Before the Machine. Mark J. Schmetzer

      To Dad:

      I still feel now the anticipation I felt then when seeing in the distance the lights of Crosley Field when you took us to games. Thanks for getting me started in sports–and for knowing the usher who could upgrade our seats.

      For my wife, Sharon,

      whose 1960 Pirates gave the Reds hope, and for our daughter, Kalli, who still dreams of a championship team all her own.

      table of contents

      Foreword by Greg Rhodes

      Introduction

      Acknowledgments

      Bibliography

      About the Author

      foreword

      Fifty years have passed, and I still remember where I was September 26, 1961—in the driveway of our house in Richmond, Indiana, in our 1955 Buick, leaning on the horn with full force. The Cincinnati Reds had just clinched the 1961 National League pennant.

      Up and down our usually quiet suburban street, the neighbors were out celebrating this most unexpected triumph. My sister stood in our front yard and banged pan lids together. Other car horns joined in the serenade.

      Maybe our little celebration was out of the ordinary, but I doubt it. I suspect such jubilation was repeated throughout Reds country—Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and nowhere more enthusiastically than in the heart of Cincinnati itself, at Fountain Square, the symbolic center of the city. Thousands of fans spontaneously descended on the Square, where they nearly mobbed the team bus carrying the Reds, who had just returned from winning an afternoon game in Chicago.

      The Cincinnati victory, combined with the Los Angeles loss in Pittsburgh around 9 p.m. that evening, made it official: the Reds had won the pennant and would go to the World Series for the first time in twenty-one years.

      You’ll find all the details from that evening, as well as the rest of that season in this long-overdue tribute to that 1961 team. And more. Mark Schmetzer has captured the mood of the city and Reds fans in this most unlikely of seasons, bring the city of the early 1960s to life. He evokes the experiences we fans recall so well—Waite Hoyt’s play-by-play, Ed Kennedy and Frank McCormick on the TV broadcasts, the irrepressible Ruth Lyons, the diva of Cincinnati TV in 1961, as she celebrated and promoted the Reds throughout the season.

      I have known Mark for many years, but didn’t realize until he told me about this book that we shared such fondness for those “Ragamuffin” Reds. Robinson, Pinson, Coleman, Jay, O’Toole, Purkey, and, of course, Hutch. The names come flooding back. The memories are still fresh.

      Mark traces the arc of the season, the ups and downs of the early months, followed by a push to the lead in early June. But the Dodgers kept it close, and every Reds-Dodgers game seemed pivotal. And those night games from the West Coast? Reds fans lost a lot of sleep that season, and many parents found a transistor radio tucked beneath their kids’ pillows the morning after those games.

      In Before the Machine, we also get a look at the front office and the work of Bill DeWitt, who had just assumed control of the Reds after the death of long-time owner Powel Crosley Jr. in March 1961. The series of moves DeWitt made prior to and during the 1961 season—trading