...Cincinnati soon found out

Sparky Anderson was as much a storyteller as he was a baseball manager. Games come and go. Wins and losses are forgotten. But the stories endure.

And that is why Sparky and Casey Stengel are the two managers most prevalent in the memories of fans. They had substance and a pleasantly fractured style that made us want more of them. But we’ve gotten all we’re going to get of Sparky. He died Thursday of complications with dementia shortly after being placed in hospice care at his long-time home in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

He won 2,194 games and three World Series with the Cincinnati Reds (1975, 1976) and Detroit Tigers (1984). And he won over countless people to the game he loved with a passion. There was a reason behind much of what many labeled simply as Sparky being Sparky. Using his gift of gab to take the pressure off his players exemplified that approach.

Anderson was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame five years later, joining many of the players who had been instrumental in racking up all those wins. And he made clear in his induction speech how much his players had meant to him.

"Let me tell you this, and get it straight, and I hope every manager that follows me will listen very carefully: players earn this, by their skills," he said. "Managers come here, as I did, on their backs, for what they did for me. I never believed different, I will never believe different, and I think that's what made my career so lucky."

When Anderson landed in Cincinnati on Oct. 9, 1969 when I was just a kid, for his introductory press conference, he was greeted by a Cincinnati Enquirer headline that shouted the thought on everyone's mind: "Sparky Who?" No one had ever heard of this guy.

Cincinnati soon found out. The Reds went 102-60 in Anderson's first year, making the playoffs for the first time since 1961. They fell to the Baltimore Orioles in five games in the World Series, but the bar had been raised on the banks of the Ohio River (I cried when we lost by the way). After a brief fall back to 79-83 in 1971, the Reds reeled off five consecutive seasons in which they won at least 95 games.

For years as a young boy I watched from Lexington, Kentucky as Sparky built the ‘Big Red Machine.’ I loved watching him and the Reds as they set the bar higher than even the experts predicted they could as the 'team of the decade.'
You will be missed...and don't step on the chalk line as you enter the gate.

p.s. You even turned me into a Detroit fan years later….