Red Reposter: Stocking Stuffers

Baseball writers must love having Brayan Pena in their city. I counted not one, not two, but three Brayan Pena holiday stories this week. They're all some variation on what Pena loves most: family, America, and baseball. I'm the scroogiest dude ever but even I enjoy these sorts of things. So you will too.

This has probably been shared around, but the list of Reds LFs since Dunn left is a wee bit devastating. I kinda have a place in my heart for Dave Sappelt, though. I want to make an all-star team of guys who tore up AA and were never heard from again.

"We're not rebuilding. If we were Johnny Cueto'd be gone, Mike Leake'd be gone. The payroll is up." So sayeth Jocketty. But the question stands: What are we doing?

What we're not doing? Building a new stadium, thankfully. The Braves are, and not only does their new stadium look to be in some sort of fresh exurban hell that will be impossible to get to or from or to do anything in, the Braves are losing even in their own wildish fever dreams. Dang.

For those like me who are interested in baseball labor rights, minor-leaguers are suing to be considered full-time employees. They're now considered seasonal workers (like farm workers, life guards, and babysitters) and are paid what they argue is below minimum wage. It's a tough battle, made especially so by the fact that in such a dog-eat-dog business players are afraid of getting dropped if they speak out. But since a whole lot of the minor leagues seems to be built on some naive "It was tough for me in the 60s, so it should be tough for you now" ethos, yeah, maybe minor leaguers should get a bite at those TV contracts themselves.

Dave Roth has a great Slate article on baseball card apps that...aren't as terrible as one might think.

His jokey "holiday albums" thing on Classical isn't so great, but surely some of you would appreciate "What The Hell Do You Know About Christmas?" by Corey Dillon. Is he Cincinnati's last openly surly athlete?

The best tweet, by the way:

bless the first rapper to drop a line about making a lady feel like she's got matt kemp's hips

— Lindsey Adler (@Lahlahlindsey) December 19, 2014

And while I'm on the subject of dumb things, the "Which of these lacrosse names are real names?" is pretty brutal. See if you can guess which ones went to Wick Terrel's high school!

If you're feeling at all happy and want to change that, read about how 500,000 people passed the old GED annually, but now the number's more like...50,000. The GED has become a computer-based test that requires a credit card to enroll in, which sounds great if you're an administrator but forgets that the sort of people who take the GED probably don't have computers, or credit cards.

Don't worry, I won't let you go into Christmas on that note. Here's some pictures of Yorman Rodriguez. The first, from our dear Jonny Moscot's Twitter:

Jonny Moscot is Jewish, which means that he was probably the loneliest dude at Pepperdine. Yorman Rodriguez is not Jamaican.

And for those like me who think the Reds' uniforms are sooo close to being great, here's a jersey with a cadet collar and no black. Not perfect, no. But so, so, so much closer...