The origins of the modern Cincinnati Reds can be traced to the expulsion of an earlier team bearing that name. In 1876, Cincinnati became one of the charter members of the new National League, but the club ran afoul of league organizer and long-time president William Hulbert for selling beer at the ballpark and playing games on Sunday, both important activities to entice the city’s large German population. While Hulbert made clear his distaste for both beer and Sunday baseball at the founding of the league, neither practice was actually against league rules in those early years. On October 6, 1880, however, seven of the eight team owners pledged at a special league meeting to formally ban both beer and Sunday baseball at the regular league meeting that December. Only Cincinnati president W. H. Kennett refused to sign the pledge, so the other owners formally expelled Cincinnati for violating a rule that would not actually go into effect for two more months.
The Reds play at Great American Ballpark located at 100 Joe Nuxhall Way in Cincinnati. The park opened in 2003 and replace Cinergy Field (the former Riverfront Stadium), the Reds’ home park from 1970 to 2002.
The name of the ballpark comes from Great American Insurance Group.
To date the longest home run hit in that park was 535’ by Adam Dunn against the LA Dodgers in 2004.
The first at-bat in the park was by batter Kenny Lofton, the former San Francisco Giant.
The first playoff game at the park was the 2010 NLDS against the Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies won that game 2-0 and went on to win the series. The Phillies would go on to lose the NLCS against the San Francisco Giants, who in turn went on to win the World Series that year.
The first no-hitter in the park was by Reds pitcher Homer Bailey on 7/2/2013 when he blanked the San Francisco Giants, 3-0.
Doc Ellis threw a no-hitter on June 12, 1970.
He was high on LSD at the time.
22 MLB rookies have thrown no-hitters in the history of baseball. The latest was this year, on 6/9/2015, by Chris Heston of the San Francisco Giants. The Giants beat the Mets, 5-0.
I doubt Heston was high on LSD at the time.
Nitpick #1: His name was Dock Ellis He was the starting pitcher for the National League in the All-Star Game in 1971 and later that year his team the Pirates were World Series champions. Joining the Yankees in 1976, he helped lead the team to the 1976 World Series, and was named the American League Comeback Player of the Year in the process.
Nitpick #2: He said he was “under the influence” of LSD. And the reporters did not believe him.
Having never heard of “Dock Ellis,” I wondered if I’d wandered into the false trivia thread by mistake. Or if Typo had. Ellis–> LSD? Weird.
It wasn’t actually a battle, but a long and difficult winter encampment: Valley Forge - Wikipedia
In play:
Joseph Ellis, historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers, lied about his Vietnam War military service and later apologized for it.
Donny Osmond found success in musical theater through much of the 1990s when he starred in the Toronto production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for over 2,000 performances.
Donny Osmond has stated that he opposes same-sex marriage but that he does not condemn homosexuality. He believes that homosexual and lesbian Mormons should be accepted in the church if they remain celibate.
The LDS Church, able to take a joke, has taken to running advertisements near theatres with the Trey Parker / Matt Stone (“South Park”) musical “The Book of Mormon” on stage. The tag line: “You’ve seen the show, now read the book!”
The Mountain Meadows Massacre occurred in 1857. On September 11 and under a flag of truce, Mormons killed all of the males and their Indian allies killed all of the women and all but 17 of the children who were adopted into Mormon households.
The man ultimately tried and executed for the Mountain Meadows Massacre was John Doyle Lee, Brigham Young’s “Danite” bodyguard and adopted son (in spite of being only a few years younger), the father of more than 60 children scattered throughout Utah and Arizona. He thoroughly denounced Young for scapegoating him in his final days in exchange for which Young divorced him from his wives. He was executed by firing squad at the site of the massacre.
Awesome. Love it.
In play: Author Jon Krakauer’s exposé on extreme practices found within the LDS church, told us of some of Warren Jeffs’ polygamist practices including being able to walk up to a young teenaged girl in his church and tell her that God told him that she would be his wife. The girl would then be obligated to marry him and join his other wives. As a church leader, Jeffs controlled many of the families in the small state border towns of Colorado City AZ and Hildale UT. Sadly, these towns were just hit by flash floods that claimed at least 8 lives.
The city of Warren, Ohio is home to the National Packard Museum, which celebrates the Packard brand’s important role in the history of the auto industry. Warren also has one of the world’s first multi-story McDonald’s, complete with elevator, fountain and grand piano, dedicated to visionary franchisor Ray Kroc.
I just saw a touring company performance of the show, and there were three pages of LDS ads in the play’s glossy program, showing photogenic Mormons of different races, with that very tagline.
In play:
Recent DNA testing has confirmed that Warren G. Harding’s longtime mistress bore him a daughter.
Cary Mullis invented PCR, polymerase chain reaction, a method to replicate DNA strands from a few samples. PCR expansion is often used in forensic analysis and was likely used in the Harding finding.
A chain gang is a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work as a form of punishment. Such punishment might include repairing buildings, building roads, or clearing land. This system existed primarily in the southern parts of the United States, and by 1955 had been phased out nationwide, with Georgia the last state to abandon the practice. The introduction of chain gangs into the United States began shortly after the Civil War. The southern states needed finances and public works to be performed. Prisoners were a free way for these works to be achieved
Richard Wilbur writes in his memoir Black Boy that the first time he saw a chain gang, he exclaimed “Look at the elephants!” Apparently their black-and-white striped outfits reminded him of a zoo animal, and he mixed up zebras and elephants.
The members of The White Stripes, best known for their single “Seven Nation Army” from the album Elephant, were then-married Jack and Meg White. The White Stripes made exclusive use of a red, white and black color scheme when conducting virtually all professional duties, from album art to the clothes worn during live performances; Meg said that “like a uniform at school, you can just focus on what you’re doing because everybody’s wearing the same thing.” Jack also explained that they aspired to invoke an innocent childishness without any intention of irony or humor.
In the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, the White Tree of Gondor was planted in Middle-earth from a seedling brought east by Elendil and his son Isildur after the fall of Numenor, a great island kingdom of Men inspired by the legend of Atlantis.
One of the first ever mentions of Atlantis comes from Plato, so from approximately 427 B.C.