Hello, you've made it to the back of the book, your new favorite arts and culture podcast. I'm your host, Christopher Scalia of the American

Enterprise Institute. I'm joined for this episode by the award-winning and prolific sports writer

Joe Paznanski. Joe is the author of eight books, including The Baseball 100, Why We Love Baseball, A History in 50 Moments, and Why We Love Football,

a History in 100 Moments. Next year, he'll publish Big Fan, Two Friends, 81,589 Miles, and the Wild,

wonderful sports we love, co-written with Michael Schur.

Schur, by the way, is also the co-host of Joe's podcast called The Pazcast.

Joe also has a website, joe posnansky.com, where in recent weeks, he's been furiously and joyfully writing about the baseball playoffs

as well as other sports and on that website you can also subscribe to his newsletter

Joe blogs most importantly for our purposes today Joe's the author of The Machine a hot team

a legendary season and a heart-stopping world series, the story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds.

It was published in 2009, but this is the 50th anniversary of that Big Red Machine team.

So it seems like an especially relevant book now. It was one of baseball's all-time

legendary teams, which won arguably the best World Series ever 50 years ago this month. So I'm

excited to talk to Joe about that incredible team in season. And we're also going to touch on the

state of both baseball today and sports journalism.

So, Joe, welcome to the back of the book.

It's great to be here.

Let's jump right into the Big Red Machine.

Who were they?

And why were they called that?

Yeah.

So it's funny because the Big Red Machine, even though now we look back on them and really remember them for 1975 and 1976.

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