Our final season

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Like many boys growing up in Cincinnati in the 1970s, I played on a community Knothole baseball team. This, of course, was long before the scourge of modern-day travel teams. Our opponents were neighborhood teams from nearby towns. They were friendly rivals, but most of us were destined to attend Princeton High School together.

Me, I was a typical Little League second baseman, decent glove but with an arm unsuited for the left side of the infield. Like most teams, the best players on TD Enterprises were our pitcher, catcher, shortstop and left fielder. Our first baseman had a good bat, too, as best I can remember.

Back row, third from the left. There was at least one team in Cincinnati better than us in the summer of ’75.

My role model, no surprise, was Joe Morgan, the second baseman for another Cincinnati-area team. But I was an average hitter at best – no Morgan at the plate. My fatal weakness was dropping my right elbow. Little Joe addressed that problem with his famous flapping. That tactic didn’t work out for me, although I was a decent hitter in whiffle ball.

My mother, who never missed a game, helped me hit as best she could. She brought a cowbell to our games and shook it when she saw my elbow begin to drop. Many of my teammates continued to play ball in high school. Facing the reality of my mediocrity, I chose not to.

Though I moved away to Ann Arbor after college at the University of Kentucky, my mom remained a devout Reds fan. Not only did she watch every television broadcast, she came up with her own scoring system, recording each game on a blank sheet of typing paper, as it was called then.

I moved back to the Cincinnati area in 2004 and witnessed first-hand my mother’s ongoing devotion to following the Reds. Each year after that, I made her a personalized, spiral-bound scorebook, designed to last all year starting with Opening Day. By October, every page, except the rarely used postseason section, would be filled.

The night Jay Bruce clinched the 2010 division championship with his dramatic walk off homer, I was at Great American Ball Park, tenth row over the Reds dugout. Like most, I hung around as the victorious players and coaches returned to the field to share the joyous occasion with their fans. When I finally left the stadium, instead of going to my apartment, I stopped in at my childhood home nearby to see my mom.

Sticky from the humid Ohio Valley September night, I hurried through the front door. There was my excited, happy mother. She, of course, had been watching and keeping score. The two of us shared a hug. After all, it had been 15 long seasons since the Reds had won the division. Celebrating with her remains as vivid a part of my memory of that evening as my recollection of Bruce’s towering blast.

Helen Mancuso (2012), Reds fan

The last Reds game we attended in person was during the ill-fated Bryan Price era. By then, a wooden cane aided my mom’s walking. Her father had made that cane for himself, 50 years earlier. It was hard for her to manage, especially the parking lot, but she was determined to make it.

For several more years after that, my mother watched every Reds game to the end, even the late ones on the West Coast. My mom continued to keep score until she could no longer remember how. By that time she had moved from her home of 60 years to live with me. We kept on watching games together until she couldn’t retain an interest in it. In anything, really.

Last summer we moved to central Kentucky where she lived first, in a memory care unit and then in a skilled nursing home. This spring, a mention to her of the Reds and Opening Day drew a heartbreaking stare. The aging curve comes for all of us.

That’s the meaning of “season” that’s been foremost on my mind the past few years. Not the annual ebb and flow of baseball or other sports. Nor the seasons of changing weather.

Instead, what has mattered most to me were the seasons that signify the stages of our lives. Whether you prefer to credit King Solomon or David Crosby, most of us are familiar with this: “For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.”

But as we all experience, unlike sports and weather seasons, human mortality travels from birth to death with no annual promise of renewal. No offseason to rebuild and start over. No trades to make or free agents to sign. No fresh prospects to call up. Many of us move from stages of wellness to illness. In the last few months of my mother’s life – what I think of as our final season together – her leaves had fallen, with no prospect for growing back. Her body in pain and failing; her mind tormented with confusion.

A week ago, Easter Sunday, my loving, bell-ringing mother passed away at the age of 96.

And here I sit writing about it. I can’t say I expected to. But as I process the grief, it feels important to let you know what a great Reds fan my mother was and how baseball and following the team had been important to our relationship. There is nothing unique about that. But I’m lucky to co-own a sports blog where I can say it.

Speaking of this place, Reds Content Plus, next week marks our fifth anniversary. Matt Wilkes and I founded RC+ to offer clear-eyed analysis of the Reds (as best possible for fans) using the mountain of new data that’s available.

We haven’t posted much lately. Just twice since last May. Why?

Fifteen years. That’s how long both of us have written about the Reds. (My mother printed out every page I wrote, because of course she did.) Matt and I didn’t plan it, but it turned out that the “stages of our lives” meaning of seasons surpassed in importance the “ooh, it’s Opening Day” meaning of seasons at the same time. Part of that is the continued neglect and mismanagement of the club by ownership. The resulting serial failure has worn down our interest. Fifteen years is a long time.

So, here I am, writing about real loss instead of those piles of game losses. It’s too early to say if my mom’s passing will refresh my enthusiasm for writing about the Reds. I do hope to channel grieving in a positive direction as it becomes part of me. If you made it here to the end of this post, thanks for sticking with it and indulging me.