Loading ...I’ve finally gotten around to reading “Fever Pitch” by Nick Hornby, who may be my favorite contemporary writer. It’s really nothing like the movie of the same name, as it’s about the sport called football by everyone outside North America.
Anyway, despite the subject being soccer, I can see why we had to have a movie here where baseball was substituted for the object of affection. There are some universal themes in there relating to the obsessive fandom we’re all engaged in.
Frankly, I’m frightened by how clearly several passages seem to be describing me. Like this one, from Hornby’s introduction, wherein he addresses his obsession with the football club Arsenal:
Fever Pitch is an attempt to gain some kind of angle on my obsession. Why has the relationship that began as a schoolboy crush endured for nearly a quarter of a century, longer than any other relationship I have made of my own free will? (I love my family dearly, but they were rather foisted on me….) And why has this affinity managed to survive my periodic feelings of indifference, sorrow and very real hatred?
Good questions. Why, indeed?
Okay, I just needed to get that off my chest. I’m admitting publicly that I have a problem, and I dare say most of you are in the same boat.
Use this thread to discuss that topic, and anything else you want, including tonight’s All-Star Game. We’ll make this an official Game Thread.
The Colin Firth film version was solid, but the Fallon version was almost unwatchable. I realize it’s for a mass audience, but the parts where they explain the “Curse” and other Red Sox myths were so incredibly contrived.
My obsession has survived moving away from Kentucky to Las Vegas 17 years ago. It has demanded that I have MLB audio and XM both to hear Marty and the Cowboy and Nuxy (RIP old lefthander, you’re finally home). I had to get Direct TV. Now I post on websites when I should be running my law firm. In younger days, I would tape the end of Marty’s broadcast to listen to it the next day, hoping the game would end before the tape ran out, avoiding the newspaper until I had finished the tape. Why? Precisely because the Reds and sports are timeless and constant, coming back every year.
To attempt to sum up my (our) obsession with this team in one blog post would be impossible, to unravel its mysteries would take an army of counselors. *call me* I think some of us are just hard wired to crave constancy, and if it weren’t the Reds, it would be something else. Not to sound like that bowl-cut dork Ken Burns, but I can only think of two things that nourish the mind and convey the complexity of the human experience so completely: music and baseball.
Needless to say, as an Illinoisian, DirecTV has been a blessing and a curse.
God forbid this team gets competitive, or we’re all doomed.
Baseball is living history, to paraphrase James Earl Jones in Field o Dreams.
The Reds are Cincinnati history alive and well. The Reds allow each of us to connect to the city and our families unlike anything else but possibly church, and a church is only if your family has stayed with one and has memebers buried there.
My grandma, born in 1912, tells stories of going to the games on streetcars, seeing Eppa Rixey pitch, and seeing a double header go 10 innings first game and 17 innings the second. My other grandma tells stories of “little” Bob Castellini doing neighborhood jobs and helping her with the yard.
My Dad kept baseball cards for me, mostly Reds team sets and a few others. He even has two original Crosley Field seats that he claims will be coming my way before he meets his maker. Johnny Bench autographed a ball for me in 1983 while ignoring all the other screaming fans clamoring for his attention just because he had been friends with my Mom some decade or more earlier (actually, Mom called over Ted Power and he dutifully went into the clubhouse and out came Mr. Bench).
Like many, I moved away from Cincinnati at a young age but kept family ties to the area and have always felt it to be home. Watching, rooting, and suffering for the Reds helps keep it that way forever, even for a mid 30’s beach lawyer in NC…
I remember working to get straight A’s on my report card so I could get free tickets from the Dayton Daily News to go see the Big Red Machine. Moved away, ignored baseball until a few years ago when my daughter discovered the Reds on TV at my parents’ house (they won every game the week we were there). She has way surpassed my love for the game — a few weeks ago her final report card arrived in the mail. When she started jumping and hollering about her “final E.R.A.” (she meant G.P.A.), I knew I had passed the torch…
It’s weird. I’m not as big of a baseball fan as I used to be, but I don’t love the Reds any less. In 1990, I was 9 years old, playing for the Cedar Rapids Little Reds CABA team, watching Cedar Rapids Reds minor league games and finally genuinely getting in to baseball. The Reds won a few games and they’ve been one of only two teams I’ve ever cared about in any sport ever since.
