Love Hate

In the article “I’m a Cincinnati Reds Fan, the author, who goes by the alias of ‘Passion of the Weiss,’ does an honorable job displaying not only his love, but his hate, for his favorite pro baseball team, The Cincinnati Reds.
This article criticizes the Cincinnati Reds, a major league baseball team that has a long history of mediocrity. Weiss displays his passion for the team and explains how he and other Reds’ fans like him are pained year in and year out by the team’s lack of success. Weiss has loved the team for a great part of his life and will continue to do so no matter how bad they perform on the field. He has a real love-hate relationship with his favorite team and he “lives and dies” with every play of every season. Fortunately, some seventeen years ago, he was completely satisfied with his favorite team when they won the baseball championship, but other than that one year, he has suffered as a sports fan.
The essay is very sarcastic and written, as the title suggests, in request of pity from the reader. Weiss, on more than a few occasions, makes sarcastic jokes about the Reds, including when he says the Reds will be mathematically eliminated from making the playoffs in April, which is impossible. He calls his favorite team losers and states that he would have been better off being run over by a bus than be a Reds fan all his life.
Weiss is very effective is relaying his feelings for the Reds. It is very obvious that he cares very much for the team. He knows the team’s history thoroughly and has obviously been a fan for a long period of time, which according to him is a bad thing. Weiss tells how he first became a fan as a young kid growing up in LA, hundreds of miles from Cincinnati, because his T-ball team was called the Reds. This is very interesting and helps the reader relate to Weiss. It is also unique because most young boys just root for the team their father roots for.
Weiss calls the time the Reds won the World Series the greatest time of his life, but then immediately goes back to talking about negatives of the team including bad coaches like the famous Pete Rose, crazy owners such as Marge Schott, and injury prone players like the heralded Ken Griffey Jr . Weiss writes that when the Reds got Griffey, he produce on the field Examples such as these especially relate to other Reds fans, such as me , because I can attest that when Griffey came to Cincinnati, I was as happy as one can get, but the happiness didn’t last long.
Weiss is very clear in his essay. He simply describes how and why he became such a huge Reds’ fan, and then shows why the team he loves is also the team he hates. He provides an adequate amount of examples to show why he is not crazy for being so frustrated with the Reds. Weiss starts the essay with a very lonely tone and then changes to negative and sarcastic and yet ends the essay being positive and hopeful for the future of his favorite team. This shows what a true fan he is. The Reds have been a below average team for years, and still Weiss is in hope that this year they will turn things around. This brings almost a funny reaction to the essay because it makes the reader wonder how this man can talk so badly about this team, yet remain in high hopes for the upcoming season. If you are a Reds’ fan like me, you completely realize how he can be this way because it is so easy to love a pro sports team and then hate them the next minute.
Weiss isn’t positive for long though, as even in the closing lines of his essay, he pokes fun at the current team because one of their best pitchers is a want-to-be musician who records cover albums. The sarcasm is very heavy in this article and gives the article a very light and pleasant read to all people, whether they like the Reds or not. One bad thing about Weiss’ constant use of “inside jokes” is people who don’t know the Reds very well will be confused when reading this article and may not continue to read because they don’t see the humor in his stories. This article really is written for Reds fans and informed sports fans only.
Passion of the Weiss has written a very funny sarcastic article about the Reds. I completely agree with everything he says in the essay and I share in his pain. He is even luckier than me because I was too young to remember the 1990 World Series. The overall point of the article is to let Reds fans out there know they are not alone in their anger for the constant failure of the Reds and to make sure all Reds fans keep a positive mind no matter how long it has been since a winning season. Weiss has done a great job writing this article.