With 23 games to go in the regular season, the Reds are 3.5 games back on the NLC and lead the second wildcard spot by 7.5 over the Nationals. It’s not exactly sewn up yet, but it’s felt pretty likely that our boys will be in the post-season for a while now. The real question has been: then what?

The first wildcard spot has belonged to the Cardinals for as long as the Reds have had the second one. The two wildcards have to play each other for the right to proceed, and for a while there it was seeming like the Cardinals were just unbeatable.

Which is just annoying. The Cardinals shouldn’t be that hard to beat. When the hell is Molina going to retire??

Lo and behold, the Reds have won their last three games against the Cardinals and have properly smacked around their ace twice. Pop quiz: if you’re managing the Cards in that one-game series against the Reds, do you start Adam Wainwright? The dude is 15-9 with a 3.14 ERA, but he’s given up 15 earned runs in his last two starts, both against Cincinnati. That stuff can get into a guy’s head.

The baseball season is too long to throw in the towel too early, even if it does look like it will be an early post-season exit, so I’m choosing to hope that this modest 2-game winning streak could be the start of something big.

I’ll close today with the latest offering from the Cincinnati Reds Wooo Guy, who hasn’t even given up on Pete Rose yet, he sure as heck won’t have lost hope for this team.

I didn’t hear about this until some 18 hours after it happened. When I did, I took a tour of the Reds blogs to see what reaction was. There was a whole lot of “everyone already knows about this” and “there’s nothing to say that hasn’t already been said.” I, as you may have noticed, have been busy with a life outside of baseball lately, though, and was actually looking for opinions, so clearly both those of those statements were dead wrong for me.

If they were wrong for me, I figure they might be wrong for someone else, and I might as well pile on.

Here are the offending tweets that BP was so up-in-arms about:

Reds go from a hitter with a .320 OBP in the 2 hole to one with a .310 OBP

— ctrent (@ctrent) August 28, 2013

and

Phillips career slash line: .272/.320/.430. career slash in 2 spot: .277/.320/.424

— ctrent (@ctrent) August 28, 2013

You might say these are stupid tweets to get upset over. They aren’t exactly damning. Oooooh, Phillips has 0.010 lower OBP than Franzier. BFD.

By the same token, you might also say they’re stupid tweets to have put up. The fact that C. Trent is drawing attention to OBP at all is tacit expression of disapproval. I mean, if he’d liked the move, he might have mentioned Phillips’ superior slugging (also a 0.010 difference).

And let’s not forget that moving BP to the second spot not only gets him more ABs, but also more for Jay Bruce, who moves up to Phillips’ previous position in the line-up. Frazier is great, but I really have a hard time taking seriously the assertion that he ought to be getting more ABs than Phillips and Bruce.

The whole situation sort of falls flat for me. It’s the brash, stressed-out guy versus the unbearably smug, under-deadline guy. You’re going to get hot words sometimes. And considering the people involved, some of them are going to be dirty words (cover your ears, grandma) and most of them are going to get reported. Shrug.

If it helps in putting the hurt on the opponent, though, I’m all for it. We could all take turns posting random stats, players can read whatever they want into them, go off, and then beat up on the likes of Adam Wainwright. Those Cardinals are the really smug ones.

I have been an outspoken critic of the title “Fox Sports Ohio Girls” since they were introduced last year.

I want to be clear, because it’s an important distinction that I have been a critic of the title “FSO Girls” and not the women who play the girls on t.v. These ladies are likely trying to launch a career in acting or modeling, and a gig is a gig. There’s no room for pride in show business.

On the other hand, there’s LOADS of room for pride in blogging, with plenty to spare to accommodate all your righteous indignation, so let’s go.

It’s not just that the network insists on calling grown-ass women “girls,” but even that would be enough. It’s demeaning. Women may call other women “girls,” as in, “I’m doing a fat flush with the girls at the office” or “feed the kids dinner; I’m heading to Chili’s with the girls to drink Sparkling Pomegranate Margaritas and flirt with the college-dropout bartender till I vomit at 10:15.” But just because members of a group call the other members of their group by a certain term does not mean it’s OK for outsiders to do the same. Any Chris Rock stand up routine will teach you that much.

