Baseball's Doing Just Fine Here

But we're an Event Town, not a hardball mecca

Early in 2006, Bob Castellini summoned me to his offices on the top floor of what was then the Enquirer building. MLB had approved Carl Lindner’s sale of the Reds to Castellini’s group weeks earlier, in Jan. 2006. Castellini wanted to meet me and show me something.

He pulled an Enquirer sports section from a briefcase. It was from a recent season, sometime in the middle of an extended slide in the standings. The Reds would finish with a losing record for five years in a row, 2001-2005. They hadn’t done that in half a century.

I’d written a column suggesting Reds baseball was not the local institution it had been. Loyalty to the club and the game had long been assumed in Cincinnati. Those days were gone, I wrote. “RIP, Baseball Town’’ was the headline. Castellini said that column was a reason he bought the Reds.

We’re still having the debate. We worry over the club and the game non-stop. We ask the question, “Is baseball dying?’’ Some of us conclude it is. RIP, Baseball Town.

We grow too soon old and too late smart.

During the Reds recent fun run through the game, home attendance bloomed. A weekend series with the Yankees drew 110,000, even as the Reds finished the series eight games under .500.

The Club won eight in a row on the road, then drew 127,000 for a Fri-Sat-Sun three-gamer with the Braves. Last weekend, Milwaukee was in town. More than 112,000 showed up.

If you’re keeping score, the Reds have drawn at least 30,000 fans in each of their last nine home games. Four times in that run, attendance has exceeded 40,000.

This says some things, all of them obvious, and should end a tiresome debate:

Baseball wasn’t lost here. The Reds were.

Second Coming to follow

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Cincinnati isn’t a Baseball Town or a Football Town or a Soccer Town. It’s an Event Town. (You’d have thought Taylor Swift was was the warm-up act for the Second Coming.) That makes Cincinnati about as unique as every other burg with professional sports. Fans here might be more forgiving than elsewhere (maybe you’ve been conditioned not to expect much) but that forgiveness doesn’t translate to their wallets.

They’ll watch on TV, they’ll listen on the radio. They won’t go to games unless you give them a reason. They’re not bandwagoners. They’re frugal.

One reason Carl Lindner’s Reds regime didn’t succeed was because Mr. Cincinnati had the notion that the Reds were an heirloom and deserved to be treated as such. He was right about the heirloom part, not right about the way they should be treated. He once suggested that if fans wanted him to spend money on players, they needed to buy more tickets.

No. That’s cart-before-horse stuff. Lindner would never have applied that thinking to the businesses he ran. He made a product worth buying before he asked customers to pay for it. The Reds were no different.

Elly De La Cruz has made baseball sexy again. It didn’t take long, another indicator that fans still were eager to love the club and the game. They just needed a reason. The Reds became Must See, in a way not seen since 2010-13.

The answer to any Reds attendance question is always “performance.’’ Not tectonic national cultural shifts or soccer booms or Bengals success. Winning. Baseball town? Not the way it was 50 years ago. Even back then, Big Red attendance numbers were good, not great. Event town? Absolutely.

The 2000 team drew 2.57 million. It finished 10 games out, but that was Junior Griffey’s first season in town. The ‘03 team won 69 games. Its best player was Jose Guillen. It drew 2.36 mil. It was the first year of Pretty Good American Ball Park.

Baseball Town doesn’t need last rites. It never did, contrary to the opinion of some know-it-all writer. It needs success, and a little Run-DLC/Ken Griffey Jr. glitter. Pay no attention to that man behind the laptop.

Now, then. . .

SOMETHING I FORGOT TO MENTION YESTERDAY was something that made me say, Hmmmm. Ben Lively left a successful start in the 5th inning Sunday because he had heat cramps. Fair question, IMO:

How does this happen?

The way to avoid cramping on a warm day is to hydrate. Drink water. Get an IV of fluids. Do something. It’s not hard. Lively knew what the weather was and he no doubt knew what he needed to do to protect himself from dehydration.

