The inevitable is finally happening. I am getting old.

All right, so I shouldn’t complain… The inevitable is finally happening. I am getting old.

All right, so I shouldn’t complain about being 22. I can still run a mile in less than 10 minutes, and not all of my joints crack when I get out of bed in the morning. And my beer belly isn’t that big – I can still kind of bend over and touch my toes.

But old age has already started to set in. The hair on top of my head is thinning, which I assume has to happen eventually, since just about every other male in my family over 30 is close to bald. I hardly ever get carded at the bar anymore, and when I do, it’s usually by someone still waiting for his voice to change.

But while all of these are good examples of how close I am to getting liver spots, here are two reasons that are even better examples.

Reason #1: Unlike many baseball fans my age, I love a good pitching duel. I would much rather watch a 1-0 or a 2-1 game in which both pitchers dominate.

However, that doesn’t mean I don’t like the long ball. Home runs are just as exciting as a strikeout, and when one of those up-and-coming sluggers smacks the snot out of a hanging curve, I enjoy it.

Funny thing about those new guys, though – they’re new.

For example: on May 20, I sat down to watch another stellar episode of SportsCenter. The first highlight that came on showed Cincinnati taking on Atlanta at the Great American Ballpark. That night, the Reds’ Austin Kearns drove in four runs in a 9-8 Cincinnati victory. But what made the feat special was that it also happened to be Kearns’ birthday.

How nice, I thought, that the guy got to have a great game on his 23rd birthday. I hope that when I’m 23, I can do something like – then it hit me: I’m going to be 23 in less than a year, and there’s no way I’ll be hitting a baseball in the Great American Ballpark, or any other stadium for that matter, any time soon.

There are 39 major league ball players who are under the age of 23. That’s not unusual because there has never been any kind of rule saying that you have to be a certain age to play in the big leagues. What’s hard to grasp is that all of those guys were born in 1980 or later.

When did this happen? It seems like only yesterday that guys who were born in 1972 were considered young’uns. Now those guys are mostly on the downside of their careers, and you don’t see them play as often.

But guys like Kearns, who are on SportsCenter almost daily, I can see just fine – which leads me to my second reason.

Reason #2: While in between articles in this month’s Playboy, my eyes – which have not yet been affected by age – happened to wander over to this thing that people call the centerfold. The girl adorning the pages was quite beautiful – with or without clothes – but the problem I found didn’t occur until the last page.

Could it really be that she was born in May of 1981? Just three weeks after myself? That’s not possible. The girls in these magazines always used to seem unattainable because of their age – I just read the articles then, too, Mom, I swear – along with the fact that I would never be able to utter a single syllable in their presence.

With a little hard – (cough) not like that – research, I soon found out that there have been 19 Playmates who were born after 1980. So does that mean that now that these girls are younger, I’d have a chance and maybe be able to talk to them?

I doubt it; I’m just a crazy old man.

Joe Marchilena is the sports editor for The Pitt News and wants to know why those damn kids have to listen to their rap music so loud.