I was sad to hear the news today that we’re about to enter the final year of the Marty Brennaman era in Cincinnati, an era that has stretched from 1974 to 2019. It’s one of those things where you’ve just become accustomed to summer nights with a voice telling stories that can be mundane or legendary. More on that later.
As for the retirement, Marty, a Baseball Hall of Famer, is 76 and says this is it:
Brennaman is fully retiring. He says he will broadcast no games in 2020.
“It’ll be tough,” he said. “Today’s been tough. “I don’t think I’ll fell the full impact until a year from now when everybody’s packing up for spring training. Nobody loves spring training more than me.”
Brennaman wanted to delay the announcement until the final game of the season, so he could avoid a farewell tour. But the Reds talked him out of it.
“I’m honored,” he said. “But I’m also uncomfortable with it.”
What a run it was. 28 years with the legendary Joe Nuxhall. There was the Hank Aaron game when Hammerin’ tied Babe Ruth. There were Final Fours. There were so many stories, including this one that I didn’t know about and one that hasn’t really found much coverage on the Internet. It’s a story about how the Reds in the mid-80s were terrible and they wanted to put bodies in the seats so they gave college kids discounted tickets. It turned into wild nights at Riverfront and some college kid threw a massive dildo at Reds right fielder Dave Parker.
I’ll let Marty tell the story in this 2014 video:
Here’s Tom Browning’s memory of the incident from his 2006 book Tales from the Reds Dugout with Dann Stupp:
Via Tom Browning bookNow we get one more season to fish out stories like this from Marty. One more run for the Reds in a division where they’ve finished 5th the last four seasons. I’m telling you, there’s nothing like those hot nights in the middle of the summer when the Reds are getting their heads beat in when Marty can just sit back and tell stories. Inning after inning. Sometimes you forget the game is going on because Marty just keeps going with a classic.
I’m talking one of those nights where you sit on the patio sucking down beer after beer and think back to when you were young and the Internet didn’t exist and Marty was your only path out of your small town. Marty would be in New York acting like he owned the place, a city you’d never been to and one that seemed like a foreign land. Or those nights when you’d fall asleep with the Reds on the radio. Or the nights when the Reds were in San Francisco — seemed like they played out there about every two weeks — and you’d catch one inning before falling asleep in small town Ohio.
Time moves on and now Marty has to figure out what he’s going to do with it. Something tells me he’s going to need a media outlet. Maybe a weekly hit on 700 WLW and holding court at spring training. By the way, can we please get the Reds back to Spring Training in Cincinnati and let Marty just walk around the ballpark acting like he owns the place. Would that be too much to ask?
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