASE.”

What I love about Jonny Gomes is his hair. Mr. T meets Kid N Play with just a touch of the true Hoosiers I used to live next door to in rural Indiana. Just a touch, mind you. He could have gone with the rat tail, but he didn’t. He knows when enough is enough.

What I love about Jonny Gomes is his twitchy helmet adjustments as he goes to the plate. One wonders if maybe the haircut has caused the helmet not to fit quite right.

What I love about Jonny Gomes is doing a Google image search on his name. Try it. It’s awesome.

But what I love most of all about Jonny Gomes are his team-leading 49 RBI. That’s about 15% of the team’s total runs for the season so far.

If you find yourself moved, tell the world with your vote.

Tonight I take a break from encouraging you to Vote Votto and allow the Cincinnati Reds to do it for me:

The Reds need your votes!
June 15, 2010 – Major League Baseball has announced the next update of the leading vote getters in balloting for the 2010 All-Star Game. Joey Votto, Brandon Phillips, Orlando Cabrera and Scott Rolen are among the Top 5 at their respective positions! The voting is heating up and the Reds need your help. You can vote up to 25 times per e-mail address to help your Reds get to the Midsummer Classic in July.

You can’t vote at the ballpark anymore – so vote online at reds.com – voting ends for good at 11:59 PM ET on Thursday, July 1, 2010! Keep voting on reds.com!

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.

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.

The updated counts are out for the All-Star voting, and at long last our hero appears in the top 5! Joey Votto pulled down no fewer that 170,128 votes this week (and it was probably quite a lot more than that) to bump James Loney from the fourth spot, and he has you–the voting fan–to thank.

The bad news is that Albert Pujols still has more than four times as many votes, and in fact received more votes just last week than Votto has total.

But people, this challenge should just inspire you! This week has shown us that we can make a difference, and with three weeks of voting left, we can leave the Prissy Prince Albert questioning his sense of entitlement in July.

Remember, you get 25 votes per email address. Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail let you set up multiple free accounts. Then you can give the email addresses to creepy people you don’t actually want to talk to.

Don’t have time to vote yourself? Suffering from carpal tunnel? Afraid you’ll like voting a little too much? 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.