Sure, I’ve tried to like other teams. I’m supposed to be a Steelers fan, but I found myself cheering for (Cedar Rapids native) Kurt Warner in the Superbowl. I’ve tried to pick an AL league team to care about, I want to be a Jets fan because Shonn Greene is there, but it ain’t gonna happen.
Of course, I’m still a bigger Hawkeye football fan. And I may just make it to Columbus this year.
I was once pleasantly surprised to tune into the Reds on WLW in Cedar Rapids.
It is hard to explain an obsession like this. I’ve been a Reds fan since literally before I can remember. It all started around 1955.
I’ve had only one period of indifference, in college from 1969 thru 1973 (and so largely missed the emergence of the Big Red Machine). Within a couple of weeks of my graduation from college, I was a Reds fan again, and was once again obsessed by the 1973 NLCS, when I was in New York to experience the pain of watching the Reds lose to a mediocre Mets team.
How bad is the obsession ? Well I just watched CoCo pitch the top of the 7th inning, and my pulse went up and my hands got sweaty, in fear that he’d blow it for the NL. It would have ruined my nite if he had.
In last year’s All Star game, I got upset by Edinson Volquez blowing the 2 run NL lead.
Funny you mention that college phase, Pinson. I feel the same way about my college years, but what I really think happened is that I didn’t pay LIFE OR DEATH attention during the second half of 1991 and most of 1992. I guess I didn’t listen to the games regularly during April-May of any of 92-95, but I still have pretty good recall of all that time.
Yet in my memory, I was totally checked out for some period of time . . . which was really the dregs of the 91 season and the next year, until I started playing roto in 1993.
One thing I really didn’t remember – they won 90 games in 1992. I remember that as the Bip Roberts team.
Great job by Francisco Cordero…plus I thought the Reds uni on him looked pretty sharp. Our return to the more classic home jerseys was a very good move. Now if we just had a good team!
There is nothing like hanging onto every pitch, just begging for some good at bats. I started watching the Reds when Barry Larkin came aboard, funny thing is I found my love for the Reds before I even knew it was my dad’s team growing up, he was raised just across the river in Covington. I remember walking to games by myself around the age of 10 or so and buying a $5 cheap seat and by the second inning I would be sitting just a few rows back from the Reds Dugout. No one ever thought to question a wandering 10yr. old so I figured I would get as good as seat as possible, usually next to an older couple so that it looked as if I were with them at the game. I live in Indianapolis now and have to deal with an ungodly amount of Cubs fans which just drives me crazy and mainly because I grew up despising the Dodgers, Padres, and Giants, as soon as we revamped the divisions I had Cubs fans down my throat about being a Reds fan in the Central Division. I will always love my Redlegs and even try to convert a cubbie or two along the way.
One interesting thing is the mention of “free will.” My rooting for the Reds has nothing to do with free will. As I said I’ve been a fan since literally before I can remember, so for me they have the same status as family (parents and brothers and sisters, that is). I didn’t choose them, but I can’t disown them, they’re part of who I am.
In the movie City Slickers there’s a scene where a woman asks the guys why baseball means so much to them. These guys were of my generation, most of us rejected our parents’ values when we went to college. So one guy says, for years it was the only thing I could talk about with my father. That really hit me, for years it was the only thing I could talk about with my father.
He just turned 90 and we can talk about just about anything now. But we still talk about baseball, current and historical, the most. We both grew up in Connecticut, but he’s a lifelong Cardinal fan.
Part of our obsession is the thing about the child being the father to the man. There are emotional connections made in childhood that remain your entire life.
There’s a Bart Giamatti story that illustrates this.
I got to know him when I was an undergrad at Yale and he was a rising star in the faculty. He was the most eloquent person I ever met, warm and charismatic, with a passion for many things, including sports, especially baseball and his beloved Red Sox.
Like many intellectuals, he romanticized atheletes and the games they play, they were heroes to him. (It’s heartbreaking to me that he’s remembered as the man who banished Pete Rose from baseball, but I don’t want to get into that.)
When he became the President of Yale at an early age, he said that all he ever wanted to be President of was the American League. So when the NL needed a new President, they thought of him, he’d come into national prominance with his handling of labor strikes at Yale and had written beautiful essays about baseball.
Then comes the 1986 WS, his Red Sox against the NL’s Mets.
