Hal McCoy penned one of the final columns of his career as he retires at season's end. It will end his 37 years covering the Reds, the longest any active writer has covered one team.

The hammer fell today and it hurts like hell.

They're putting the ol' baseball scribe out to pasture and if there are teardrops on your screen, well, that's from me, just an old softie.

My run is over - 37 years of bliss, doing a job that wasn't a job. It was pure joy and pure fun.

And I wanted you, all my loyal readers and followers over the past 3 1/2 decades, to be the first to know. The run is nearly over.

The newspaper told me today that it will no longer cover the Cincinnati Reds the same way it has in the past, beginning next season. And don't blame the paper. It is the economic times and we're all suffering. They just can't afford the more than a quarter of a million dollars a year to send me coast-to-coast.

The Dayton Daily News has been nothing but great to me. How many companies would keep a legally blind employee and furnish that employee with a driver and/or a car service to get him to and from games? The paper did that for me and it certainly didn't have to do it.

The DDN didn't have to do that, but it did and I'm so forever grateful, just as I am for the 37 years they permitted me to do what I love to do so much.

So it is off to retirement after this season ends. It isn't early retirement. I'm 68, soon to be 69. But it isn't something I want to do. I feel like I still have my fastball at the keyboard and can deal with the curves thrown my way.

McCoy is an excellent baseball writer and he will be sorely missed. If you need any sort of evidence for that, there have been nearly 360 comments since the column went up last night on the Dayton Daily News' website.

It is a shame baseball will be losing another spectacular writer, but hopefully this will be a reminder for us to not take for granted whoever we read to cover our favorite team, whatever sport it may be. The current economic condition is taking down the newspaper business and with it several outstanding baseball writers.

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