The Battle, an update

And, please, no caterwauling.

The Blob knows you don't care about the Battle for the Cellar. It knows you don't care about its crappy baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. It doesn't care that you don't care. So there.

Thing is, this is the perfect time for a Battle update, given that we're a week away from the All-Star break and neither the Pirates nor the Reds, the hard-fightin' Battle participants, are going to have much of a presence there for the excellent reason that they both stink.

The All-Star rosters were released yesterday, and the Pirates have exactly one player (pitcher Felipe Vazquez) on the National League's. The Reds have three, none of them starters and none of them pitchers. And one of them is Joey Votto, who shouldn't really count because Votto's really, really good and pretty much an automatic All-Star every year.

This brings us back to the Battle, which has tightened again since we last checked in. The Reds have now closed to within 2 1/2 games of the Buccos, mainly because they've been playing some decent baseball while the Pirates have doggedly pursued their customary craptitude. In fact, their lead over the Reds was as low as a game-and-a-half until the Reds dropped two in a row to the Cubs over the weekend.

Can't wait to see what the rest of the season will bring.

Yeah, I know. I'm the only one.