1979 Cincinnati Reds: 90-71, 1.5 Up

This was the last hurrah for the Big Red Machine.  For the past two season the team played second fiddle to the Dodgers and began parting with HOF pieces.  First Tony Perez left for Montreal and was replaced by Dan Driessen, a solid player, but no Tony Perez.  Then Pete Rose went to Philly and Ray Knight (a nice player) stepped in.  This team was not getting any younger.  At 31 and with over a decade of mileage on his knees, Johnny Bench was not the same guy behind the plate.  Joe Morgan was not the MVP 30-30 guy he was just a few years past and the great Tom Seaver was in the process of morphing from the games premier power pitcher into a classic pitcher.  With all those negatives, Johnny McNamara did a whale of a job cobbling together a division winning team out of the remnants of the past and some young guys who were solid performers.  Seaver didn’t have the fastball to strike out 200+ batters anymore, but he sure had the brain power to fool them and go 16-6 (3.14).  Youngster Mike LoCoss was 14-8 in the #2 roll.  Tom Hume pitched 163 innings out of the pen and saved 17.  George Foster (.302-30-98) was now the focal point of the offense.  Johnny Mac made the most of what he had.  He smartly chose to go with defense over offense in centerfield and platooned veteran’s Paul Blair (.150) and Cesar Geronimo (.239).  Both could track down just about anything in the air, but neither could hit a lick by this point in their careers.

The Reds and the Astros played cat and mouse all season until the Reds finally put it away down the stretch relying on veteran guile.  By the time the got to the NLCS they faced a Pirate team that was on a major roll and wound up getting swept in 3 straight.

There’s a lot of balance here for rookie KOD manager Mike Hill.  Mike did a fine job in the Holiday Festival and gets to pilot a team for a full season for the 1st time in KOD.

I didn’t have to do any work on the missing cards for this team set.  I wound up creating them last year for ARAIG, so it’s great to get a second usage from them.  Only 12 cards were needed to finish off the original set.