Cincinnati Reds

All good things must come to an end, and that includes the career of Marty Brennaman as the Reds' broadcaster.

Edd Roush may be the greatest Cincinnati Reds player that younger generations of Reds fans know little, if anything, about.

WVXU-FM will produce Rod Serling's O'Toole From Moscow, a 1955 TV comedy about confusion between the Soviet Union and the Cincinnati Reds, as a radio drama.

Ted Kluszewski was a Cincinnati Red from 1947 to 1957 – the first 10 years of his major league career – and so there are now generations of Reds fans who never saw him.

The Cincinnati Reds franchise had been carrying an albatross around its neck for 20 years by the time the Reds returned to the World Series in 1939 to take on the New York Yankees.

No one believed the Reds could win a World Series fair and square.  

Young Reds fans may well believe Tuesday's three-team trade that sent outfielder Yasiel Puig to the Cleveland Indians for starting pitcher Trevor Bauer was the biggest deal in the history of the team. But the trade made by the Reds and the Houston Astros on November 29, 1971 had far more impact. 

On his birthday four years ago, I first proposed the Reds honor Hall of Fame radio announcer Marty Brennaman with the "ultimate birthday present," a statue on Crosley Terrace. I've updated the column for his 77th birthday today during his 46th and final season on Reds radio. Happy birthday, Marty! ! (And Happy Birthday to his wife, Amanda, who also celebrates one today!)

As he celebrates his 77th birthday today, Marty Brennaman sounds as excited as that rookie big league radio announcer who joined Joe Nuxhall in 1974. That’s what made him a Hall of Famer.

The official attendance at Great American Ball Park on the night of June 6, 2017, for a game between the Reds and the St. Louis Cardinals was 18,620 – not even half full. But the people who were there saw something so amazing that the likelihood of them ever seeing it again is next to nothing.

The stands at Crosley Field were packed with 28,027 Reds fans on the night of June 24, 1970, the final game in the cozy, quirky ball park that had been the home of the Cincinnati Reds since 1912.

George Lee Anderson of Bridgewater, South Dakota, might well have turned out to be one of the most obscure people to have ever put on the uniform of a Major League Baseball team.

You know him as Sparky, a nickname given to him by a minor league radio broadcaster because young George was something of a firecracker.

This is a year of anniversaries for the Cincinnati Reds.

It's the 150th anniversary of the Cincinnati Red Stockings, baseball's first all-professional team…  The 100th anniversary of the Reds winning the 1919 World Series… The 75th anniversary of Joe Nuxhall's historic debut as the youngest Major League Baseball player, at age 15.

Joe Nuxhall made baseball history 75 years ago, pitching for the Reds at age 15 in an 18-0 loss to the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals on June 10, 1944. It was four days after D-Day when Nuxhall took the mound at Crosley Field, and it wasn't pretty.  

Historian Greg Rhodes celebrates the career of Waite Hoyt, the Reds' radio play-by-play voice from 1942-1965, at the main Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County downtown at 2 p.m. Saturday, June 8.

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.