Cincinnati Reds broadcaster Joe Nuxhall died the other day. I had a lot of affection for Joe Nuxhall--I'm pretty sure his picture is in the dictionary next to "Avuncular". He always seemed like your incredibly mellow uncle that you might sit out back and have a beer with while you listened to the game on the radio. Except he was actually on the radio. He was very good at his job, and while you certainly heard murmurings about other Cincinnati baseball celebrities like Pete Rose and Johnny Bench being jerks, you never heard a bad thing about Joe Nuxhall.
But, despite the many hours I spent listening to his voice, I didn't really know Joe Nuxhall, and I think what really makes us sad about the death of a celebrity is not the loss of that person as much as the loss of a link to a time in our lives when that person was important to us.
For me, this was primarily the years 1986-1989, the height of my baseball fandom. I will try to steer clear of maudlin baseball nostalgia here--the simple fact is that my friends and I went to a lot of baseball games and watched or listened to the games we didn't attend because we lived in Cincinnati and there was simply nothing else to do. These were mostly college summers, when I was too young to go to bars and too old to go to high school parties, and it was cheaper to go to a Reds game and sit in the top 6 than it was to go to a movie. (True! $3.50 for the cheap seats! It was a bargain even in 1987!) So I followed the Reds kind of obsessively, and, this being before the internet, when I went back to college in Philadelphia I could sometimes tune in Marty Brenneman and Joe Nuxhall calling that all-important September series where the Giants would put the Reds away for good in my dorm room on WLW all the way from Cincinnati.
It was a weird, awkward time between adolescence and adulthood, and the Reds, brought a lot of enjoyment into those summers. So my thanks to Marty Brennaman, the late Joe Nuxhall, Chris Sabo, Ron "True Creature" Robinson, Barry Larkin, lots of Reds I can't remember (Like Sox Manager Terry Francona!) and whoever did that animation that ran on the Riverfront Stadium scoreboard where the bun-clad sausage slides into second and the ump says, "Yer...a hot dog?" The manager comes running from the dugout, screaming "Yer blind! It's a smoked sausage!" and eventually the runner, actually a Kahn's Big Red Smokie, is declared out, I suppose, by virtue of having been stuffed in the ump's mouth as "Mmmmm!" reverberated around the stadium.
