2. Cinergy Field
Let's make one thing clear: Cinergy Field is a ridiculous name. I always refer to the now demolished stadium as Riverfront Stadium. However, the fact remains that I was never at Riverfront as the rename was in full effect during my four visits there. In the interest of keeping the lists accurate I always the official name of the stadium... but it's Riverfront.
On a side note, I originally planned to post this series in the order I'd visited the stadiums, but as I noted in the Jacobs Field post I assumed, possibly incorrectly, that I'd been to the Jake in 1997. History says it was probably 1999, while I know for certain that my first visit to Riverfront was on Saturday, August 8, 1998, so my posts are already out of order!
However, it was the second game I attended at Riverfront that's seared into my memory. In 1998 I was on co-op at a company in Lexington, Kentucky, from Memorial Day to Christmas. My first trip was mostly out of sheer boredom - they were playing the Brewers, who weren't anything special, but Kentucky was boring. The second trip was me making a longshot bet that came *this* close to paying off.
As any baseball fan knows, 1998 was the year that proved that chicks dig the long ball. Mark McGwire was (and is) a personal favorite of mine from his years in Oakland, and I remember thinking that "there's no way he can keep up this pace, but if he does it'd be great to see him." So in June or so I bought a ticket for a Wednesday night in early September, specifically September 9.
Somehow (ok, the steroids didn't hurt), Big Mac kept up the pace. In mid-August the question went from "can he break the record?" to "when will he break the record?" There was a chance that I could be at the game where the record fell. Suddenly that longshot bet was looking pretty damn good.
Alas, I just missed. On Tuesday, September 8 Big Mac went deep in St. Louis for number 62. The record had fallen, but I was definitely going to the game the next night anyway. I may have bought my ticket earlier, but the idea certainly wasn't original. The Reds sold more tickets that night than they had during the 1990 World Series. Originally Big Mac wasn't going to play because he'd been up all night giving interviews, but when informed of the crowd, he graciously played.
I have never in my life seen a stadium crowd like that one. The Reds and the Cardinals are rivals, but when Big Mac came to the plate in the first inning the crowd went nuts. It seemed like every person in the stadium was taking a picture at once as a wall of flash bulbs went off through his at bat. McGwire didn't reach base in either of his two at-bats, but the crowd cheered him just the same. When he was pulled for a sub, the crowd quickly disappeared. At the end of the game it was like the crowd had never been.
Ironically, McGwire's replacement in the order was rookie J.D. Drew, who hit his first major league home run. Drew was widely disliked because his agent got him a huge deal for a team that did not originally draft him. The crowd booed him, and his home run was thrown back by the crowd, which was the first time I ever saw that.
In any event, that was quite easily the biggest baseball crowd I've seen in my life. There were 51,969 tickets sold that night, which far outstrips the sellouts I saw in the Jake in 1999 & 2000; the Jake only held 43,368 back then. Even if it hadn't, I've never seen flash bulbs like that and probably never will again. As I've said before, if anyone has the email I wrote after that game, I'd love to have a copy!
This game was far more memorable than the stadium itself, which was a generic 1970s multisport franchise. It was a large concrete ring... and I honestly remember very little beyond that. I enjoyed it, but at that time I didn't have much to compare it to. At least there was a sense of history. After all, the Big Red Machine played there.
Oh, and those other two trips? One was in June 1999 as a stop on the way to West Virginia for a wedding. I went with three fraternity brothers (also en route to the same wedding) and several women from college who lived in Cincinnati. The Indians were the visiting team so it was quite crowded as all the Clevelanders who couldn't get tickets normally migrated south. The other game was in 2000, and I recall little about it.
A much more lasting memory was the day they demolished the old place. As with all the other multisport facilities from the 1970s, fashion changed and Cincinnati splashed out a lot of money to subsidize the Reds with Great American Ball Park. on Sunday, December 29, 2002, Riverfront was imploded. As it happens, at the time dmw7 was living on the Kentucky side of the river. I crashed at jenny31978's mom's house, got up very, very early in the morning and drove to Kentucky. dmw7, her then boyfriend and I watched it get taken down from the hill overlooking the stadium.
This video isn't from the direction we were facing, but the noise of the charges and the rumbling of the concrete were easy to hear even from the top of the hill we were on. Thus died Riverfront.
