A Quick, Bitter Ending

By Hal McCoy The Cincinnati Reds are now a band of not-so-merry men. Their 2025 post-season came to a quick and crashing conclusion Wednesday night in Chavez Ravine, just two games into it. The Los Angeles Dodgers ended Cincinnati’s up-and-down season on a downer, another beatdown, 8-4. After a long, drawn-out scratch and scramble during […]

LA Blasts Reds With 5 Homers

By Hal McCoy Nobody living between Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon was shocked when Shohei Ohtani ripped Hunter Greene’s fourth pitch of the game into the left field seats. It was a portend of things to come, a preview. The Los Angeles Dodgers hit five home runs Tueseay night in Dodger Stadium, tying the franchise […]

Some Pre-Playoffs Observations

By Hal McCoy UNSOLICITED OBSERVATIONS from The Man Cave, chair reclined, cigar in hand, ready for baseball’s post-season. As Willie Stargell once said, “They don’t say, ‘Work ball.’ They say, ‘Play ball.’” —LOOK OUT, LA: The Cincinnati Reds stagger into Los Angeles carrying cement blocks, the barely-made-it third wild card team matched against the defending […]

The Reds Are IN!!!

By Hal McCoy Never has a baseball team celebrated after a loss the way the Cincinnati Reds celebrated Sunday afternoon. They lost, but they won. They lost their last regular season game, 4-2, to the Milwaukee Brewers, but the Miami Marlins shut out the New York Mets, 4-0. And that plopped the Reds into the […]

ONE More To Go…

By Hal McCoy For the Cincinnati Reds, it’s The Final Countdown. After 161 games, the hopes and dreams for a playoff berth rests on game 162, the final game of the regular season. If the Reds win Sunday afternoon’s game against the Milwaukee Brewers, they are in, owners of the third and final wild card […]

Some Late-Week Observations

By Hal McCoy UNSOLICITED OBSERVATIONS from The Man Cave and while it’s only for the last spot in the National League playoffs (the sixth spot), the last-week battle between the Mets, Reds and Diamondbacks is nerve-wracking and invigorating. —ABS (A BAD SYSTEM): Forever and ever I have been adamantly opposed to the Automated Balls & […]

Extra-Inning Woes For Reds

By Hal McCoy When it comes to playing extra-inning games, the Cincinnati Reds are as helpless as a man stranded in the desert without water. In one of the biggest and most important games of the fast-fading season, the lowly Pittsburgh Pirates handed the Reds a 4-3 gut-grabber in 11 innings Wednesday night. With a […]

A Devastating Loss

By Hal McCoy There was no good news, bad news for the Cincinnati Reds Tuesday night. It was bad news and worse news. The bad news was that the Reds lost to the last-place Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-2. The worse news was that the New York Mets came from 6-1 behind the Chicago Cubs and rolled […]

The Great 8 – Pitchers

By Hal McCoy The team hotel in Philadelphia was behind a barbed-wire fenced-in parking lot in old Veterans Stadium. To walk from the park to the hotel required a three-block foot trip to circumvent the parking lot. As I left the stadium one night, a security guard said, “Walk straight back in the parking lot […]