And it’s not just that their only purpose appears to be to add a rack to the game-watching experience. To FOX Sports’ credit, at least these women aren’t actually wearing bikinis, though in some ways it might be better if they were. At least that would be an honest expression of what they’re there for. I get the feeling that if this weren’t the Midwest and if baseball weren’t such a “wholesome” sport, FOX would have the FSO Women in their skivvies in a minute. (Yes, I just did a Google image search of “FOX Sports girls” and other regions do appear to have their women in bikinis.)

And it’s not just that one of the FSO Women disappeared without fanfare (are the reasons you’re thinking of as looks-based as mine?) and now FOX wants fans to vote on the next one to replace her. Since the FSO Women aren’t given any tasks of any substance on which basis you could compare their skills, I guess you’re just voting based on which one you think is hottest. It’s all the icky feelings of watching the Miss America Pageant without the interview questions about geography.

It’s not any one of those things, but it is all of them. And more. It’s the vapid commercial break spots. It’s the Twitter account. It’s the “win a chance to have dinner with, and drool all over, the FSO girls.”

I’m psyched to see any women in a baseball broadcast. But is it really too much to ask that the women not only be included but also allowed to be intelligent professionals at the same time? Because these women have at least as much to add to the game-watching experience as Jim Day does. You don’t have to get rid of the t-shirts from the Alyssa Milano collection, just call them something that doesn’t imply they’re children and let them do more than pimp seat belt wraps. At least give us a little dignity about the whole thing. Maybe even a little pride.

This week I got together for lunch with a high school friend, and when I asked the waitress to turn the game on, the conversation turned to baseball. My friend doesn’t follow the game like I do, but she did used to consider herself a Cubs fan (poor thing) back when we were in school.

She told me that she was recently out at a bar with friends where the Cubs were on, and she noticed for the first time in some 20 years the state of baseball players’ uniforms. In her recounting of the story, she became a little agitated:

“Why are his pants so baggy? They didn’t used to be that way!” she told her friends. Alas, none of them was a baseball fan. Two didn’t follow any sports at all and the other, Chris, a guy we also went to high school with, was strictly a football fan.

“Chris, you watch sports. Baseball pants didn’t used to be like that, did they?” she said, hoping for some vindication for her reaction. But Chris left her hanging. He used to do that to me sometimes, too, back in high school.

I assured her that baseball pants, indeed, have not always looked like a pair of sweatpants that some lazy lardo wears to Wal-Mart.

“And it’s a shame, too, because these guys are athletes, and most of them have something worth looking at,” I told her. “Most, but not all. You can pretty much count on a center fielder to rock a tight pair of pants, but it’s really hit-or-miss with, say, first basemen.”

At that point the lunchtime conversation turned to something other than baseball, but later I found myself thinking about the attractiveness level that you can expect from each position in the field. Not that the rules are hard-and-fast, but there are some general trends for sure.

You know how people rank each other’s appearance on a scale of 1-to-10, like, “she’s a total 10.” Maybe you could make a similar scale based on baseball player positions. Then, you might hear one of those women who go to bars to pick up visiting-team players say something like, “Yeah, when I was younger I could land a second baseman any day of the week, but these days I’m lucky to get a catcher.”

Man, why didn’t I ever become one of those women? Well, there’s the ethics, sure. And the fact that, even at my cutest, I probably couldn’t have scored much higher than a platoon third baseman. (You absolutely have to be blonde to go above that.) These days I’d have to set my sights on a middle reliever or below, and no one wants to see that.

Still, maybe I’ll find my second wind in my cougar years. I once had a Reds insider tell me that Marty Brennaman had “digits to every nursing home in town,” so I guess there’s always hope.

You know that the Cincinnati Reds are an inspirational team because once someone gets started writing songs about them, the hits just keep on coming. It’s like they’re the muse of the National League.

Here’s the latest from The Cincinnati Reds Wooo Guy. Myself, I perhaps don’t find Marty quite as venerable, but checking out the song’s still a good way to spend two and a half minutes on a Friday afternoon.