Claude Osteen (left) and Hal McCoy talk baseball over barbecue in Arlington, Texas, on Friday. (Press Pros Feature Photos)
Covering Ohio State this weekend at the Texas Globe Life Baseball Classic, hall of famer Hal McCoy joins our beat to cover Buckeyes baseball. It’s turned a few heads, including mine.
Arlington, TX – Many of you, by now, know the story of how Hal McCoy became the first writer hired by Press Pros Magazine, in 2010 at the Marion’s Pizza in Englewood.
Actually, Hal and Chick Ludwig both agreed to write for the site that day over a jumbo deluxe and two pitchers of forgettable beer. They didn’t have the good stuff…no PBR…on tap.
Over the years we’ve had a lot of fun, and Hal’s made a lot of friends for Press Pros, writing the OHSAA state tournaments and University of Dayton football and basketball. Reds-wise, he’s been officially retired now as beat writer for the Reds for more than a decade, while still contributing his ‘Ask Hal’ column for the Dayton Daily News (about the Reds) on Sundays.
So, when I asked him in December if he’d be interested, at age 84, of contributing to our coverage of Big Ten and Ohio State baseball, he couldn’t answer “Yes” fast enough, lighting up a Montecristo White Label (the Churchill size) in tribute.
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So this weekend, here in Dallas, he’s making his 2025 debut covering, not big league baseball, but Big Ten baseball in that same inimitable fashion that millions came to read over his 47 years of traveling with the Reds.
Ironically, there aren’t that many Ohio State players who know about him, or his reputation as one of the country’s best baseball scribes. But coaches do, especially head coach Justin Haire, who grew up around Reds baseball as a high schooler at Hamilton’s Badin High School.
And the sports information people at Ohio State are more than familiar with his color, honesty, and bottomless bag of similes and metaphors.
Constantly recognized, Hal signs a bat for a Reds fan who said, “Aren’t you Hal McCoy?”
Generational, indeed, a few of the more knowledgeable around the Texas Rangers’ Globe Life Field have turned their heads. And we had lunch and talked shop Friday with Cincinnati native and former Los Angeles Dodgers great, Claude Osteen, who won 196 games in an 18-year major-league career. It was a baseball dream. I pinched myself, and picked up the check!
Immature as it sounds, it is a bit of a dream come true to think about writing baseball with Hal McCoy after reading him for most of those 47 years he wrote the Reds. Yogi Berra once said, “Who da’ thunk it?”, and that’s kinda’ how I feel about writing and publishing with the man who coined the phrase, ‘The Big Red Machine’.
But it’s more than sentimentality because shamelessly I’ve borrowed a lot from Hal’s knowledge and style of baseball journalism. A lot of us have, because he’s one of the 30 best who’s ever done it, and his plaque in Cooperstown proves it. His style is a cross between educating and entertaining the readers, with an honesty that’s more than once brought him discord with Reds players and management.
Three times former owner Marge Schott had Hal banned from the media dining room at Riverfront Stadium. On the day after umpire John McSherry died on opening day in 1996, he exposed Schott for having sent used flowers to the umpire’s dressing room the following day.
“No soup for you,” she said.
Schott once took the leftover donuts from a staff meeting and sold them for 25 cents apiece to office staff until they were gone. Hal wrote it, and she dumped him again.
And he got in Marge’s smoked-filled brain a third time when he wrote about Barry Larkin complaining about Schotzie, the St. Bernard, for doggie ‘dumping’ on the field during batting practice. Hal packed Eckridge on Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip for a week after that.
Joe Morgan didn’t speak to Hal for twenty years at the end of his tenure with the Reds because it was Hal who had the courage to write one day…that Joe Morgan’s best days were behind him.
Columnist Sonny Fulks writes OHSAA sports and Ohio State baseball for Press Pros Magazine.com.
You apply for credentials for Big Ten road games weeks before the actual games, and I smiled when an SID responded recently, asking, “That Hal McCoy?”
Yeah, that one, and I caught myself saying the same thing when we got off the elevator Friday for the Globe Life Field press box.
And Chick Ludwig, by the way, has been absent from Press Pros since 2012, choosing instead to do late-night radio on WLW after Reds games. I love Chick, but somehow it’s not the same as……
Hal McCoy back in a big-league town, and a big-league stadium this weekend, writing baseball, and turning a few heads. Awesome, Stud!
I think I’ll have some used flowers delivered.
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