Sports

The Cincinnati Reds have had their fair share of National League MVPs over the years – 10 players have won the award 12 times.

Major League Baseball is a team sport, one where all 25 players on the roster have a role to play if the team is to have success.

What other game has the concept of "sacrifice flies" and "sacrifice bunts," where a hitter gives himself up willingly to move a teammate into scoring position to increase the odds of scoring runs?

At first glance, the 1990 Cincinnati Reds looked like a brash, young team with tons of talent but no chance to make the post-season, much less win the World Series.

"Nobody picked that team to do anything,'' said Marty Brennaman, the Hall of Fame broadcaster who will retire at the end of the year after 46 years in the radio booth.

A Cincinnati native is heading to France this summer to play in the Women's World Cup. Rose Lavelle is among the 23 women named to the roster for the June tournament.

If you had been in Al Lopez Field in Tampa, Fla., in the 1980s, watching a Cincinnati Reds spring training game, you probably wouldn't have noticed the tall, thin old man sitting in the seats behind home plate, a scorecard in his hand.

Just another old snowbird from up north, you might well have thought.

Imagine yourself as a loyal Cincinnati Reds fan on the evening of May 24, 1935.

You were one of the 20,422 who had paid a top dollar of $1.75 for a seat in Crosley Field at the corner of Findlay and Western avenues in the West End.

Sometimes, as I sit in my mezzanine seats at Great American Ball Park, I hear fans sitting nearby – casual fans, folks who do not, like some of us, live and breathe Reds baseball all year long – talking about the circular plaques on the façade behind home plate, just below the press box and broadcast booths.

Seven years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, a 29-year-old utility player from Indiana named Chuck Harmon became the first African-American to play for the Cincinnati Reds.

Will White looked like a mild-mannered bank teller, but he was, in fact, the fiercest, nastiest and most durable pitcher the fledgling Cincinnati Reds had in the 1870s and 1880s.