George and Rita Madden will miss their favorite seats. (Craig Ruttle photo) | ZOOM |

        Next spring, when Reds fans file into Cinergy Field for Opening Day, baseball memories will hover, suspended in thin air over 14,000 absent seatbacks. The memories will survive; the places they were made will not.

        The red reserved seat where you sat one October night 10 years ago for the second game of the 1990 World Series, looking down the left-field line, hoping the ball Joe Oliver chopped down the line would be fair and cheering when it was, as the little-known but long-remembered Billy Bates scampered home to score the winning run.

        That seat will be gone.

        And the green seat in straight-away centerfield where you sat on Sept. 11, 1985, where you cheered yourself hoarse and cried like a baby when a looping liner off the bat of Pete Rose made a soft landing on the left-field Astroturf, and 4,192 became a number you would remember more easily than the number on your own bank account?

        That place will be gone, too. Monday morning, after today's final home game of a could-have-been, should-have-been season for the Cincinnati Reds, who have occupied that round bowl of a stadium for 30 years now, demolition crews will move inside and begin the months-long work of taking a 14,000-seat “bite” out of the ballpark.

Workers have been clearing out the "wedge" between Cinergy Field and Firstar Center (Glenn Hartong photo) | ZOOM |

        The project will turn Cinergy Field into a 42,000-capacity, open-ended ball park for the next two years while the new Great American Ball Park is being built next door.

        Cinergy Field — Riverfront Stadium to old-timers — will never be the same.

        Baseball is a game played at a pace slow enough to allow its best moments to be burned in a fan's memory forever.

        For those fans who aren't content to watch it on TV at home, nestled in their recliners — the ones who like to sit there in the stands among the beer cups and peanut shells yelling at umpires and cheering the home team — the mental videotape they play over and over again in their heads is always shot from whatever seat they happened to be sitting in when the big moment happened.

        But if those memories were made in the green and red seats of left and center fields, the fans who go to Cinergy next year will never see baseball from those particular vantage points again. It will be gone, just like places where all those Crosley Field memories were made generations ago.

        George Madden, a long-time Reds fan from West Portsmouth, Ohio, was thinking about that Friday night, as he and his wife, Rita, settled into their first-row red seats in left field for a game between the Reds and Astros.

        “I was standing up in the top row of the red seats for a game in the '76 World Series against the Yankees,” said Mr. Madden, who makes the two-and-a-half hour drive to Cinergy about 20 times a year.

        “I paid 18 bucks for that seat and I was about as far away from anything as you could get, but I was never so excited in my life,” Mr. Madden said. “All I cared about was I was in the ballpark.”

        Even though the players on the field that day were so far away they looked to be smaller than his thumb, he can remember everything that happened.

        Don Gullett, now the Reds pitching coach, got the win in a 5-1 Reds victory that featured a Joe Morgan home run and a three-hit day by Tony Perez.

        “Won't ever forget that one,” Mr. Madden said.

        These days, when the Maddens journey to Cincinnati for baseball, they go to the ticket window and ask for lower red seats in the outfield. When there is a big crowd, the tickets are hard to get, but, on most nights, they are siting out around aisles 339 or 340 in near isolation.

        “It's nice and quiet out here and you can see everything that's going on,” Mrs. Madden said. “You have to walk a ways for the concessions, but that's all right.

        “We think the outfield's the best place in the park,” she said.

        Next year, though, they'll have to go elsewhere: the seats they were sitting in Friday night won't exist anymore.

        “Maybe we'll try to get down in the blue,” Mr. Madden said.

        A few sections to the west of the Maddens on Friday were Steve and Brenda Napier of South Point, Ohio, who stopped in Cincinnati for a ballgame on a trip to Kansas to visit their son.

        They were sitting in section 343 in the red, just to the left of the foul pole. Next year, there will be nothing but air to their left in that section; that is where the “bite” in Cinergy will begin.

        “I don't mind sitting out here; it's a pretty good view,” Mrs. Napier said. “I'm not sure I'd want to be sitting here next year, unless they brace this part of the ballpark up pretty well.”

        Between the Maddens and the Napiers was the section of lower red seats where, on 33 occasions over 30 years, players have hit home-run balls into the red seats — mighty wallops, indeed.

        Tony Perez was the first to do it Aug. 11, 1970, about two months after Riverfront Stadium opened. Over the years, you could make quite an all-star team from the home-run hitters who have reached the red seats — Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Dave Parker, George Foster.

        Next year, home runs of that magnitude will just keep flying out of the park, landing probably in the middle of the Great American Ball Park construction site. Reds fans will have to find some other measuring stick to separate run-of-the-mill home runs from titanic blasts.

        Things like seeing a red-seat home run or watching Tom Browning pitch a perfect game are big memories, but ballparks create smaller ones, too, even on late September nights when the home team is out of the running and the team is just playing out the string and hoping for better things next year.

        Friday night was a good example. The Reds won a slugfest over the Astros 12-5, in a game where eight home run balls — six by the Reds, two by the Astros — flew over the Cinergy Field fence. Four of them were gobbled up by fans, because they landed in seats that, next year, will no longer exist.

        Glenn Morris of Springfield, Ohio, nabbed one of them. It came off the bat of Astro outfielder Richard Hidalgo and rattled around under the green seats before he scooped it up.

        “I've been waiting a long time to get one of these,” the 41-year-old Reds fan said. “Good thing I was sitting out here.”

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