The origin story of the Reds goes like this: In 1869, just after local boy and war hero Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated as president, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the very first entirely professional baseball team. They were later a charter member of the National League, essentially creating baseball as we know it today. That tradition was respected for decades; in fact, for many years, there was a tradition that baseball’s Opening Day would feature only one game, and it would be hosted by the Cincinnati Reds, in honor of their status as the “first franchise.” But the powers that be in Major League Baseball no longer care about tradition, they just care about money, and have opening days in Japan or whatever that don’t even include the Reds. Cincinnati still makes Opening Day an unofficial city holiday, complete with parade, but it’s just not the same. Cincinnati gets no respect.
The above story is what I was raised to believe, and what everyone around me believed, and I imagine that most people in Cincinnati believe it today. But almost none of it is true. The fully professional Cincinnati Red Stockings have no connection with the modern franchise. They dissolved after a couple seasons, and the team name resurfaced in Boston with a franchise that today is known as the Atlanta Braves. The Cincinnati Red Stockings who were a charter member of the National League was a different team, too, and they got kicked out of the league a few years later for serving beer at their games. It was the third iteration of the Red Stockings that became today’s Cincinnati Reds.
Also, there was never a tradition that the Reds would have Opening Day to themselves. It’s not even clear how that myth got started. Cincinnati gets roughly the amount of respect that it deserves, given that the team hasn’t contended for over 30 years. And the Grant administration didn’t turn out so great either.
In 1994, the Reds were leading their division when the season ended. Which was true of five other teams in that strike-abbreviated year, but for the Reds it was the second time they had had the best record in their division without making the playoffs, the first being in 1981.
The Reds are haunted by the Big Red Machine. That dynasty won its last title just a few years before I was born, and their aura still suffused my childhood. Johnny Bench advertised just about everything in Cincinnati, Pete Rose kept hanging around to rack up more hits and keep his bookie happy, and even as late as 1990, Ken Griffey Sr. was still on the Reds’ roster in the Udonis Haslem role. But the Big Red Machine is never coming back.
Which makes the Reds the perfect team for Southwest Ohio, a region likewise weighed down by the memory of its golden days. Cincinnati used to be the Queen City of the West, the largest non-coastal city in the country. It had its own high society; I have a print of a painting of the women of my great-grandparents’ generation that wouldn’t be out of place in a Gilded Age home. Dayton, my hometown, was the birthplace of aviation, a major player in the automotive industry, had the most patents per capita in the nation, and played a part in both the Manhattan Project and deciphering the Enigma machine. Ohio was a crucial electoral battleground for over a century, and the birthplace of seven different presidents (though not any of the good ones). All of that is gone.
Which leads to a strange mix of collective emotion; a sense that we don’t get the respect that we deserve, combined with the realization that, not only does nobody else agree, but even the respect that we deserve is nothing like the respect we used to deserve. It’s a mix of pride and shame which matches my feelings about the hometown I moved away from, and the baseball team I still cheer for.
My happiest Reds memories are from my childhood. Some of that is rose-colored nostalgia, and the purity of childhood fandom, but another part is that, well, that’s the last time the Reds were very good. Listening to Marty and Joe on 700WLW whenever I could, and reading Hal McCoy’s game report every morning, unless it was a West Coast game, in which case I’d call a Dayton Daily News number to hear a recording of Hal McCoy reading his column. Every trip to Riverfront Stadium was a landmark event. We’d drive down with my parents and brother, and maybe a school friend, or Gran, my dad’s mom, a tiny old Irish woman who loved the Reds only slightly less than she loved Mother Church. We’d park in Kentucky, walk across the bridge, get our seats in the very top of that giant concrete bowl, and root, root, root for our Reds.
I got to watch local hero Pete Rose, Charlie Hustle himself, break the all-time hits record on TV with my dad. And best of all, when I was 11 years old, the Reds swept the A’s to win the World Series, which felt like the greatest moment in history, and still kind of does.
Pete Rose, of course, turned out to be Pete Rose, and that 1990 squad was owned by Marge Schott. I owe them some of my happiest memories. It doesn’t feel great.
My mom defended Marge Schott. Having fought her own battles in the workplace, she sympathized with Schott as the only woman in a boy’s club, arguing that the other owners were probably just as bad, but got away with it because they were men. In her defense, that was before the worst revelations came out.
