My Big Red Machine

This is the 50th anniversary for the first of the back-to-back World Series titles for Major League Baseball's storied Big Red Machine, and out of all the books written about those Cincinnati Reds teams of the 1970s, this is the most unique. It is filled with great storytelling through vivid writing. It involves Terence Moore who pulled a rarity. He went from living and dying with his sports heroes as a youth to dealing with them up close and personal on a regular basis.

They say you should never meet your heroes.

Terence did . . . and more.

Not only that, but Terence built a lifetime bond with several of them while becoming an award-winning journalist and a Baseball Hall of Fame voter.

Terence began hugging those Reds as a fan during the late 1960s, and he continued into the 1970s. Then on May 7, 1978, he graduated from Miami (Ohio) University, located 35 miles north of Cincinnati, and a week later, he became a professional sports journalist for The Cincinnati Enquirer. He often was assigned by the paper to write about those Reds.

Terence had to learn in a flash how to control his awe around a clubhouse filled with perennial All-Stars and future Baseball Hall of Famers. Since newspapers still were in their heyday during the Big Red Machine's era, he also had to find ways to survive and to prosper in that massive and competitive media environment.

That was despite two things: (1) Terence usually was the youngest writer by far consistently around those Reds, and (2) he was the first full-time African American sportswriter ever to work for a major metropolitan paper in the region. In fact, he was one of just two African Americans in the country writing about baseball on a consistent basis in that capacity, and he gives fascinating details on his Jackie Robinson role.