As it was, Lively threw four innings and 57 pitches and left with a 3-1 lead. The Reds needed six — count ‘em — relievers to cover the rest. They lost to the Brewers, 4-3. It was a big deal, given the opponent.

It’s possible the Reds pitcher mainlined Kool-Aid pregame. But it doesn’t seem likely.

SORRY, BUT. . . BAD IDEA. Baseball scribe deluxe Jayson Stark is all for an Oldtimers Home Run Derby at the All Star Break. Writing in the Athletic:

Close your eyes and imagine this scene at next year’s All-Star weekend. The Futures Game has just wrapped up, but the goosebumps are only beginning.

It’s time for the Home Run Derby, but not one we’ve ever seen before. Get ready for the first (and hopefully annual) Legends Home Run Derby, featuring a lineup fit for a real-life Field of Dreams.

Jim Thome

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Ken Griffey Jr. … Albert Pujols … Jim Thome … David Ortiz … and, well, just fire up your baseball memory bank and dream on the rest of this cast of iconic characters.

Yeah, nothing quite projects forward-thinking, next-century vibes quite like old guys hitting BP home runs.

I was working in Dallas in 1986, when the NBA all-star weekend, or whatever they called it, included an OG stars game. What stuck with me that weekend was the sight of a pot-bellied Oscar Robertson playing basketball. If there’s anything less appealing than the current, bloated, three-hour HR Derby, it’s a bloated, three-hour HR Derby featuring 50- and 60-somethings.

If MLB wants to involve the likes of Griffey, stick him in the same contest as the current bashers. Give Junior some sort of head start, say 10 homers in the bank before he starts swinging. Beyond that, the thought of the good ol’ national passed time wheeling out OGs with their OG, warning-track power seems sorta desperate.

Is anybody dying to see Jim Thome swing again? Was anybody dying to see Jim Thome swing back then?

OTHER THAN THE TEXAS RANGERS — does anybody care about the Texas Rangers, even in Texas? — the most nondescript team in baseball is the LA Angels. Even with Shohei Ohtani, the best player of his generation, arguably any generation. Even with Mike Trout, 1A in the Best Player sweepstakes. I’m not sure how this is possible.

They play their home games in kind of a Disney-fied ballpark just off a freeway in the equally unremarkable town of Anaheim. Let’s go to an Angels game, kids! They have a waterfall!

They’ve made the playoffs once since 2013, they haven’t been to a World Series since 2002. Take away ‘02, they haven’t made a World Series in their entire existence, starting in 1961. That’s only 62 years.

They excel at spending money on players who don’t deserve it. See; Pujols, Albert. Also Josh Hamilton and Anthony Rendon.

With Trout and Ohtani together since 2018, the Angels don’t have a winning record.

Plus, they’re the Angels. Raise your hand if you’ve ever stayed up late to watch an entire Angels game.

They exist in the 2nd-largest market in the country, and they make news only with Ohtani trade speculation. And really, unless you’re a fan of a team interested in acquiring Ohtani, how much attention have you paid to that?

Name five Angels, win a bag of In-N-Out fries.

BECAUSE TV IS MY LIFE. . . I understand that the Justified revival is set in. . . Detroit? At least partly? Not sure how that works. I am sure of this: As much as I liked the original that ran 2010-15, I didn’t like its portrayal of Kentuckians generally, and the fact that lots of the “Kentucky’’ scenes were obviously filmed in California.

Hollywood tends to view anyone breathing south of Mason-Dixon to be inbred and illiterate. The characters in Justified were no exception. That pissed me off. So did the brown hills that back-dropped scenes supposedly picturing the coal towns of eastern K-Y.

The Ringer declares Justified “the greatest TV show of the 21st century thus far.’’ Um, no. But its revival should be as good as anything on now.

I LOVE THAT THE REDS SELL DOMESTIC BEER FOR 3 BUCKS ON TUESDAYS. That is all.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . A precious pop cupcake that came out just after my college girlfriend dumped me. I wore it out. It didn’t help.