Park Rankings
RankParkTeamFirst Visit# Visits
1 Jacobs FieldCleveland IndiansApril 17, 199963
2Cinergy FieldCincinnati RedsAugust 8, 19984
3 The MetrodomeMinnesota TwinsJune 22, 19923
On a side note, I originally planned to post this series in the order I'd visited the stadiums, but as I noted in the Jacobs Field post I assumed, possibly incorrectly, that I'd been to the Jake in 1997. History says it was probably 1999, while I know for certain that my first visit to Riverfront was on Saturday, August 8, 1998, so my posts are already out of order!
However, it was the second game I attended at Riverfront that's seared into my memory. In 1998 I was on co-op at a company in Lexington, Kentucky, from Memorial Day to Christmas. My first trip was mostly out of sheer boredom - they were playing the Brewers, who weren't anything special, but Kentucky was boring. The second trip was me making a longshot bet that came *this* close to paying off.
As any baseball fan knows, 1998 was the year that proved that chicks dig the long ball. Mark McGwire was (and is) a personal favorite of mine from his years in Oakland, and I remember thinking that "there's no way he can keep up this pace, but if he does it'd be great to see him." So in June or so I bought a ticket for a Wednesday night in early September, specifically September 9.
Somehow (ok, the steroids didn't hurt), Big Mac kept up the pace. In mid-August the question went from "can he break the record?" to "when will he break the record?" There was a chance that I could be at the game where the record fell. Suddenly that longshot bet was looking pretty damn good.
Alas, I just missed. On Tuesday, September 8 Big Mac went deep in St. Louis for number 62. The record had fallen, but I was definitely going to the game the next night anyway. I may have bought my ticket earlier, but the idea certainly wasn't original. The Reds sold more tickets that night than they had during the 1990 World Series. Originally Big Mac wasn't going to play because he'd been up all night giving interviews, but when informed of the crowd, he graciously played.
I have never in my life seen a stadium crowd like that one. The Reds and the Cardinals are rivals, but when Big Mac came to the plate in the first inning the crowd went nuts. It seemed like every person in the stadium was taking a picture at once as a wall of flash bulbs went off through his at bat. McGwire didn't reach base in either of his two at-bats, but the crowd cheered him just the same. When he was pulled for a sub, the crowd quickly disappeared. At the end of the game it was like the crowd had never been.
Ironically, McGwire's replacement in the order was rookie J.D. Drew, who hit his first major league home run. Drew was widely disliked because his agent got him a huge deal for a team that did not originally draft him. The crowd booed him, and his home run was thrown back by the crowd, which was the first time I ever saw that.
In any event, that was quite easily the biggest baseball crowd I've seen in my life. There were 51,969 tickets sold that night, which far outstrips the sellouts I saw in the Jake in 1999 & 2000; the Jake only held 43,368 back then. Even if it hadn't, I've never seen flash bulbs like that and probably never will again. As I've said before, if anyone has the email I wrote after that game, I'd love to have a copy!
This game was far more memorable than the stadium itself, which was a generic 1970s multisport franchise. It was a large concrete ring... and I honestly remember very little beyond that. I enjoyed it, but at that time I didn't have much to compare it to. At least there was a sense of history. After all, the Big Red Machine played there.
Oh, and those other two trips? One was in June 1999 as a stop on the way to West Virginia for a wedding. I went with three fraternity brothers (also en route to the same wedding) and several women from college who lived in Cincinnati. The Indians were the visiting team so it was quite crowded as all the Clevelanders who couldn't get tickets normally migrated south. The other game was in 2000, and I recall little about it.
A much more lasting memory was the day they demolished the old place. As with all the other multisport facilities from the 1970s, fashion changed and Cincinnati splashed out a lot of money to subsidize the Reds with Great American Ball Park. on Sunday, December 29, 2002, Riverfront was imploded. As it happens, at the time dmw7 was living on the Kentucky side of the river. I crashed at jenny31978's mom's house, got up very, very early in the morning and drove to Kentucky. dmw7, her then boyfriend and I watched it get taken down from the hill overlooking the stadium.
Click to viewThis video isn't from the direction we were facing, but the noise of the charges and the rumbling of the concrete were easy to hear even from the top of the hill we were on. Thus died Riverfront.
Park Rankings
RankParkTeamFirst Visit# Visits
1 Jacobs FieldCleveland IndiansApril 17, 199963
2Cinergy FieldCincinnati RedsAugust 8, 19984
3 The MetrodomeMinnesota TwinsJune 22, 19923