brandondawson.org

It might not be Cincinnati Reds GM Walk Jocketty to whom the credit accrues for the coup of the offseason: the Reds’ signing of left-handed Cuban wunderkind Aroldis Chapman.

But, you’ve gotta hand it to Jocketty, nonetheless: all winter long, Reds fans –as well as the rest of the baseball world– had been quietly wondering about the complete, total, and utter absence of transaction activity on the Reds’ part.

And now we know why. So basically, that weird sense of calm Jocketty had been exuding now makes sense: why get hot-and-bothered about the free agent market –populated mainly by aging stars with outsized asking prices or by no-name journeymen– when you can sign a left-handed kid with a triple-digit fastball?

Ah, October 1990. I was in 7th grade, and the Reds went wire-to-wire to capture the NL West, winning 91 games to finish five games ahead of the 1988 World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers.

Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait a few months before, setting off the events that would result in the (first) Persian Gulf War. (Which until the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, would continue to be known primarily by its jingoistic “code name”, Operation Desert Shield/Storm.)

(Given that an entire generation has grown up in the interim between 1990 and 2009, I find the need for parenthetical comments such as the one above…or this one…to be aggravatingly necessary, as you’ll soon see…it’s surprising how much the world can change in just 20 years. Don’t even get me started on the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
Continue reading…