One of the great beauties of baseball is that one pitch can mean everything and one game can mean nothing. The Reds are off to a slow start, winning seven of their first 16 games. It’s not ideal and wins in April count as much as wins in September, but it’s baseball — every team loses roughly one-third of its games.   

It seems every mock draft out there — and there are a ton — knows exactly what the Bengals will do with their two first-round picks on April 26: The team will take a guard and a cornerback. They seem to be the two glaring needs, even though the team addressed their depth at the positions in free agency.  

Nielsen says we’re the smallest market in Major League Baseball, but last week Bob Castellini sent the message that the Cincinnati Reds are no longer a small-market team, signing Joey Votto to a 10-year, $225 million extension that brings his contract to more than $250 million over the next 12 seasons.   

I know I will lose any claim to being an actual Cincinnatian with this statement, but I’m not really bothered that Major League Baseball’s first pitch of the season wasn’t thrown in our city. In case you missed it — and it’s very possible you did — the 2012 MLB season began on March 28 in Japan.  

Much of the offseason optimism for the Reds was dashed this weekend when it was announced that closer Ryan Madson would require Tommy John surgery on his right arm and miss the season. But it’s spring, the sun is out, every team (in the National League at least) is undefeated and now is not the time for doom. No, now is the time for optimism.   

For the first time in the history of the NCAA Tournament, four teams in the Sweet 16 — a qualified quarter — are from the state of Ohio, with Cincinnati, Xavier, Ohio and Ohio State moving on to make up 25 percent of the remaining teams fighting for a chance at basketball supremacy.  

Pain came from inside Cashmere Wright’s head, looking to get out, pulsing, like his brain was expanding beyond what his skull could contain. His eyes — perhaps the most important part of his multifaceted game on the court — betrayed him; he could barely see. A single ray of light crippled him, yet he was readying for the brightest spotlight of his career.   

Tu Holloway and Kenny Frease know all too well what it means to be senior basketball players at Xavier University. For three seasons they saw older players — the likes of Jason Love, B.J. Raymond and Jamel McLean — lead the program to deep runs in the NCAA tournament. It would be Holloway and Frease’s turn this season.   

The NCAA Tournament comes around every year, which is great for those of us who believe it to be the greatest postseason event in sports — the first two days of which are particularly dramatic and exciting.  

With the Reds away in Arizona and another story already planned on UC this week, I was left pondering what to do to fill this space — and then I got one of the greatest gifts ever handed to sportswriting — Charlie Coles.   

The Reds’ playoff odds got a bump last week. Without adding a player or any injury to a rival occurring, the playoffs got that much closer for Cincinnati. That said, they did for every other team as well. Bud Selig got his playoff expansion, adding another wild card to the playoffs in each league. Now 10 teams will be in the postseason.   

During the nine days between the Oct. 24 announcement that Whit Babcock had accepted the offer to become the athletic director of the University of Cincinnati and the day he started on Nov. 2, West Virginia became the third Big East member to leave the conference.  

As the college basketball season started, many predicted the Xavier Musketeers would finish the season in the Final Four. And that’s still a possibility — but nobody predicted this would be the ride. Winners of their first seven games, including wins at Vanderbilt and Butler, the Musketeers were living up to their billing and were ranked No. 8 in the country.  

The University of Cincinnati’s conference future is beginning to look a lot like its conference past, and that’s not a good thing. Last week Memphis accepted a bid to the new-look Big East, which is suddenly starting to resemble the old Conference USA.  

Following in the footsteps of Frank Robinson, Josh Hamilton could forever be the one who got away from the Reds. But the reason Hamilton was deemed expendable (wrongly, in retrospect) keeps popping up, while Robinson’s exile is still a mystery.