From Wikipedia:His father's contract with the Reds is set to expire after the 2010 season and Marty has said that he wishes to retire following the 2010 season.

And on a side note, is it common knowledge that the Reds traded jet fuel and nacho profits in order to get the crotchety old goat's crotchety kid?:

Also from Wikipedia: In exchange for allowing Thom to break his contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Reds agreed to travel from Florida to Phoenix to play a series of exhibition games at the end of spring training, beginning in 2008[2](this is in addition to the usual, regularly scheduled National League road games the Reds will play at Chase Field during the regular season).

but I think it is an indictment of both. Look at the way the "true Yankee" crap that the New York media spews out affects fan reaction to Alex Rodriguez. Some of it before he even played an inning.

As we've discussed ad nauseum on this site, perception often unduly influences reality, i.e. the Dodgers pay ridiculous money to have Juan Pierre bat lead off, when he is in fact a terrible OBP guy or the Mariners sign Jeff Weaver after pitching well in two fluke games in the post-season for the Cardinals.

When Marty says something like "Dunn absolutely has to be gone after this year" to John Fay during the Cubs game last week, the Reds front office has to answer not only to fan sentiment, but fan sentiment emboldened by the "official voice" of the team.

Marty is a great play-by-play guy, but the short-sightedness of his opinions make me prefer the pleasant inanity of George Grande. That is sad, as Dunn pointed out, but it's true.

As I've grown to dislike (and thus ignore) Marty more and more over the past few years I have become more and more frustrated with the Reds for continuing to employ him as the voice of the franchise.  Chandrathan, I know that your point is more towards "If the Reds were better, Marty would complain less" but I think that a parallel can be drawn between some of the aging second-rate ballplayers that the Reds have put on the field recently and the two old coots in the booth that are as exciting and dynamic as the Tuesday morning conversation at the barber shop when all the best jokes were just told over the weekend and nothing new has happened to help spur any new ones.

I realize that I am in the minority amongst Reds fandom when it comes to opinions on Marty.  And I think that I am in the minority of the minority in that I really don't think Marty is a very good play-by-play announcer.  Oh, he's got he's cadence and flow and you're not ever gonna wonder about the count, the outs, the inning or the score.  But he rarely provides for me anything about the game that I could not observe by watching the telecast with the sound turned off.

• There are new players being born into the MLB universe every week about whom Marty rarely has anything to tell us.  I often learn many things about our boys wearing the wishbone 'C' by listening to Vin Scully (Hallowed be thy name.)when the Reds go way out west.  
• For a representative of a small market/free agent-averse team like the Reds, Marty has surprisingly little to ever say about the players in the minor league system.  When he does share a farm report it sounds as if he's simply reading something that was just handed to him by some glad-handing yes-man.  If he were asked two innings later to summarize what he had read, he might take that annoying quasi-dramatic pause that he takes when he's about to be a complete condescending smug fucking asshole and say, "Now let me tell you something, alright?..."
• Jeff Brantley has not yet figured out how to call a game well but I like him as a "color man" because in one night he'll he gives ya more about "the game within the game" than Marty can in an entire homestand or five. (Listen to an Indians broadcast sometime if you don't think a play-by-play man can do better than "He hit a 2-2 pitch.")

You might say, "Alan, that's Marty's style and it evidently doesn't suit you but that doesn't mean that he's not a good announcer... That's just your opinion."

Right.  I'm usually pretty cool with allowing everyone to have their own opinion and I try to recognize that as strongly as I may believe something, it is very often "just my opinion".  About 85-89% of the time I can get with "To each his own."  But if your opinion is that the Volkswagen Cabriolet is not necessarily a "chick car" but that it's so much more- It's a sylish Euro-design built for the young and fun loving set, well, I've got two words for you:

It's a fucking chick car, dude.

He's been an anti-Dunn windbag for years now.