Eternal voices

Marty Brennaman called his last Reds home game last night, and there goes more of summer's background music. This is how it works in baseball, see. No sport is more wedded, in its porch-swing cadences, to its season and its medium -- the season being summer, and the medium being radio.

And so when a Brennaman sits behind the mike for 46 years as the voice of Cincinnati Reds baseball, a curious alchemy takes hold across the long slow days and lollygagging twilights of summer. After awhile his voice becomes what you hear when you look back on that season of the year, a soft murmur that's barely noticed but indelibly stitched into every summer memory.

It worked that way with Red Barber and the Yankees and Ernie Harwell and the Tigers and Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray and the Cubs, and it works that way with Brennaman and the Reds, too. Next season someone else will be calling balls and strikes and telling tales in baseball's long pauses, but something will be off. The Reds will still be the Reds, but it won't seem so, somehow.

Every Reds fan has his favorite Marty Brennaman story, and, even though I am not and never have been a Reds fan, I have one, too. It is an outsider's story, and thus an odd one. But in some way it is its own tribute to the Brennaman canon, its own nod to 46 years of ritual.

Back in my Anderson days, when there was still such a thing as two newspapers even in fair-to-middling cities, the assistant sports editor at our rival paper was a huge Reds fan, as many folks in central Indiana are. Every night he'd lay out the pages or write headlines or craft ledes with Marty Brennaman's voice as his accompaniment. And when Brennaman got to his signature line, "And this one belongs to the Reds!" ...

Well. The sports editor, being an impish sort, would always time it perfectly. He'd wait until juuuust before Brennaman began "And this ...", and then he'd reach over and quickly turn off the radio.

The assistant sports editor was not amused by this, I am told.

Because, yes, ritual is all, in this realm. And now, after 46 years, it is no longer.

Someone has reached over and turned off the radio. For good, this time.