Great American Ballpark (Cincinnati, Ohio)

 If you have followed my blog from the beginning (August 2007), or even just read the introductory remarks on this blog’s homepage, you are aware that one of our goals as we travel the country is to get to all 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) parks. We began this summer with twenty checked off the list, and figured since we were on the east side of the country already, we may as well pick up the Midwestern teams we hadn’t got to yet. So began our 2016 continuation of the Great MLB Park Tour, with our first stop in Cincinnati, Ohio to watch the Cincinnati Reds versus the Texas Rangers on 8/24/2016. The Reds have been around a long time, and have an interesting history.

The original team was called the Cincinnati Red Stockings, founded in 1866, and was baseball’s first fully professional team. There has been a litany of name changes, city changes, star players, and championships since then, way too much to document here, but easy enough to search out on the internet for those who are interested. I thought it would more fun to highlight a couple of the “fun facts” about the team instead!

•        The highest recorded attendance in a season was 2,629,708 in 1976, which happened to be the year they won their second consecutive World Series title.
•        The Cincinnati Reds were expelled from the National League in 1880 for continuing to rent out the ballpark on Sundays and not ceasing to sell beer during games.
•        There are some hardcore Reds fans that believe Opening Day should be named a Cincinnati holiday. For decades, the first pitch of every major league season officially took place in Cincinnati, and the Reds remain the only major league team to always open the season with a home game.

 Attendance during the game we attended was 16,001 (capacity is 42,319), and despite “root, root, rooting” for the Home Team, Texas won, 6-5.