Cinergy Field
From Ballpark Roadtrip
Cinergy Field
Pittsburgh Pirates @ Cincinatti Reds
July 5, 2001
Contents |
The Road Trip
Lumpy and Mike drove to Cleveland from the east coast on Wednesday, the day before the game. Dauber flew out from the bay area and we all met at Pyle's house, about 20 minutes south of Cleveland. Pyle was a friend of ours from college originally from the Cleveland area who moved back after school. On this year's trip we added Cooter, another friend from school who was living in Columbus. We all met at Pyle's place and took a trip into Cleveland to enjoy the fireworks show from the Flats. We got a decent night's sleep and everyone except Pyle headed down to Cincinatti early in the morning. We were very fortunate this year in that Cooter's parents volunteered their Chevy Blazer to be the roadtrip vehicle for the 2001 trip. Thanks a bunch! We had no problem getting in to Cincinatti and parked in a garage right across the street from Cinergy Field.
The Park
First of all, this is Riverfront Stadium and was much more interesting as a donut stadium with Astroturf everywhere except the cutouts around the bases. On the other hand, Riverfront was the first to paint metric distances on the outfield walls, what is that all about? Where else in the U.S. do we see this? I guess they were actually convinced that by 1980, all of the traffic signs would be in metric units. And another thing, what is Cinergy and what do they have to do with Cincinatti ? Well, after checking cinergy.com, they are a ultility. They supply gas and electric for the Cincinatti area. Now this corporate stadium sponsor stuff is getting a bit ridiculous! "Wrigley" Field is kinda cool because they are local and have been there and awful long time, it keeps the neighborhood feel to the stadium. "Coors" Field is even acceptable since Coors is in Colorado and is pretty famous for being the beer from out west. It is even understandable to have a "Pepsi" Arena because it's great advertisement and maybe fans will drink Pepsi instead of Coke to support their team. But what is with utilities sponsoring stadiums like Cinergy and PacBell? Do the fans actually have a real choice of their electricity supplier? Well, enough with beating on the name of Cinergy Field...it's a moot point because they're building a new park adjacent to Cinergy. It will be called Great American Ball Park which is cool because even though it is named after an insurance company, it sounds like a generic ballpark name. Way to go!
The stadium falls into the same category as County Stadium, old stadium, cookie cutter, nothing fancy but nothing terrible. It would have been cool if it was still the donut, we could pretend we were at the Coliseum and cheer for the gladiators to come onto the field. One thing notable about Cinergy is that we agreed that they had the best scoreboard trivia so far. We should have written down the questions, one of them was about Pittsburgh Pirates all-time sluggers and Willie Stargell and Dave Parker were part of the answer. Another negative about Cinergy (and this will become an important motif throughout our journey), they do not sell postcards at the stadium! We walked down the street to a CVS and got a fist full of postcards for $1.00. It's still cool to be able to get them at the stadium gift shop. I guess this whole internet thing might really take off and people won't be sending postcards anymore. ;)
The Game
It was again a Thursday day game on our first stop of the 2001 trip. It was a hot sunny day and we knew we would bake; fortunately Dauber brought some Coppertone Water Babies suntan lotion. This stuff is designed so you can camp out right underneath that big hole in ozone layer and not worry about being burned. It saved us all a lot of pain except Cooter, he still roasted. One cool thing that happened in this game was there was a backhoe working just over the left center wall. Aaron Boon hit a bomb to left field which fell close to the backhoe. The operator moved close to the wall, lifted the shovel end and positioned it above the wall and tilted it up and down to make it look like a hand waving "Bye - Bye!" That was pretty cool. The Reds won decisively in front of their home crowd in an otherwise somewhat lackluster game. We had a great seats and had a good time at our 2001 trip opener.
Pros: Great view of Newport, KY, good scoreboard trivia, stadium will be demolished soon and that stupid name will be gone, ushers show you to your seat and wipe them down for you
Cons: Cincinatti is a dumpy town, plain style stadium, we have to live with "Cinergy Field" until 2003
