If you call yourself a Cincinnati Reds fan but you go only when there is a bobble-head doll to be had, or if you bolt for the exits when the home team is down by three runs at the seventh-inning stretch, you need to meet Andrew Althaus.

Andrew Althuas sits in his season-ticket blue seat at Cinergy Field Friday. (Brandi Stafford photo) | ZOOM |

        This is a Reds fan.

        For every one of the Reds' 79 home games so far in 2002, the last season at Cinergy Field, the 34-year-old assistant bank cashier has gotten in his car in his hometown of Bluffton, Ohio, hopped onto Interstate 75 and driven 140 miles south to the ballpark with his single season ticket in Aisle 101, Row 11, Seat 103.

        And, for every one of those games, he has hopped back in the car after the final pitch and driven back home so he could be at his desk in the Citizens National Bank on Bluffton's Main Street at 7 a.m. the next morning.

        That means about 22,200 miles of driving, the rough equivalent of starting in Cincinnati, driving east around the world and ending up on the California coast.

        That's a Reds fan.

        “I can't help it,” Mr. Althaus said. “I love the Reds. I love baseball.”

        Mr. Althaus has had his single season ticket for three seasons now. The first two years, he missed only seven of 162 games.

        But this year, he said, with the Reds playing their final season in Cinergy Field, he made up his mind the day the season tickets arrived that he would not miss a single game.

        Ordinarily, he drives back and forth from Bluffton, but this weekend, he said, he would stay in a Cincinnati hotel for all three games against the Philadelphia Phillies.

        “Maybe Saturday I'll see if I can pick up a ticket somewhere to the Ohio State-UC game,” Mr. Althaus said. “When it's over, I can just walk over from Paul Brown Stadium.”

        Mr. Althaus said he is fortunate that he has the kind of job (in accounting at the Bluffton bank) where he can work “sort of flex-time.”

        He arrives around 7 a.m. and can leave about 3:30 p.m. With a quick stop at home, that can put him in his blue box seat long before the National Anthem is played at a 7:10 game.

        “Most of the time I get there in time to see some batting practice,” Mr. Althaus said.

        And on weekends - well, he has no worries in the world.

        “I know that if I had a wife and family at home, there's no way in the world I could do something like this,” he said.

        He won't miss a beat next year when the Reds move next door to Great American Ball Park. Mr. Althaus has already put down a deposit on a Scout seat in a section of the new ballpark that begins nine rows behind home plate.

        “I've been watching all year long as the new place has gone up,” Mr. Althaus said. “It really looks like a ballpark. I can't wait to see it from the inside.”

        Baseball has been in his blood since he was a little boy, when his parents would take him down to Riverfront Stadium to see his favorite team.

        “My first memory of this ballpark is sometime in the 1970s, in the Big Red Machine days, when I came down with my folks and we saw a double-header with the Dodgers,” he said.

        “We sat in the very top row of the red (seats). But I was in heaven. And I've been in love with the place ever since.”

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