It’s college football season. And this time I brought reinforcements. Go Bucks!

I updated the FAQs a bit while adding a couple new questions and expanding on some others. Enjoy.

The good folks at Redleg Nation beat me to the punch with this, but I’ll point it out nonetheless.

The slump is getting to manager Tony La Russa, who complained about home plate umpire Gary Cederstrom’s calls in the ninth inning while Brian Wilson was finishing for his 35th save in 38 chances.

“You can go ahead and fine me, I don’t care,” La Russa said. “There were several strikes, a guy as good as Brian Wilson, he doesn’t need. Who knows how that inning would have been?”

You know, the season could go completely downhill from here (and it probably will) but it has been more fun to watch the Reds this year than it’s been in a long time. Also it’s nice to have a team we can really root against with gusto at the same time, for reasons beyond just where we sit in the standings.

The fraudulent, suck-ass Reds are 4-0 since fraud expert Colin Cowherd called them frauds.

The lily-white, super awesome, and non-fraudulent Cardinals are 0-3 over that span.

Also, for the Reds to finish with the record I predicted before the season started, they’d have to go 17-23 over their final 40 games. Isn’t that incredible? At the time I made my prediction, I was more or less joking around because although I thought they’d be improved this year, I never thought they’d actually still be in the race in late August.

Of course, now they’ll lose their next 24 games just to make me look like an ass.

update – I just realized this – if the Reds go .500 over the next 40 games, which I think anyone would reasonably expect at this point, they’d finish 91-71. The same record the Reds finished with in 1990. Presented without comment.

Earlier this season when Joey Votto was jobbed out of being named to the All Star team, ESPN radio’s Colin Cowherd went on a diatribe for a good fifteen minutes making the case against having an MVP and Triple Crown candidate on the All Star team. His reasoning was that fans will vote for players they know who have an impressive body of work in their past, and that Votto’s stats weren’t all that impressive considering that he plays half his games in Great American Small Park. Sounds pretty rational on its face, right?

Of course, he failed to address the fact that people weren’t upset by the results of the fan voting. No one who follows baseball – not even the biggest Reds homer – would have expected a relatively unknown Canadian to get more votes than Albert Pooholes. The problem was that Phillies manager Charlie Manuel chose Philly Ryan Howard – a great player in his own right – over Votto when Votto was having the better season in every statistical category. You see, a major league manager chooses the reserves for the All Star team, and a major league manager should have heard of Votto, right? And as the manager for the National League team, is it not reasonable to expect him to choose the best players available, not just the ones who the fan base knows and have impressive bodies of work in past seasons?  And while we’re at it, isn’t Citizen’s Bank Park in Philadelphia – where the prestigious Ryan Howard plays half his games – a bit of a bandbox too? Sadly, Colin decided to leave the answers to those questions out of his “analysis” as well.

But I digress. The previous paragraph exists merely to set up this week’s manufactured drama. Cowherd, being a radio blowhard and probably just trying to stir the pot a little, called the Reds frauds. Cincinnati Enquirer and SI columnist Paul Daugherty took exception to this, worlds collided, etc. I’m not the biggest fan of Daugherty – although I don’t have the animus towards him that others seem to – but I have to side with him on this one.

How are the Reds frauds for getting swept by the Cardinals’ 1,2, and 3 pitchers, two Cy Young candidates and a Rookie of the Year candidate? Did their bracketing the St. Louis series by sweeping the Cubs (who just beat the mighty, non-fraudulent Cardinals 2 out of three this weekend) and Marlins make them frauds? Or was it when they got back their 2-game lead in the division within a week of the brawl that was supposed to have ended the Reds’ season?

I get it. Brandon Phillips shot his mouth off and went 0 for 70 in the Cards series. Then again, Brandon didn’t say “We’re going to whoop the Cardinals this week, and I’m going to bat .900 for the series.” He said, “I hate the Cardinals. They’re a bunch of whiny bitches. All they do is bitch and moan all the time.” Saying you hate a team and then failing to perform against said team is not fraud. In fact, it’s probably the opposite of fraud – his shoddy performance should be evidence of his truthfulness. He probably should have said after the series, “Yeah, I went 0 for 350. That’s why I hate them. That, and they’re all a bunch of whiny bitches.”

