Power Stacks: Zac Taylor talks Elly De La Cruz, the Reds and his love of baseball

Most nights during the summer, Zac Taylor said that he’s sitting on his back porch and watching the Reds.

Taylor grew up in Oklahoma, where all of the Sooner’s stars were his favorite athletes. But he didn’t have a favorite professional baseball team until he settled into Cincinnati. Now, it’s at the point where he refers to the Reds as “we.”

Recently, I ran into Taylor at a Reds game and had a great conversation with him about the team. Afterwards, Brian Giesenschlag had the idea of having Taylor on our Power Stacks Podcast as a crossover episode of Paul Dehner Jr.’s The Growler.

Taylor sat down with Brian, Paul and I for a conversation recently where we just walked baseball.

Here’s what was discussed.

-The behind the scenes look that former Reds manager David Bell provided Taylor, and what Taylor took away from it. “I enjoy seeing moments where they’re going through something I can relate to.”

- “I didn’t realize there was a batting cage right behind the dugout. Postgame, they were (hitting). That was fascinating. It was something I had never even considered. At midnight, people are in there.”

-Taylor gives his scouting report of Elly De La Cruz, who told the Bengals’ head coach that he could be a quarterback. “(He’s) rare,” Taylor said.

-Reds players who could play football and Bengals players with standout skills in other sports. (This didn’t stick in the show, but Zac Taylor added later on that he saw Luis Mey as an F tight end).

-Taylor’s short-lived playing career and the great Home Run Derby of 1998 (the one on a sandlot field in Oklahoma).

-Taylor learns the origins of “Do you want to have a catch”

-Taylor hasn’t met Terry Francona yet, but his son Brooks has met the Reds’ manager. On a flight, Brooks and Francona sat next to each other and happened to both be watching the same episode of the TV show Lost.

Here are the links