I guess we are showing our age here aren't we? :laugh:
I don't really care who knows my age, I kinda miss those days too. ;)
Printable View
Until recently, the only chance the Reds and Indians had a chance of playing was in Cooper stadium. Growing up in Columbus, I was a fan of the BRM but also pulled for the huge underdog in the Indians. I think most people don't view it as a rivalry or an either or proposition.
If Gomes does not return to the Reds, and for a minor league deal I don't blame him, I am hoping to see him in Cleveland.
Nobody ever complained about the unbalanced schedule in the 70's, 80's, and early 90's.
My two boys (15, 10) are fairly well known in the area for wearing Reds stuff all of the time...everyone knows they are brothers and my kids. (Small community)
Anyway, my oldest son decided he wanted to buy a Dodgers hat the other day and now wears it (even wore it to a dance the other night with a blue tie). I almost felt like dying. He says he wants to buy all of the MLB hats except the Cards and the Yanks. He hates those two teams and cannot understand why I hate the Dodgers. He even said, "they (Dodgers) aren't our rivals."
My wife who is a Cardinals fan also has commented at how much she hates seeing him wear Dodgers blue. Things certainly have changed.
The unbalanced schedule makes sense, but not when teamed with interleague play, especially with the number of interleague games. I am in LA and this means that I get to see the Reds once for a three game series, every year.
Unbalanced makes sense with a 3-2 ratio of games vs teams in your division and teams outside, but makes little sense, and is actually unfair, with a 3-1 ratio.
You would feel different if you were living in Columbus and had to deal with all the bandwagon Indians fans who never existed before 1995. If you are a diehard Reds fan living in Columbus, you quickly grow to hate the Indians. Columbus is actually closer to Cincinnati than it is to Cleveland (not by much, but a good 20 miles) but a lot of people try and act like this is an Indians town now. But this used to be a Reds town. Oh well, I guess we need to start winning again and all of that will take care of itself.
If Indians fans are giving you grief at this juncture, they are absolute Indians fans as the bandwagon fans ditched the Indians when Thome left and they stopped selling out the stadium.
I think what you are saying is there were more Reds' bandwagon fans in the 70's but the Tribe collected their own in the 90's. Otherwise I think it is split evenly.
It's possible that many baseball fans in columbus decided to become Indian fans after the 94 strike.While they held harsh feelings toward baseball they probably weren't aware that the Indians existed before the strike and decided not to hold the loss of half a season of baseball and the WS against a team that had nothing to do with any of that nonsense.Then again they're probably just bandwagon fans.
There were always a ton of Indians fans in Columbus - as Ohio State and the city itself attracts many Clevelanders. Decades of losing has the effect of driving many of those fans underground; success brings them back to the surface.
Getting the thread back on track,. here is a somewhat related question:
Reds down 5-3 to Anyteam USA, bottom 8, men on 1st and 2nd, 2 out, pitcher slot coming up.
Does anyone feel confident that they are scoring this inning? How about if the pitcher is a lefty?
I'd much rather see the Reds play every team in the NL the same number of times and skip interleague play. For one thing that means a kid gets to see the greatest players in the game more often. Those players aren't necessarily in your own division, even though right now the greatest player in the game probably is in ours. There's nothing that made me a lifelong baseball fan any more than seeing Mays and Clemente as a kid. If those guys were now on teams not in our division, my chance to see them would be very greatly reduced. And watching them on TV is not a substitute.