Let’s Remember Some Reds!
Luis Quiñones: Utility infielder. The only reason I remember him is because, after a few years of lobbying, he became the first player to have the name on his uniform printed with a tilde. A small, but meaningful step forward.
Danny Jackson: A perfectly fine starting pitcher. Also my favorite pitcher on the team, for no reason that I can remember. One time the Reds won 20-0, and Danny Jackson came out in the ninth to finish his complete game, which is wild to think about today.
Todd Benzinger: Speaking of things that wouldn’t happen today! Todd Benzinger was the starting first baseman for the 1990 World Champion Reds. His slashline that season was .253/.291/.340(!), for an OPS+ of 70. But as people pointed out, he played great defense, and you need that at first base, because they’re involved in almost every play.
Chris Sabo: Rookie of the Year, nicknamed Spuds because his goggles made him resemble Spuds Mackenzie, a dog who advertised Bud Light. It’s impossible to explain how big a deal Spuds Mackenzie was in his time. You just wouldn’t believe me.
Aaron Harang: My first live-in girlfriend had no interest in sports, but she was raised in a Reds family, and so was tolerant of their frequent presence on our TV, even developing a mild interest. She would ask “Is the ugly guy pitching?” and I would know she meant Harang. You can decide if that was unfair or not. He also became the first pitcher to ever lead his league in wins and not get a single Cy Young vote. Nor should he have.
Billy Hamilton: Incredible speed, great defense. His only shortcomings were that he could neither get a hit nor draw a walk, which turn out to be crucial baseball skills. They kept on running him out there for a while in the hopes that he would figure it out, but he never quite did.
Bronson Arroyo: Came to the Reds in one of the handful of good trades I can ever recall them making. Played the guitar, including for a jingle promoting local meatpacking conglomerate JTM, a jingle which I am happy to report I have finally managed to forget.
Sean Casey: Came over from Cleveland in one of the other good trades (for Dave Burba, another great Guy to Remember). Easily the most enjoyable Red to root for between Barry Larkin and Joey Votto.
Adam Dunn: Galoot (complimentary).
In 1992, the Reds traded Paul O’Neill, and my little league coach’s daughter was devastated, because he was her biggest Reds crush. The fact that the Reds got Roberto Kelly in return didn’t console her. Nor should it have.
I didn’t know I was trans until well into adulthood, after my father had passed away, but it was clear from the beginning that “guy stuff” was not really my thing, which was hard on him. His upbringing meant that there were only a limited number of ways to relate to me, and I had no interest in most of them. I couldn’t stand the Boy Scouts, or fishing, or the outdoors in general. I had no particular interest in cars, and I couldn’t even really imagine how anybody could (this is still true). But the two interests I did share with him were board games and sports, and it was through them that he was able to pass down the only life lessons that stuck with me. He taught me that, whether in board games, sports, or life, your character is shown in how you play, and how you lose.
One moment that struck deep: we were watching the Reds play the Dodgers, and it seemed like Steve Sax was fielding every ball the Reds hit. I’m sure he was just recording a standard number of putouts for a second baseman, but I was 8 years old or whatever and it felt like a deep injustice. Finally I shouted out “I hope Steve Sax gets hurt!” I could immediately tell I’d done something wrong. Dad didn’t even yell, but in the most forceful voice I can ever remember hearing from him, he said “Don’t you ever say you want a player to get hurt.” And I never have.
The fall of 1999 was a great time for the Reds and for me. I moved into the first place I’d ever lived on my own, free from both my parents and my University of Dayton classmates. The Reds, under wacky old Jack McKeon, were in a pennant chase, which is one of the great experiences in all of sports. Near the end of the season, my best friend from high school came to town and we went to a crucial game against the Cardinals, watching from the same old top-row seats. Light-hitting shortstop Pokey Reese hit a walk-off home run that just barely cleared the left-field wall (one of only 10 homers he hit that season), and my friend and I and 30,000 or so other people jumped up and down and shouted like maniacs.
