Rafael Furcal loves what they've done to Cinergy Field. The diminutive shortstop homered, hit two more balls to the warning track and drove in a career-high four runs Monday as the Atlanta Braves pulled away to a 10-4 victory in the first game at the Cincinnati Reds' reconfigured field.

        If the opener is any measure, the National League has a new launching pad. Four balls reached the warning track, two slammed off the drawn-in walls and four more cleared them, nudged by a swirling wind.

        Furcal's tiebreaking solo homer off Dennys Reyes in the seventh soared over the 8-foot wall in left-center and was retrieved by a hard-hatted construction worker helping with the groundwork for a new ballpark next door.

        “Yes, it's a surprise to me,” Furcal said. “You don't see that every day. I had pretty good swings and the ball carried pretty good.”

        The 5-foot-10, 165-pound shortstop hit only four homers in 455 at-bats last season, when he was the NL's Rookie of the Year. He also flew out to the wall in his first at-bat and had a sacrifice fly to the warning track.

        “It was weird,” said catcher Javy Lopez, who hit two doubles off the wall. “Sometimes the wind was blowing out, sometimes it was blowing in. With the open (outfield), it makes the wind twist. It's going to be like that the whole year because of the shape of the stadium.”

        Andruw Jones also homered and Quilvio Veras drove in three runs with a bases-loaded double for Atlanta in the eighth.

        All of Cincinnati's runs came off homers — Dmitri Young's solo shot and Sean Casey's three-run homer off John Burkett that tied the game at 4 in the sixth inning.

        “Sometimes, the ball didn't carry. Sometimes, the ball took off,” said Young, who had to run down Furcal's sacrifice fly to left field. “On Furcal's fly, I was playing in and that ball just kept going and going. On Andruw Jones' ball and the one that Lopez hit, I didn't know if they were that strong or if they got the ball up in the jet stream.”

        For a few moments in the fifth inning, the umpires were prepared to award Lopez a homer on a ball that didn't clear the wall. His drive to center off starter Pete Harnisch smacked the black plywood above the green padding that extends 14 feet, and Miller immediately twirled his right hand in the home run signal. It was the wrong call — the entire 40-foot wall is in play.

        Lopez, who held up at second, started trotting toward home as Reds manager Bob Boone shot out of the dugout. Home plate umpire Jim Joyce reversed the call before Lopez made it home.

        “I thought everybody knew that it had to go over it for a home run,” Boone said. “It was in all the newspapers. The key is to get it right, and they got it right.”

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