Guess what? I agree with him, and a lot of people who follow baseball but don’t root for St. Louis probably do too. Sure, the Cardinals have a great fan base – although I even think that’s overrated considering how much they’ve been winning since about 1997 – but that doesn’t make their team and their legendary micro-manager immune from seeming as though they should be fitted for tutus and given ponies at the first available opportunity.

I simply ask this: are the Cardinals not frauds despite the fact that the Cardinals (in particular Yadier Molina, their .200-batting All Star catcher) threw a hissy fit – remember, for being called whining bitches –  that set off the brawl in Cincinnati on Tuesday and then whined and moaned when a couple of their players got owies after pushing a spike-wearing pitcher up against the screen behind home plate? Is it not a sign of fraudulence when a player talks about professionalism and decorum and then chews out his own teammate during a game? (That last link does a good job pointing out something that seems a lot like… how you say? frr-OW-d? … to me, by the way.)

I guess I don’t know what constitutes fraud in the sporting arena. Thank God for Colin Cowherd.

As I referenced earlier, I’ll be writing a bit more now. I didn’t want to mention any details until I knew for sure, hence the cryptic nature of my last post. Sorry about that.

The news is that I’ll be writing a few times a week for Men of the Scarlet and Gray. It’s a site dealing primarily with Ohio State football that I’ve been reading for a few years now. A few weeks ago they asked for interest in writing for their site and I tossed my hat into the ring. They’ve decided, graciously, to let me throw some of my ill-considered crap onto their site, provided I watch my language.

I’ll still be writing here, of course, as much as I feel the need to. After all, I still have a lot of “Understanding Your Fellow Human Being” posts to write if nothing else.

I’m pretty excited about the opportunity, and if any of you are interested in the goings-on in Old Columbus Town, I’d urge you to visit the site. Even the posts I didn’t write. They’re pretty good.

I know I haven’t written in a while (sue me) but hopefully soon I’ll be writing more. I’ll fill in the details as they arrive.

As most people who know me are aware, I have been a sports bigamist with regard to the NFL since I was about 6 years old. I’ve been a fan of both the Cincinnati Bengals and the Miami Dolphins for that entire time. In my defense, the Bengals haven’t really been what anyone would describe as a “professional football team” for most of my life, so I think I can escape scorn for having two teams.

I mean, it’s not like I root for four college football teams or anything.

However, my relationship with the Dolphins has been rocky as of late. First they traded Ted Ginn, although I did appreciate the necessity of their having done so. Then I realized that the Dolphins now have a quarterback and an owner who attended a certain syphilis-infested university in the north and there is no longer a sufficient quantity of virtuous counter-balancing Buckeyes on the team.

Also, as I get older and realize that I am a role model for two very impressionable kids (VERY impressionable – ask me what happened when I was watching the Tourette’s episode of South Park with my daughter) I realize it’s imprudent for me to have divided NFL loyalties.

Thus, I am temporarily renouncing my ties with the Miami Dolphins until such time as they lose both their loser quarterback and their chlamydia-addled owner. Once those two conditions have been met, I will revisit the situation with regards to sports bigamy and traditional notions of fanhood and the contractual obligations therein.

This unfortunate necessity doesn’t mean that I will necessarily root against them – hell, I’ve been rooting against the Bills, Pats, and Jets for 25 years, I can’t stop now – but I will no longer actively root for them. It also doesn’t change my One True Belief that Dan Marino is the greatest quarterback ever to play the game, nor my belief that had he a better supporting cast, he would have won eleventy billion Super Bowls.

It’s been a hell of a ride, Miami, but one that needed to happen.

And it’s not because we’re all a bunch of knuckle-dragging racists. (Someone explain the logic behind that to me. The U.S. soccer team has like 2 black guys on it. It’s probably our whitest sport outside of diving and speed skating.)

But no, the reason we hate soccer is because shit like this happens.

Jim Joyce called to say, “Wow, now that guy made a terrible call.”

If soccer referees can call penalties willy-nilly without telling anyone why, doesn’t that put soccer down to a rung maybe slightly above  figure skating and just below badminton on the “is it a sport?” pyramid? The worst part is soccer people outside of the US basically shrugged their shoulders. If this had happened to Brazil there’d be riots.  If it had happened to Germany, they probably would have invaded Poland. Again.

I’m still watching the World Cup until the US gets knocked out, but I’m putting soccer on notice. You’re a stupid sport and I hate you.