Colorful Success

On this MLK Holiday Weekend in 2017, I will share one of my baseball art prints that I created four Januarys ago.  It is a piece of art that I list in my Etsy shop as: "Cincinnati Reds Big Red Machine Painted Bobblehead Mosaic", and it has grown to be my best selling print that sends me to the post office regularly for deliveries of continued incoming orders.

My husband will clearly reason that part of the great sales success with my “Big Red Machine” art is because, as he says,  “They never lose.” ; but, for me, the attraction and colorful beauty of this art subject has more historical meaning. 

As a child growing up in my hometown of Cincinnati in the 1970’s, this team of spirted ballplayers helped provide for me not only an understanding of an organization that my country clearly valued, but it also provided an example of what my country looks and acts like.  It was through this team that I came to recognize and see what I was being taught in school at the time - - That the United States is a colorful “Melting Pot” comprised of people coming from diverse heritages and various nations around the world; and that, like “The Big Red Machine”, it is a collection of unique people finding common ground to gather for the sake of exercising their individual talents and visions as part of a unified whole. 

​For this group of baseball players, it was through such obvious diversity and, of course, recognition that everybody plays a part and that the perspective of each position is needed, that this team was able to show itself as having the strength to become a legend worth celebrating.  For me, as a ball playing eight-year-old in 1975, this collection of World Series champs of “America’s Pastime” represented a symbolic picture of my colorful country, The United States.

This January, more than ever, I have grown to not take these idealistic views formed in my childhood for granted. I still admire "The Big Red Machine" and will forever celebrate the colorfulness of its success.

​   * For more *Big Red Machine* blogs see my "Bench Number Five ~ The Earth is a Baseball" piece which I created in March of 2018 & "The Timeless Charlie Hustle & The Geometry of a Rose" which I created in March of 2017.

​   ** Find more blogging about Riverfront Stadium on my "Number Eleven & The Four Elements" piece.