It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

2015… man oh man… it truly was the best of times and the worst of times. Not just for the sports world that circled around Cincinnati, but also in my personal life.

I realize I didn’t post in 2015… it was pretty crazy. Having moved back to Ohio in the fall of 2014, I was still attempting to put roots down back at home and felt reinvigorated to make new memories vs dwelling on the old ones. So i lost my focus for the blog. I switched jobs 3 times from late 2014 through early 2016, so I was putting the ax to the grind. Each opportunity brought new challenges, some of them were the best of times, and then there were also the worst of times that saw the first two opportunities come to a close. My current role as the Director of Communications at my local church, Mount Carmel Christian Church on the east side of Cincinnati just a few minutes from my home has been an incredible opportunity and has helped me to refocus and get back into a grove of telling captivating stories that hopefully share their roots with many of you.

2015 saw the purchase of our first home, the welcoming of our 3rd child Asher, the MLB All Star game, and an 8-0 start for the Bengals. These were the best of times.It also saw the complete collapse and fire sell of a team that had been a playoff contendor for five straight years in the Reds, and an equally brutal, but much more sudden collapse of a team who was ushered out of the playoffs for the 5th straight wildcard weekend in a row for the Bengals. These were the worst of times.

Below are the pictures to capture these moment:

1 – Aspen and I went on a daddy daughter date to a day game where were treated to some nice seats that came with her Red Heads memberships. The Reds beat the Marlins and we got to see Michael Lorenzen pitch who became one of our 1st half favorites to follow.

2 – Aspen and I attended a night game, this was us during the 7th inning stretch where we sang Take Me Out to the Ballgame together, which became her favorite song that summer. The Reds also won, and by the 3rd inning we were able to sneak down into the 11th row seats on the 1st base line and she provided ample entertainment for everyone around her 🙂

3 – the Whole family got to attend a game for “Bark in the Park” night against my wife’s team, the New York Mets. This was Asher’s first game, and one of the joys of taking little kids to Bark in the Park night is watching them go up to all of the friendly dogs and say hello. They were so excited! I was just happy knowing that my kids wouldn’t be the most annoying aspect of the night since there were plenty of Dogs that had little to no respect for the game and it’s traditions 🙂

4 – My dad and I took in all of the spectacle of the All Star game, it was a doozy, especially getting the watch Todd Frazier win the Home Run Derby in walkoff fashion in front of his home crowd. The electric nature of the crowd was as if we had just won the world series! Definitely a once in a lifetime moment, and I was ecstatic to share it with a great man after several seasons apart.

5 – My dad also purchased a Half Season home game package for the Bengals that got us tickets to the Chargers, Chiefs, Browns and Steelers home games. We mopped the floor with the first three, with the Browns game being a rather fun Thursday night game (overcoming the prime time curse), but the last two games were both brutal loses to the Steelers with the first one being a huge scare with QB Andy Dalton breaking his thumb which ended up being a season ending injury, and the 2nd (Picture #6) was a heart breaking playoff loss that for the most part was a frustrating 58 minutes followed by the wildest 2 minutes of my life…

When AJ Green caught what should have been the game winning TD with a minute forty something left on the clock, in a game that had seen some incredible hard hits and very intense action both on the field and in the stands, the roof blew off the building. 60,000 plus let out two decades worth of frustration as we felt the lack of playoff victories finally coming to a close. Who knew that two minutes later it would all slip away due to some of the most ridiculous on field and off field antics, poor control of both teams and refereeing that I have ever seen that setup the Steelers for a chip shot FG to win the game. It was a long, rainy, walk across the bridge back to KY where we parked our call. Just thinking about the season and how it played out, it just ripped your insides out. The reds had done it to us, but let’s be honest, we all saw it coming, and it was a long, drawn out process over a period of months that left you devastated, but at least it just seemed like business… The Bengals game was sudden and traumatic, and it felt personal. The time invested in the team, sacrificed from family time, would never be recaptured. All of those positive feelings I felt sitting with my dad at the Home Run Derby celebrating what felt like a personal win, were strangely inverted at that moment at Paul Brown Stadium where the exact opposite feelings poured out of us, trying to hide our embarrassment and shame in that brutal of a loss. What can you say… That’s just sports.

2016 will hopefully bring new memories, unfortunately most of them will be in front of a TV and not live in stadium until we can recover our faith in the teams in order to shell out the money to enjoy them live, but it helps me put into perspective the gamble of falling in love with a sports team, and how little of a gamble it is to fall in love with my family. My favorite moments of this year weren’t when my team won, it was when I was with them, win or lose. So, if nothing else, Thank you Bengals and Reds for giving me a platform to share special time with the ones I love, and for that, you’ll always be there for me, and I’ll always be there for you. Looking forward to this coming year!

