What A Bunch: The Big Red Machine

I really enjoy watching baseball. It has been a great pleasure to see that passed on to my girls; they love watching baseball as well. My time as a fan has not left me numbered among the long suffering (think Cubs fans); I've had a great couple of runs with teams I followed.

As friends and regular readers will know, I grew up in Central Kentucky, from 1967 to 1980. I became aware enough to really start following baseball in 1970, and of course, the Cincinnati Reds were my team. It was the beginning of a dynasty. An excellent recent Sport Illustrated article asserts that the 1975 Reds were the best hitting team ever. Of course, the name Sparky Anderson comes up here at the house all the time. Game 6 of the 1976 World Series was arguably the best World Series game ever.

College, life, marriage, kids, etc. dimmed my ardor some through the years in Washington (no team) and Charleston (no team). We moved to Atlanta in the spring of 1991, the year the Braves went from worst to first. Two year old Caroline would do the chop from her car seat and every single car that saw her would chop right back at her. The Braves proceeded to win more divisional championships in a row (14) than any other team, to the point where the local fans were bored by the post season. The peak of the Braves "dynasty" was after taking 2 games against the dreaded Yankees in Yankee stadium, coming home needing only 2 of three in Atlanta-Fulton County stadium in October 1996. NYY swept the rest of the series and the Braves haven't really done well since. After these last 4 mediocre seasons (as I write this, the Braves just lost 4 in a row to the Reds, effectively ending their feeble attempt at a Wild Card post season bid), fans here might actually get excited again by a solid season and a pennant race.

The point is, I've been privileged to live near and follow a dominant team twice in my life; you can't ask for much better than that.

Back to the Big Red Machine.

In those days, only occasional weekend games were on TV. You can bet I was in the basement watching the big color TV for those games (with the adjustable antenna set North to get WLW). I fell asleep on summer nights listening to Marty Brennaman and Joe Nuxhall. Marty did a 15 minute "Star of the game" segment after every game. If we won, it was the most important Reds player from that game. If the other team won (didn't happen much - the Reds won 100 games almost every year), we got to listen to the 2nd most significant player from the other team (the other radio team got the most important one). Then Joe did a 15 minute wrap up of games around the league - the "10th inning show". It was finally time to go to sleep when Joe said "this is the old lefthander rounding third and heading for home" at the end of the broadcast.

I only learned while writing this piece that Nuxhall was the youngest major league player in the modern era. In 1944, with many of the regular players in the war, 15 year old Joe pitched 2/3s of an inning, giving up 5 earned runs for an ERA of 65.2. He came back 8 years later for a strong career, then retired to the broadcast booth in 1967, just before I started listening.

Dr. Brown and TGP took us to Crosley Field when we were pretty young, so I don't remember it much. I do remember that Dr. B. dropped a foul ball that Willie Mays hit, and it bounced away, lost forever.

Every Spring in the 70s in Georgetown, TGP would fill out the order form from Graves Cox and get tickets for several games, usually including at least 1 double header (back in those days, they really played 2 back to back games and you were guaranteed 18 innings of baseball). We sat way up in the cheap seats, on the third base side so we could see in the Reds dugout. The ride up I-75 was always eventful. We usually went with the Browns, so it was TGP & Kendall, me and Kevin and Dunn and Jeff. We had various overpasses that we would pretend Indians were hiding behind and shooting at us from (there was no such thing as political correctness then). Sometimes, we'd stop and eat at the rest stop before the last downhill in KY. Kevin usually had some extraordinary concoction of a sandwich - cream cheese and pineapple or peanut butter and banana. Sometimes, we'd go straight to downtown and have a meal at a pancake restaurant (I always got the Pig in a Blanket) above our underground parking.

Once inside Riverfront, we'd get some popcorn (despite the grown ups attempts to have us already fed by then), mostly to convert the container into a megaphone so we could cheer the team along. Coke cups, quickly emptied, were for popping; they made quite a sound when we stomped on them. Kevin and I would run a full circle around the stadium, dodging crowds the whole way. That's one thing those old baseball/football round stadiums would do that the new "old" parks don't. Herself and I went to Yankee Stadium last summer before they dropped it; you can't run a full circle around that one either.

It wasn't only us and the Browns. I went to the game several times with Red and his father Milt. The best time was when we went up US-25 in the convertible Pontiac. What a beautiful day. Kim has always viewed having a ragtop as a necessity in life.

Riverfront went the way of all good flesh a few years ago, replaced by the Great American Ball Park, which Kim's architecture firm built. That let the GBBN folks play the last game in Riverfront (or Cinergy) before it was dropped.

We had a reunion of sorts at the Great American Ballpark in the summer of 07. It was so hot during our Sunday afternoon game that we went up a section to find some shade.