Reliving the Reds special 1995 season with Jeff Brantley on WARP

Twenty-five years ago, Jeff Brantley remembered being told to stay ready.

The players were still on strike at the beginning of the 1995 season, and replacement players were in camp. The real big-leaguers were at home on standby. Judge Sonia Sotomayor, then with the U.S. District Court in New York and now a Supreme Court justice, granted an injunction on March 31, 1995, two days before the scheduled start of the season, reinstating the economic conditions that had been in place before the strike. In response, the players’ union called off the strike.

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“We were told to basically to keep everything together, keep yourself ready, you could be called on at any moment,” Brantley recalled Tuesday on The Athletic’s “WARP in Cincinnati” podcast looking back at the 1995 National League Division Series. “Time kind of wore on and on and, you know, we’re getting later and later and we’re not in camp, and all of a sudden you get the call and you’re kind of pressed to get ready in a hurry.”

Sound familiar?

“Yeah, that’s gonna happen this year,” Brantley said. “You can book it.”

Spring training lasted three weeks before the season began on April 25.

“Position players and relievers — as long as everybody’s healthy, I think you can be ready in less than three weeks,” Brantley said. “I think the whole issue with spring training is trying to get starters ready without having to push them beyond what their comfort zone is. And you and I both well know, when you get to spring training every year, somebody’s got a little bit of a nagging elbow issue or a shoulder issue or maybe a rib cage problem. And you try to, instead of trying to push them forward to get ready for April 1 or March 31, you say, ‘All right, we’re gonna give him seven or eight days, he’s gonna miss a start, get some treatment, and then he’ll come back,’ and you don’t have to worry about it so much. This year is not going to be like that.”

The 1995 season was 144 games, 18 fewer than a normal season. The season looks like it will be, at best, 82 games if the players and MLB can reach an agreement.

“You’ve got to hit the ground running,” Brantley said. “It’ll be a sprint not only from the time we get into spring training but from the time you hit spring training until the time that the playoffs roll around, it will be a sprint. Games will be managed differently, they’ll be played differently. This is not going to be that 162. We’re not running four or five times around the track. We’re running a 50-yard dash.”

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The ’95 Reds lost their first six games of the season, twice in walk-off fashion off closer Héctor Carrasco. They won their seventh game of the season, and Brantley got the save. The Reds then fell five games behind the Astros in the National League Central after another pair of losses. But they turned it around and by May 30 were tied for first place. They beat the Pirates on June 5 to improve to 23-13 and moved into first place, never relinquishing their spot. Cincinnati went 85-69 that year, winning the division by nine games.

Brantley saved 28 games and put up a 2.82 ERA that year. He got the final out in all three of the Reds’ postseason victories in the new divisional series, including a lineout from the Dodgers’ Mike Piazza to finish off the sweep at Riverfront Stadium.

On this week’s “WARP in Cincinnati,” Paul Dehner Jr., Mo Egger and I rewatched the 1995 NLDS and talked about it. I also interviewed Brantley about the series, the season and more.

When Brantley pumped his first and hugged Benito Santiago, it marked the last postseason victory for the Reds or Bengals in Cincinnati. That’s why we took this time to look back at three games from 25 years ago.

The Reds were swept by the Braves in the NLCS, and Atlanta went on to beat Cleveland in the World Series.

“We had trouble with the Braves all year,” Brantley said. “It was one of those teams that just happened to … we just happened to figure out a way to click, and we did it really, about, I don’t know, 20 days into the season and we played good together.”

The key, Brantley said, was the Reds’ leader, Barry Larkin.

“Whoever was on that club, he made them feel like they were part of the Reds family,” Brantley said. “And I think that is the greatest part of leadership besides being a great player, and there’s no doubt he was a great player. But I think the thing that Larkin did, and it didn’t really matter if you were a pitcher or a position player, but he made you feel good about being a Red, and there was a sense of pride that went with that. And I think it just kind of jelled everybody around each other. I know it did with the ’90 club, and it definitely did for us.”

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Brantley talked about much more in this week’s episode of “WARP in Cincinnati,” including how he didn’t care about giving up a mammoth shot to Eric Karros in Game 2, how underappreciated Hal Morris was and is and why he loved the team’s white pinstriped hats.

(Photo: Mark Lyons / Associated Press)

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