Babe Ruth. Still Dead.

Opening Day should suck a little less this year.

















If you're lucky, the crappy team you root for every year will spend April and May playing scrappy, getting their uniforms dirty and, the good Lord willin', give 110%. Or you're a Pirates fan.

If you're extra-shiny lucky, the crappy team you root for will manufacture some feel good story to ease the slushy grayness of February and March. For the Cincinnati Reds, that feel good story has a name. It's Josh Hamilton C. Trent Rosencrans.

Replacing the affable Mark Lancaster at the doomed Post, C. Trent has been a breath of fresh air in a baseball town that too often smells like Marty and Joe locked in a tiny radio booth with coneys with plenty of mustard and onion, Bud longnecks, and Camels.

You have to admire C. Trent, a man who silently moves past the fugly new spring training gear MLB markets, and invents new teams. The guy's popping out names like he was Adam on Day 8. And unlike the Nicknamer-in-Chief, they're actually funny: the General Shermans, Satan's Rays of Sunshine, and Pure Evil.

Speaking of the Yanks, C. Trent may have already peaked. Noting the field-blocking pillar the Yanks have at their overpriced spring training grounds, C. Trent found visiting media can't actually watch the game. But they are treated to a framed picture of the Whammer. Which led C. Trent to proved his web fans with a Babe update at the bottom of each inning.

These are the kinds of things that ease the periods between Pete Rose press releases/ autograph signings.