Sad day for Reds Fans- Joe has Rounded 3rd and headed home!Joe passed away overnight

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by BuckWoody

I didn't figure it would be long before Jim Borgman would have a tribute. Nicely done.

http://borgman.enquirer.com/img/dail...borgman600.jpg

---

Ok.....now I'm a crying mess.

Like everybody I can remember those late night west coast games and sneaking a tranisitor radio into the bedroom.

All time favorite Joe story is the interview with Luise Quinonis (sp?). To this day it cracks my father and I up.

We're going to a wedding tonight, but afterwards I think we'll drive downtown and go past the stadium to see it darkened except the "rounding third....." and Joes statute and say good-bye.

Nice video from ESPN

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3113499

Daugherty:




Joe Nuxhall

He was the only person I've ever known about whom a bad word was never spoken. If you can live your entire life and have that be your epitaph, you've led quite a life. We've lost someone essential to who we are around here, someone who represented what we like to think is our finest nature. We're friendly, if guarded if we don't know you. We're approachable. If you need us, we're there.

Mostly, we're regular. We're incapable of pretense. Who you see is who you get and once we love you, we don't leave. Joe never left. He never will, of course.

On the radio, where most of us knew him, Joe was summer. He sounded like baseball: Lolling, drowsy, taking his own sweet time. Balls went to right-left-center. Latin names could be mangled. Calls on close plays could take days and really, so what? You didn't listen to Joe for perfection. Or, maybe you did. Perfection assumes different forms.

The best ambassador we've ever known has passed. He'll be missed.

That's the best way to say it .... "Joe was summer".

What tough, sad news to try to comprehend all day at work. I still don't know what to say, but have to say something.

At least he's in no more suffering or no more pain - simply eternal spring training for the Old Left Hander.

A big part of my youth (I'm now 34) is gone.

Head on home, Joe. Head on home, buddy.

Very, very, very sad news. I feel like I just lost my best friend. RIP Joe, you will be dearly missed. Thanks for everything you did for Reds baseball.

When he entered the hospital this last time I was worried. Growing up, he was the Reds on radio to me, listening to him and Al Michaels. It will not be the same for me. Thanks for the memories Joe.

My heartfelt prayers go out to the Nuxhall family.

I hope this organization does something really special to honor Joe this next season.

I thought of another story about Nuxhall. I spent the summer working in Arizona 2 years ago. The apartment we lived at didn't have internet but we could check email and do a little web surfing at a computer over in the main building of the apartment complex. So I had a subscription to the radio streams on MLB.com but I rarely ever listened because it was inconvenient to go over and spend a long time over at computers, not to mention the game times were always 3 hrs earlier. But whenever Joe came back to do a series with Marty I always made sure to hurry home from work so I could go listen to a few innings of the game.

Rarely in life do you get the opportunity to take something for granted, and then after realizing you took it for granted get the chance to have it back again. I think most everyone probably took Marty and Joe for granted and assumed they would be doing games forever. Then, Joe retired in 2004 and we realized just how great it really was to listen to him calling a game, even if he wasn't the smoothest. I usually listened to the games he came back to do. There's just something special about listening to the game on the radio, something that can't be matched in any other sport than baseball.

a melancholy day. My daughter had surgery on her hip this morning, come home and find out Joe had passed.

Too bad the news has to be dominated by someone like Bonds ona day when a true original with a heart of gold has left us.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by vaticanplum

Haven't read through the thread yet, but wanted to say that I heard this on the radio AS I WAS DRIVING PAST the ballpark this morning. Very weird.

I want to put flowers at his statue at the ballpark this afternoon. Is that a nice gesture or does it cross the line into Crazyfan?

---

If you haven't done it, do it - put some down for those of us who are cannot be there, please.

One thing that I will always carry with me is the memory of Joe interviewing guys half his age--young men who I feel certain did and perhaps still do think awfully highly of themselves--and completely disarming them. Not through intimidation or grousing, but through a nonpareil charm. By the end of the interview, this hot young star was addressing him as "sir" or for the hometown boys, "Nuxie." Everything about Joe Nuxhall--everything--was unaffected. There was simply no artifice there--that "aw shucks" attitude? Not false modesty; the real thing.

In many ways, Joe connected me to a city towards which I've long held an ambivalent and sometimes hostile attitude. Cincinnati was my home for the first eighteen years of my life and as such was formative--the place I grew up with and to some extent against. But Joe represented in my mind everything great about the place that I still call home. Avuncular, kind, midwestern. Decent. Good god what a decent man. His voice connected so many important moments in my life, it's almost impossible for me to separate his words and inflections from all of those summer days and nights constitutive of my family, loves, myself. As elemental in many ways as the crickets or bullfrogs I'd hear as the broadcast came to an end and I turned off the radio. Joe could be absolutely blitzed on air, but like a character from Hemingway, there was no shaking his dignity; his quiet center held up despite the occasional beer hiccups or on-air burps.

One of the last times I heard Joe on the radio was when I listened to a broadcast of a nighttime Spring Training game, seven or eight years ago, I guess. I was on my way up I-75 to pick up my wife and daughter who were staying at a friend's place in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit. It was cold as hell--just a brutal March cold snap. Because it was night I was able to hear the game up through Toledo and into Michigan, and just as my car hit the Ambassador Bridge, I heard Joe call one of his barking, "getup" home run calls (Chris Stynes, maybe?). It was the last call I remember hearing, as I crossed into Canada, and the signal broke up for good.

Quote:

---

I've been putting off coming here because of this.

---

I haven't been around lately, but this is the first place I thought of. I can't think of a better place to mourn someone who meant so much, to so many. While I don't know anyone here, I still feel like I'm among friends. It's a good place to be.

From Joe's Final Sign-off: Long...

Marty (Obviously breaking up): "We'll have a hard time getting through this..."

Joe (Sounding cheerful): "Oh, we'll make it..."

Thank you Joe, for everything. Even the words that you left in the past, might hopefully make us all feel better in the present. "Oh, we'll make it...", but without you, it won't be the same. You will be missed Joe. Unlike Matt Holliday, make sure you touch home. :)

Godspeed.

Something I put together for today's show.....

I had trouble getting through it enough to finish it

I think I'm cool now... :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Matt700wlw

Something I put together for today's show.....

---

Very nice... thanks for posting it. Its hard to save some of the sound files found around the web.

sitting here, thinking I maybe should be getting fired up for "the Game" - or something else -, just crying my freaking eyes out instead..... God Bless you Joe Nuxhall.