Brainwashing your Kids Bengals

If you’re a parent, you probably have Netflix. When you first signed up, it was nice to have access to some great movies and TV shows at your fingertips. By now, your digging through suggestions for Barney, Teletubbies, and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic… (kill me Lord) before you can find the shows YOU actually want to watch (IF you even get a chance to watch something, which means it’s well after 10pm and you’re likely falling asleep halfway through…)

Anyway… Netflix has helped me in one way. I have fine tuned Aspen and Joseph’s viewing experience to focus on striped animals… Whether it is Daniel Tiger, Tigger, heck, I’ll post Frosted Flakes commercials on repeat if I have to, just as long as when they see Orange with Black stripes, they get all warm and fuzzy inside. So far, so good! Still working on getting Aspen to stop celebrating opponent’s touchdowns, but all in good time.

Growing up Bengals

My family moved to Cincinnati from the west coast in 1985. We had only been in the San Francisco Bay area for a little over a year and a half, and that was still close enough to the 1981 Super Bowl loss to the 49ers to sway our alliances. My dad having grown up in Indiana, was a Bears fan, and from what I remember, his dad was a Packers fan, but my dad took to the Bengals quite well. His company had season tickets, and by the time I was an appropriate age to go to a game (I was 10 in 1992) The Bengals had fallen into an abysmal state.

The 1989 Bengals Super Bowl was a wonderful first memory for me… and no, it had nothing to do with football, as I don’t believe I watched a second of the game as a 7 year old. We had gone to one of my parents friend’s house, and they had a Nintendo Entertainment System, and it was the first time I had ever seen Super Mario Brothers. I played that little plumber till his overalls fell off. I was hooked. By Easter 4 months later I was the proud owner one myself after I swindled my sister out of her birthday money (I repented later… much later.)

Anyway, back t the season tickets… My dad’s company would give them away to sweeten a business deal, but by ’92, you were essentially insulting your business partners to hand them a wad of Bengals tickets. Being the hero that my dad is, and not wanting anything to ever go to waste, he would frequently put in requests for the tickets and take me to a game.

I remember seeing some pretty great games, my favorite though was a game against the Steelers. The Steelers would regularly sweep us without a problem, but one this fateful day, we were playing them pretty tough. It was getting late in the 4th quarter and we found ourselves down by 5. The offense had us just outside of the red zone and the down marker had a big 4 on it. The coach was wondering what to do. The gamble would be to go for the long TD and see if we could get the win, but winning wasn’t really the Bengals style, so Doug Pelfrey came out onto the field to kick the field goal. Nailed it! Unfortunately, that still put us down by 2 with under a minute left. As a young fan, not really sure of how football worked outside of touchdowns and field goals, I was pretty sure that the time game was over.

The kickoff team lined up, looking a bit heavy to one side, and that is when I witnessed my first onside kick! Pelfrey hit the ball just right and put it into the pocket where the Bengals could get it in good field position. The clock was winding down, not just about under 10 seconds. The Bengals were able to scramble there and get one play off across the 40 yard line of the opponent’s end of the field. Doug ran back onto the field for the 3rd time in the last 30 seconds and got the snap off just in time to kick what had to be a 50+ yard field goal to win the game on a buzzer beater to send the arch-rival Steelers back up the river with a big upset.

Those were the types of small things that would make a season, even if it was the only home win of the season, to be there made it feel like you had just won the Super Bowl. That is what it was like to grow up a Bengals fan.

Time for Transition

Hey everyone,

Sorry I was away and that quite frankly, I dropped the ball just about as much as our beloved Reds did.

I guess I have some explaining to do…

April was not just a rough month for me as a fan, but as as a man. My grandmother passed away at the end of the month and it took my focus off the blog. I tried getting back into the swing of things but every time I sat down to write, I would just think about her and what I would want to say about her. My mother grew up loving baseball and there are so many stories about my grandmother, like the time she threw away all of my mom’s baseball cards because she kept leaving them out on the floor <countless late 50’s and early 60’s treasures lost for eternity>, etc.