Going into their last series, on the road against an already-eliminated Brewers squad, the Reds controlled their own destiny. Naturally they then proceeded to drop the first two games, but still, a win in the last game would get them into a one-game tiebreaker against the Mets. This being October, in Wisconsin, that last game was delayed for several hours by a snowstorm. I spent five or six hours listening to the radio and pacing my living room, and sometime after midnight, they finally won to keep their season alive. The next day I called my dad and asked if he wanted to go to the game with me, one of the rare times I made him happy in those years. We parked in Kentucky like always, and made it to Riverfront in time to see 98 Degrees (the boy band that wasn’t the Backstreet Boys or NSYNC) sing the national anthem. Which is good, because that was the high point of the evening. The team hadn’t gotten back into Cincinnati until something like 5:00 that morning, the Mets’ Al Leiter was dominant, and there wasn’t a single moment where it felt like the Reds had any chance at all. I don’t remember us saying much as we walked back across the bridge. There wasn’t much to say.
While I discarded the cereal inside it long ago, I still have a box of VottO’s, the limited-edition Joey Votto–branded Cheerios knockoff.
As far as I know, the Reds don’t have a legendary curse, so here’s my proposal: The Curse of Davey Johnson. See, in 1995, Davey Johnson coached the Reds and NL MVP Barry Larkin to a division championship, followed by an NLDS victory over the Dodgers. However, he didn’t return for the next season. And not because he retired, or couldn’t agree to a new contract, or even get fired at the end of the season. That would have made sense. What actually happened was, shortly after the beginning of the season, Marge Schott announced that, regardless of how the Reds performed that year, next year Johnson would be replaced by his bench coach, Ray Knight, because she was offended that Johnson had lived with his fiancée before they got married. I don’t know if Johnson cursed the franchise on his way out the door, but he would have been justified in doing so, and they’ve certainly played like they were cursed. Here’s a complete list of the Reds’ postseason appearances between 1995 and last fall's two-game sweep at the hands of the Dodgers:
2010: Roy Halladay threw a no-hitter. The Phillies won in a three-game sweep.
2012: The Reds faced the Giants in a quirky 2-3 format where the first two games were played in San Francisco, and the last three in Cincinnati. The Reds won both games in SF, meaning they just needed to win one out of three, at home, to advance. They did not.
2020: In the COVID-shortened season, a 31-29 record was good enough to face the Braves, who swept the Reds 2-0, shutting them out in both games. Which was fair, given that the Reds’ batting average as a team that year was an atrocious .212, the lowest for a playoff team since the days of Tungsten Arm O’Doyle.
That’s it. Do you know how many other MLB teams have won a playoff series since 1995? All of them. Every single one. Maybe we can ask Davey Johnson to lift the curse. Well, shit.
In what felt like a miracle, the Reds in 2000 traded for freakin’ Ken Griffey, Jr., the best, coolest player in all of baseball.
Here’s a sentence from Griffey’s Wikipedia entry: “The 2000 season began what has generally been seen as a decline in Griffey's superstar status.”
I nearly quit once. God knows I’d been through enough: three decades of losing, seeing heroes like Pete Rose, Aroldis Chapman, and Trevor Bauer (the only Cy Young winner in franchise history) turn out to be horrible people, wasting Joey Votto’s career, a drive into deep left field by Castellanos, an unending parade of cheapskate moves, and finally, what I thought was the last straw, the owners, on Opening Day, declaring that the reason they wouldn’t spend more money on the Reds was essentially that Cincinnati didn’t deserve it. Cincinnati, among the greatest baseball towns in America, which still cheers for this garbage team that gives them nothing in return. If the owners didn’t want me to support the team, why should I?
And then Elly De La Cruz came along and I was sucked right back in. Dude is just so much fun, plays the game with such joy, does things no other player can do. I was at the Giants stadium when he hit a legit, non–little league inside-the-park home run, the coolest baseball feat I’ve ever seen live. Another time I turned on a random game and within a few minutes saw him steal second, third, and home. No doubt he’ll be another wasted career, but he makes games worth watching, so I guess I’ll be sticking around a little longer.
And to be honest with myself, I’ll probably never really give up. I stick around for all the reasons sports fans stay in this type of relationship. Because of the memories, and the people I’ve watched the games with. Because of the grain of hope I retain against all evidence. Because of the home that I left behind, but that will always be a part of me. Because, on the rare occasions they bring me joy, I think about the people I’ve lost who would have felt that same joy, and can feel their presence for a moment.
And even if the Reds never win another playoff series (and there’s no real reason to think they ever will), well, this life is but a vale of sorrow. Go Reds!
