Published Wednesday, April 16, 2008 9:10 AM
Updated Wednesday, April 16, 2008 9:11 AM

 

Finding Mudville 4/17/08

Radio, baseball and the Reds


I am a baseball fan.

Before I ever became a baseball player, I was a baseball fan.  In fact, I probably became a baseball player because I was a baseball fan.

I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. I am a Cincinnati Reds fan.

Early on I went to Reds games with my three heroes, my dad, my grandfather and my Uncle Bill. They were my heroes for a lot of reasons, but I can't think of the Cincinnati Reds and baseball without thinking of them.

I was three years old when it all started, this love affair with baseball.

I happened to be good enough and lucky enough to play it for a living for a short while but I would have still been a baseball fan and a Reds fan regardless.

Back then there was no ESPN and no superstations broadcasting every ball game. We had just three channels, and if the President happened to be on that night we were out of luck.

If you wanted to catch your team’s games every night you listened to them on the radio.

That’s where I discovered my love for baseball, listening to my great-grandfather’s old transistor radio.

I am a product of baseball on radio. Lying in the top bunk at nights, the only light coming from the soft amber glow of the old transistor, and listening to the Reds on WLW AM-700.

Comforted by the radio’s glow I’d lie back and let the words of Waite Hoyt take me off to sleep, talking about Robinson, Pinson or Rose hitting one to Burgerville – Burger Beer being the longtime sponsor of Reds games – or old stories of his days with the Yankees during rain delays.

I didn’t know Waite Hoyt was a Hall of Fame pitcher with the New York Yankees until after his death in 1986. I always knew him as the voice of the Reds.

His call of a ball game was simplistic and analytical, and spiced with stories from his playing days. He was not a radio man but instead a ball player who worked in radio. He didn’t have that golden radio voice either, though nothing else ever came out of the speakers of that transistor radio sounding sweeter.

I can rattle off a slew of names that have passed through the Reds’ broadcast booth between Hoyt and current play-by-play guy Marty Brennemann. Names familiar to me but probably strangers to everyone else. These guys were my friends, and these guys I emulated as much as Pete Rose, Johnny Bench or Tony Perez.

It all started in the back yard with, “There’s a drive, deep to right …”

Guys like Jim MacIntyre, local Cincinnati sportscaster Jack Moran, Al Micheals, and then Brennemann. They were all radio and TV guys. They had the radio and TV voices.

The glue that held them all together, that linked them all, was the Old Lefthander, whose signature signoff I stole and used as my own when I called games on radio.

Joe Nuxhall.

Joe’s was the voice you’d hear in the background off mic, behind the calls of Michaels and Brennemann et al.

“There’s a drive, deep to right …”

“Get out! Go on! Get out of here! Get out of here!”

Nuxhall, an unabashed and unashamed homer, would provide the “Get out of here!”

I started listening to Joe Nuxhall on WLW in 1967 when he traded his spikes and glove for the microphone and got bounced upstairs.

As a pitcher goes, Nuxhall was a journeyman leftie, forever immortal for one thing … being the youngest person ever to play in a major league baseball game at the age of 15. In 1944, Nuxhall pitched in a game for the Cincinnati Reds, beginning a 63-year association with the team on the field and in the broadcast booth that ended with his death this past November.

It’s because of Nuxie that I love guys like Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Joe Morgan, Vada Pinson and Pete Rose.

The play-by-play guys would come and go, but Nuxhall would be the constant, the string that tied the knot.

It was never quite the same when the Reds moved into Riverfront Stadium after June 24, 1970, the last game played at Crosley Field. Maybe it was because I was growing up too and letting go of Crosley Field was like letting go of childhood myths.

I’d lay there in bed with my eyes closed and I could actually see Crosley Field in the amber lights of an August night, the haze drifting off the Mill Creek from beyond the leftfield fence, hearing the steady hiss of late night traffic on Interstate 75 that ran just beyond the outfield fence, and noting the time 10:40, forever frozen on the Longines clock perched atop the 40-foot high scoreboard in left center.  

I’d hear the pop of paper cups, the final strains of banjos and trombones serenading the crowd heading for the exits – twin floodgates down the right and leftfield lines – as they made their way home.

It would be Joe Nuxhall who’d tell me it was time for bed, whether or not I’d sleep contentedly knowing we’d won, or toss and turn all night after a loss. Either way, win or lose, Joe would tell me good night from my great-grandfather’s old transistor radio.

“This is the Old Lefthander rounding third and heading for home. Good night everybody.”