Red Reporter, a Cincinnati Reds community

Newly-minted Hall of Famer Barry Larkin has been hired to manage the Brazilian team in the upcoming World Baseball Classic. Given the short and relatively scant history of baseball in Brazil, I'm pretty confident in saying that their best hope is having him bat lead-off and play SS.

Tomorrow at 11 a.m., BET debuts a documentary produced by Eric Davis and childhood friend Daryl Strawberry about Harvard Park, a small park in the bowels of southcentral Los Angeles. ED took Barry Larkin to fair Harvard Park in the offseason once. Said Larkin: "The park was in the 'hood.' There were rocks all over the place, and I'm thinking, 'All right, we're playing in the big leagues and this is where we're working out?' But there was a saying -- 'If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere. If you can field ground balls here, you can field them anywhere. If you can hit here, if you can survive in this situation here, you can survive anywhere.'"

For folks like me who only remember Barry from the 90s onward, this is a neat look at the only time of his life he lived outside of the 513 environs. I figured he was good in college, of course, but it's neat to see that he went to UMich on a football scholarship and, as the legend goes, "Schembechler liked watching him play baseball so much that he told Barry to focus on it." Which I'm sure is 100% true, of course. And Barry was on the 1984 Olympic team, which was also news to me. Seems like you people would enjoy this article, so here it is.