I thought I had my head cleared after I spent some time writing down an unpublished reflection about her, but once summer hit, I was in a daze. My wife and I had to do a couple gut checks and between having a difficult time at work getting what I needed to pay the bills, not having enough space in our apartment that we were already over paying for, and in general just having a feeling that it was time to move on, we did just that. We spent the summer getting everything lined up, interviewing for jobs, and praying through the transition with family and friends. We ultimately packed our bags and moved back to Cincinnati over Labor Day.

We are still trying to figure out the living situation and job thing, but life has been good. My kids got a chance to go to their first baseball game and we had a lot of fun! Aspen ate everything that was made of sugar and was probably the most excited fan there!

Aspen even warmed up to Grandpa after he bought <her> a whole bag of carmel popcorn!

But with baseball season over now, and the Bengals at 3-1 as of this posting, I do have to say that it is time to get back down to business. Hence the face lift. Now that I live back here in Cincinnati, while Cory is still out in Long Island for the time being, we will be covering the Bengals and the Reds from two different perspectives.

I should have a pre game prediction post and a post game wrap up post this weekend, so look forward to it and GO BENGALS!

This Ain’t No Fantasy

It was 2001. Senior year of high school. A couple of my friends from the football team and I were putting together the mother of all March Madness pools. We sold 200 brackets at $5, and for a high school kid, having $1,000 cash stuffed into an envelop in your locker is pretty exciting until you realize the police department is bringing in the drug dogs that month to sniff around… Dodged that bullet…

Mike McQuery was about as far from an athlete as they came in my high school, but the guys knew his sports, and in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, that was a rare find. Stat heads hadn’t taken over sports yet, there was no public knowledge of money ball, and the word fantasy was used only in the context of cheerleaders.

Mike won our bracket hands down, basically uncontested, and it left a sour taste in a few of the jocks’ mouths. How did this guy know more about sports than we did? His answer, fantasy sports…

Mike was trying to explain fantasy sports to a group of us and to be honest, at that time it sounded like the dumbest thing i had ever heard of. This was coming from a guy (me) who had spent portions of his childhood playing Dungeons and Dragons, Final Fantasy, and collected all 151 Pokemon…. It was a collision of worlds… Dorks and Sports mixed like oil and water.

Now to be fair, in 2001, technology hadn’t embraced fantasy sports yet. Heck, Aim was all the rage, Napster was all i used my computer for, and cell phones were only good for playing Snake on, rarely was a text ever sent.* (editor’s note: this article is being typed out on a cellphone, we’ve come a long way in 13 years)

This breed of fantasy sports involved a 3 ring binder, a USA Today subscription and more #2 than an SAT prep class.

Fast forward 3 years.

It’s 2004, i’m now a junior in college, a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon, and finding myself a bit detached from sports now that I wasn’t competing myself. One of my brothers. Reintroduced me to the idea of playing fantasy sports, but by now, it was as easy as signing into Yahoo, plus, free chicken wings at a draft party sealed the deal.

That year i played in my first fantasy football league and also my first baseball league. I found that it was pretty fun and helped me to really get to know more players than just the ones that played for my teams. I got to know the guys i played with and it made watching the games on tv more exciting. Pretty good deal i thought.

No harm done right… That’s how all addictions start…

I had every intention of playing in the same leagues the next year, and did, but as i met new people, and shared my interest in fantasy sports, i began to get invited to other leagues. At first my heart revolted to the idea of turning my back on my leagues to join another one, that would be like fantasy adultery…

My heart was torn, old friends or new friends? What to do?

Well, i did what anyone would do, i played in both leagues… And the next year i was in 3, and finally it was 4… By the time ESPN got on board, i was in over my head. At one point i found myself owning so many different players in so many leagues that every play on an NFL sunday both helped me and screwed me. I needed help.

Luckily, moving away and having kids, took time away from fantasy sports. Overtime, leagues closed and college friends moved on and joined leagues with new friends, and eventually, i was back down to just 2 or 3 leagues.

This year, i finally made my exit from both Fantasy baseball and am playing in my last NBA league. Just one NFL league with local friends that is highly competitive.

Some of my favorite memories was my 2005 all Bengals team that won my first championship, my all Asian fantasy baseball team, and my dominating fantasy Nascar league win.

In all, this blog was started to fill the void that i had been pumping with fantasy sports for so long. Fantasy baseball is just so much work, and ain’t nobody got time for that!

Fantasy or not, being a fan takes some ingenuity and a willing ness to do your research. I’m excited for this year, not having to worry about losing a fantasy league because jay bruce bombed a homerun against me. It will be a return to purity, and a year of great memories, not fantasies!

Rounding third and heading for home, this one belongs to the fans!