Of course the Sox hadn’t won a WS since 1918. Giamatti is asked who is he rooting for, the Red Sox or the Mets. He gives a long articulate reply about the “phases of life” etc. and says that at this point, as the President of the NL, he’s rooting for the Mets. I knew he was lying.
Anyway when the Red Sox blow Game 6 in extras with the 2 run lead and nobody on, Bart unravels. He starts chain smoking and is visibly nervous.
By the time the ball goes thru Buckner’s legs, he’s completely lost it, stomping
on his own cigarette butts.
His intelligence, position in life, etc. in no way affected his emotional connection to the Red Sox.
I have a strange relationship with the Reds and baseball.
I grew up outside Buffalo, NY so didn’t have a team near me and played baseball for years as a kid before I watched a pro game. My grandmother use to listen to Yanks and Mets games on the radio and she was my favorite adult.
I was a good little league player, making the all-star team, etc. I was a pitcher and started following Tom Seaver. I didn’t really follow the Mets I followed Seaver. Then one fateful night right after Seaver was traded to the Reds, I was grounded and started searching around on my AM radio for something to listen to. I happened to get the WLW broadcast of Seaver’s first start as a Red all the way in Western NY! They had such an amazing team so I started following the Reds. Seaver, Bench, Morgan, Griffey Sr, Norman and Hume were my favorite players. This continued as I was a good baseball player in high school making the varsity team by 9th grade and then playing in an adult league in 11th grade. At that point, I met my match and quite playing….I couldn’t hit those pitchers AT ALL. I went an entire summer (I was a pitcher), getting 1 hit.
Then I moved to Rochester, NY which also didn’t have a team and somewhat lost interest in baseball and the Reds. Surprise it was the mid 80s and the Reds stunk.
It wasn’t until about 89/90 when a coworker turned me on to Bill James and ask if I wanted to join a fantasy baseball league (before the internet) that I got interested again and as luck would have it the Reds were good and won a world series. I was hooked again and at this point I lived in the San Francisco and had 2 teams, the As and Giants to watch. But I think it’s been my interest in the analysis that has kept me interested in baseball. Baseball is the ONLY TV I watch and I’m busy enough with other interests (have been a radio DJ for 20 years, work full time, and bowl very competitively) that baseball is sort of my down time. I love reading about the history of baseball and its relationship with american history (history is another hobby).
Last year was the closest I’ve come to giving up the interest. The Giants, As, and Reds all were terrible and when the Reds traded Dunn I stopped paying attention. I think the only reason I’m back watching is because I enjoy watching young players progress and the Reds have a handful of players I am excited about, Votto, Cueto, Volquez, EE, Bruce and Bailey plus I had gone to a handful of Giants High A ball games last year and watched Pablo Sandoval and have been fascinated with his progression. So I watch the Giants for the same reason. Sandoval, Cain, and Lincecum. One of my bowling teammates being a HUGE Giants fan, having season tickets for many years, also helps.
I realize it’s just entertainment but unlike a lot of other entertainment it has a long history that is connected to history outside of baseball. It’s something I’ve played. Yes it’s all just a game but one where I enjoy the human achievement. It’s also not simple to understand/quantify/analyze which keeps my geek interest. Other things are just too simple and I get bored. Nascar and football for example. People are shocked when I tell them I haven’t watched a football game in 20 years and have NEVER watched cars drive around in a circle as a fast advertising medium. I just don’t care.
I also think one thing that has kept my interest and kept me a Reds fan during these dark inept days is that the Reds have THE BEST historian in baseball. Greg Rhodes had documented and researched Reds history like no other has done for another team. I’ve read most of his books.
It doesn’t make sense to me either. I don’t watch tv, I don’t watch Hollywood movies, I don’t listen to mainstream music, hell I don’t even believe in capitalism but somehow I’ve kept my interest in baseball
I’ll stop babbling now.
Great story about Giamatti, Pinson. There’s a heartbreaking moment in Sideways where Paul Giamatti is stealing money from his mom’s dresser drawer and looks at a picture of him and his (real-life) dad, who in the movie has also presumably passed. A nice touch.
Ken, thanks for that, in particular telling me about that scene in Sideways. I’ll watch it someday.
Bart loved the theater, that was close to the top of the list of his passions. I presume he liked quality movies too, and would be very proud of his son.
And BTW he liked me as an actor !