His disdain for advanced metrics, the almost sneering tone whenever the subject came up, shocked and saddened me. When Brennaman criticized Bruce for being a poor hitter with runners in scoring position, how could Marty not know that Jay was actually hitting twenty points over his career average with RISP? It’s not that he didn’t know everything; he didn’t even seem to know — or want to know — the truth of what was happening right in front of him.

Where had the Marty of my youth gone?

To be sure, Brennaman is far from alone in wanting nothing to do with Sabermetrics — that province of folks with too much software and time on their hands. I get that. Different strokes, etc. But Marty isn’t just anyone. He’s the voice of Baseball’s oldest team. If it was my opinion Marty had a responsibility to keep an eye open to this new, progressive wave of front-office thinking — changing as it is the way teams chose, develop, and pay their players — well, it was more than clear that Marty didn’t share that view one whit. Moneyball? Baseball blue bloods saw nothing more than a Hollywood rag with a pretty-boy actor having fun at the expense of hardworking, tobacco-chewing lifers.

Which is a bit of a problem.

Fifty thousand watts of clear channel cascading out to Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and points beyond grants Brennaman an almost evangelical reach. Mix in 40-plus years of shared nights and Sunday afternoons, you have a pretty large pulpit from which to preach your baseball blessings.

Which makes Marty’s yearly crusade against Joey Votto’s plate approach so breathtakingly wrongheaded. Those hardworking fans in Lima, Ohio or Charleston, West Virginia — all those far-flung places Marty and the players visit on the Reds fan Caravan each winter? These are the same folks that have seen their families priced out of the ballpark. Perhaps they find it hard to relate to the ungodly sums of money culled by players like Votto. Marty could help diffuse some of the class-based disdain — borne from guaranteed millions and $10 beers — hung in the air like some heavy summer smog. Instead, he seems content to merely toss more logs to the fire:

“I definitely fall on the old-school side. He’s not paid to walk. Walking is a byproduct of being a good hitter. He’s paid to drive in runs.”

One would hope a man of such influence and intelligence could be compelled to an open mind. “Old school” has its charms, be they nostalgic or, in some cases, statistical. But there’s nothing charming in the way Brennaman has continually gone after Votto. The walk, with its air of sloth-like and sedentary deference, has become a cudgel with which to bludgeon a millions-making athlete. In this context, OBP becomes — in the minds of the people who claim keys to the kingdom — the couch potato of stats. Indeed, it’s deeply ironic that the baseball man whose approach to hitting Votto reveres above all others, Ted Williams, isn’t old school enough for Marty and his anti-analytics cohorts.

Two summers ago, during a pregame interview with then-manager Dusty Baker, Marty again leveled a shot across the bow at the 2010 MVP, asking Baker why he wouldn’t consider moving Joey into the two spot, given that Votto “placed walking above driving in runs.”

Ouch.

This past February, before spring training had even begun, Marty was ratcheting up the rhetoric once again in what had long since become a kind of Cold War of words:

This past weekend, on the eve of the All-Star Game, as the Reds were being swept away by the dreadful Milwaukee Brewers, the season slipping further into the rear view mirror, the Hall of Fame broadcaster reprised an old standard one more time:

“I would not categorize it as a criticism, I would categorize it as a statement of fact. Joey Votto is no longer one of the elite players in Major League Baseball. That is not to say that he won’t yet be, but with the year he’s having right now — he’s on a pace to hit maybe 27, 28 home runs, but drive in around 80 runs. And ‘elite’ with those kind of numbers don’t apply.”

And there you have it. It should be noted that Votto, who is in the midst of a protracted slump, was hitting .299 with an OBP of .398 and a slugging percentage of .554 as recently as June 15th.

And yet, from his throne on high, Brennaman has summarily removed the four-time All-Star from the ranks of the game’s elite.

Never mind the fact that, since 2009, there have been but six players with better collective WAR numbers than Votto. Forget that every player in baseball, save for Miguel Cabrera, Andrew McCutchen, Ben Zobrist, Evan Longoria, Mike Trout and Robinson Cano rank below Votto in overall value during the last seven seasons — two of which, it should be noted, have been severely compromised by injury.

Even with the untimely slump, Votto was a borderline All-Star this season. You’d think that kind of track record might warrant a little bit of patience. From The Voice of the Reds, of all people.

Yes, I still listen to the radio on occasion — just not with the same sense of reverential awe. Maybe the boy in me has finally gotten old, my ears tone deaf. But I simply can’t escape the feeling that something’s missing. It’s not the fuzz and crack of the radio, those flawed frequencies into which we all seemed to tune in unison. Whatever smartphones and MLB.com’s At Bat may lack in charm, they more than make up for in clarity and convenience.

To the contrary, Brennaman’s tone that’s changed. And not for the better.

I once believed this was all about old schools and young whippersnappers. Now, I simply see it as a fight to control the narrative. Marty Brennaman is a smart baseball man, and as died-in-the-wool Old School as they come. But a simple understanding of RBI for what it is—a stat of opportunity, and not a silver chalice from which one must sip before taking up residence in some baseball Mt. Rushmore — really isn’t all that much to ask. Even from the game’s most traditionalist tribes.

During Brennaman’s tenure, Cincinnati’s story was, first and foremost, that of the Big Red Machine and the men who drove it. Next came the Nasty Boys and their high-octane charge to the 1990 title. These were the characters — heroes, antiheroes and yes, one or two villains, too — but Marty was always the man telling the story. He shaped it as he saw fit, molded it to his Valhallan vision, and we were only too happy to accept the eloquent, Middle-American masterpiece he painted for us. Maybe he feels that saga slipping away. Maybe he fears it’s no longer his tale to tell. It’s a sad prospect indeed, and one few Reds fans — this writer included — would happily heed.

Whenever Marty finished a game, it didn’t just belong to the team. He made it feel like it belonged to each and every one of us, no matter where we were orbiting in the Reds’ universe, be it some suburban driveway or an Army barracks in Afghanistan. And while the memories Marty helped to sew will never subside, those days seem very far away now. As does the man a young boy once knew — a man once revered with an awe only a boy with a wishbone “C” on his faded cap and a Knothole shirt could ever truly summon.

Now I only look around … and he’s gone.