Source: ramsey.mlblogs.com --- Wednesday, November 22, 2017
The Cincinnati Reds Go To Japan The Bad News Bears weren’t the only American Baseball team to go to Japan in 1978. From October 25 through November 21 of that year, the Cincinnati Reds played 17 exhibition games in 13 different Japanese cities against the country’s best players. There are a number of things that make the Reds ’78 tour of Japan noteworthy. The most significant was that it marked the end of the club’s Big Red Machine era. In 1978, Tony Perez was playing in Canada and the popular Bob Howsam turned over GM duties to Dick Wagner . If the team was assuming a new identity, then the Japan series served as a farewell tour of sorts. For when the Reds returned stateside, Sparky Anderson was fired and Pete Rose signed with the Phillies. It was “sayonara” for the last Cincinnati Baseball dynasty. But before the band broke up, the Machine sang its swan song in eastern Asia, winning 14 of the 17 games and finishing the tour with a 12-game winning streak. The series drew over 550,000 fans. Rose was featured on the game tickets and hit safely in 16 of the 17 games. Johnny Bench and George Foster combined for 13 of the team’s 28 home runs. The pitching was highlighted by a couple of up-and-comers in the form of Mike LaCoss (4–0, 0.82era) and Tom Hume (5–0, 2.68era). Japanese Baseball fans were treated to dream-like scenarios (e.g., Tom Seaver vs. Sadaharu Oh ) and given an idea of how their heroes matched up against America’s. Fo ...
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