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Billy Reed: A trip back to Cincinnati to see the Reds brings back fond memories of better times


CINCINNATI – I went to Great American Ballpark Wednesday for a matinee game between two of the worst teams in major-league baseball, the Cincinnati Reds and the Atlanta Braves. Before you ask, I have not lost my mind, even though it did get a bit warm in all that bright sunshine.

I love baseball in the daytime. When I was kid and many games were still being played in the afternoon, I couldn’t imagine anything better than being a big-league beat writer. Get up late, hang out at the ball park, knock out a story, and then have the night to run around with your fellow writers or even some of the players.

Would that be perfect or what?

Of course, all that changed and not for the better. Almost all the teams began playing the vast majority of their games at night. Salaries and egos soared in direct proportion to each other. By the 1980s, I had come to believe that being a big-league beat writer had to be one of the worst jobs on the planet.

It’s got to be tough for the folks covering the Reds this season, mainly because the team is so bad. Night after the night, the poor ink-stained wretches have to trudge to the clubhouse to ask what went wrong again. Difficult in the best of times, baseball managers and players can be nasty when things are going bad.

Reds photo

Reds photos

But my trip to Great American had nothing whatsoever to do with the standings and everything to do with nostalgia.

When I was growing up, a trip to Crosley Field was the absolute highlight of the summer, something that was anticipated for weeks with anticipation and excitement. So all these years later, summer still doesn’t feel complete to me unless I make one pilgrimage to see the Reds play.

Usually we would try to pick out a doubleheader so we could get our money’s worth. For those of you under the age of 40, a doubleheader was when the teams played two games, back to back, usually on a Sunday afternoon.

Since those were the days before interstates, the trip had to be made on two-lane roads that twisted through towns like Georgetown and Cynthiana. To make a 1 p.m. start for the first game, we would have to leave home at no later than 7 in the morning, figuring in time for a couple of gas station stops.

The second game of the double-header wouldn’t be over until 6 p.m. or so. For some reason, the trip home wasn’t nearly as exciting as the trip up. But if we could be in bed before midnight, that was a good thing.

Now please tell me this: Why do I know more about the 1956 Reds than the team playing for Cincinnati today? I was 14 that summer, the last one when I didn’t have to work, and I devoured everything about the team I could fine. In Mt. Sterling, where I went to spend a couple of weeks with my grandparents, you could even get some of the games on TV in black-and-white.

To this day, if pressed, I cannot only name just about every player, I can give you his uniform number and home run total. I went crazy when a new magazine named Sports Illustrated put a color photo of sluggers Ted Kluszewski, Wally Post, and Gus Bell on its cover.

Until that summer, the Reds had gone through a series of bad-to-mediocre seasons. But in 1956, thanks mostly to the addition of rookie Frank Robinson, the team exploded for 221 home runs, which tied the major-league record. Robinson was the team’s first African-American star. He knocked 38 homers, tops on the team, and was named Rookie of the Year in the National League.

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The best part was that the Reds were in the pennant race until the last days of the season. They finished third in the eight-team league, just behind the champion Brooklyn Dodgers and second-place Milwaukee Braves. It was my first experience with a pennant race.

Something else new that season was the vest-type jerseys with red T-shirts underneath. I thought, and still think, they were very cool. Sometimes, on especially hot days, Kluszewski, the massive first-baseman, would skip the T-shirt, exposing his bulging biceps for the world – and the opposing pitcher – to check out.

I like Great American Ballpark because it replicates the Crosley Field experience far more than Riverfront Stadium ever did. For those of you under the age of 25, Riverfront was a two-sport stadium in the “cookie-cutter” style of the day. It looked more or less like the stadiums in Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and maybe a couple of other places.

The idea was to save the taxpayers money by having the same stadium used for both baseball and football. In reality, however, those stadiums were unsatisfactory for either, and the artificial-turf fields caused more injuries than they prevented.

Riverfront’s only saving grace is that the “Big Red Machine” played there. Without question, the teams that won the World Series back-to-back in 1975 and ’76 were among the best in baseball history.

Three starters – catcher Johnny Bench, first-baseman Tony Perez, and second-baseman Joe Morgan – have been inducted into the Hall of Fame. Two others, third-baseman Pete Rose and shortstop Dave Concepcion, should be there, too, but that’s a story for another day.

As I walked around Great American on Wednesday, I noticed all kinds of tributes to the “Machine.” Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, except that that team played its last game 40 years ago. Since then, the Reds have won the World Series once (1990) but accomplished little else.

Isn’t it time to start living more in the present day?

Joey Votto (Reds photo)

Joey Votto (Reds photo)

Bad as they are, the Reds beat the Braves, 6-3. My only disappointment was that Adam Duvall, the slugging left fielder from Louisville, took the day off. But I got to see Joey Votto and Tucker Barnhart hit home runs, and pitcher Anthony DeSclafani did a good job of scattering eight Braves hits in an impressive performance.

More than any other team or program I’ve ever covered in almost 60 years of typing, I have trouble being objective about the Reds. That’s because I was a devoted fan long before I became a writer. They are a part of my DNA. I can get mad at them, as I’ve done a lot this season (see last week’s column), but I can never abandon them.

In 1961, when I was 18 and fresh out of Henry Clay High in Lexington, I was credentialed to cover World Series games in Cincinnati for The Leader, then Lexington’s afternoon paper. The Reds, surprise winners of the National League, were pitted against the mighty New York Yankees at the end of the season in which Roger Maris hit 61 homers to break Babe Ruth’s record.

For years, I’ve claimed to be the youngest writer ever credentialed to cover a World Series game for a legitimate newspaper. If somebody has information to the contrary, I’d like to know about it.

Sitting in the auxiliary pressbox with my much older peers, I tried to be professional. Inside, though, I was pulling for the Reds. That’s what happens when you’re a fan at heart, one who still gets a little excited about going to Cincinnati on a fine summer day to see a ball game.

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Billy Reed is a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame and the Transylvania University Hall of Fame. He has been named Kentucky Sports Writer of the Year eight times and has won the Eclipse Award twice. Reed has written about a multitude of sports events for over four decades, but he is perhaps one of media’s most knowledgeable writers on the Kentucky Derby


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