The joy of baseball in the background

The comfort food of sports

Cincinnati’s first few games have had it all. Comebacks and blown leads. Clutch homers and ill-timed baserunning blunders. Ups and downs, you know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you’s. Sure, I’ve enjoyed the heroics of Christian Encarnacion-Strand and Will Benson and Spencer Steer and Alexis Diaz (recently, anyway). Jonathan India’s strong play has put a smile on my face. I like the fact that the Reds came out of the gate by winning three of four and on pace to win 122 games.

But that’s not my favorite thing about the 2024 season so far. Not by a long shot.

No, what I like the most is just that we’re surrounded by the national pastime once again. It’s like the comfort food of sports.

After all these years of mostly bad baseball, I just don’t get worked up about the day-to-day results, the wins and the losses, any longer. I mean, all things being equal, I’d prefer the Reds win. It’s more fun to watch when the good guys end up on the smilin’ side of the scoreboard, and fewer people yell at me on twitter when things are going well.

But either way, the game is on the television. It’s on the radio when I’m in the car. It’s in my ears when I’m out for a walk around the neighborhood. It’s always there.

For as long as I can remember, baseball has been there. It’s always in the background. As a kid, it wasn’t on the television often, and when it was, we were glued to the screen. But it always seemed to be on the radio, Marty and Joe. having fun as we were doing other things, driving, yard work, playing wiffleball. As long as I live, I’ll never forget being a teenager and helping my father rebuild the back porch on the house he was remodeling. I listened excitedly as the Reds scored 14 runs on 16 hits in the very first inning against the Houston Astros. That is burned into my memory, as is the fact that it was a blazing hot Thursday afternoon.

Nowadays, every game is televised, so it’s always on at our house (unless we’re blacked out, which is a different conversation for another time). Even if we’re watching something else — like Monday night when we witnessed Caitlin Clark’s magic in the Elite 8 — the Reds are on a second screen. Though I’m sick of my phone most of the time, baseball is actually the perfect sport for this era where people are glued to their devices. You don’t have to pay attention to every moment. Your attention can drift. Your eyes will snap back to the screen when John Sadak starts getting excited.

Baseball is the ultimate “comfort food” of sports. Win or lose, I love that it is the background noise for my entire life. And I guess it’ll always be that way, despite everything else that is constantly changing around us.

That is comforting, isn’t it?

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This week at Cincinnati Magazine: Here’s What We Have Learned About the Reds So Far

Baseball is back, and the first weekend of games in Cincinnati were a rollercoaster affair, filled with comebacks and blown leads and unlikely stars. The hometown nine won two out of three games against Washington before winning the series opener in Philly; if the Reds maintain that pace all season long, they’ll finish with a record of 122-40. That’s even better than the 95-win campaign I predicted last week. I’ll take it.

The baseball season is a long one so we shouldn’t draw any grand conclusions based on three or four games in March. On the other hand, it’s a good opportunity to assess what we learned over the first weekend of games, and what we still don’t know.

Is Frankie Montas going to be better than advertised? Montas, acquired over the winter on a one-year/$14 million contract (with a mutual option for another year), was one of the best pitchers in the American League back in 2019, when he went 13-9 with a 3.37 ERA for Oakland, finishing sixth in Cy Young balloting. Since then, he’s experienced a mix of ineffectiveness and injury (Montas appeared in only one game last year thanks to a shoulder injury). Read the rest of this week’s Reds column over at Cincinnati Magazine.

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What’s Chad Watching?

I watched the original Road House last week, since there is now a remake featuring Jake Gyllenhaal available on Amazon Prime. The new version bears very little relation to the original, other than the name of the main character (Dalton) and the fact that there is an actual road house involved. Gyllenhaal is always interesting and I guess it’s fun to watch him beat up wave after wave of bad guys, but I’m not sure I’d go out of my way to see this one. Watch the Patrick Swayze version instead.

The newest installment in the Ghostbusters franchise is Frozen Empire, in theaters now. It’s fine, I guess. There are a few laughs and a few desperate call backs designed to appeal to those of us who owned the VHS edition and watched the original incessantly. (I think that and The Legends of the Fall were the only two movies we owned on VHS. We watched Ghostbusters a lot.)

Frozen Empire is mostly completely forgettable, though. The previous film in the series, Afterlife, was superior in pretty much every way. My biggest gripe is that there are evidently, like, 15 Ghostbusters running around with proton packs now. Do we need that many? I mean, the Spengler character is pretty good, and everyone loves Paul Rudd. But I dunno…it was too crowded.

Macao was a movie. It starred two of my faves, Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum. I like these old movies that are supposedly set in exotic locales. And I’ll almost certainly never watch this one again.