As the Reds play the last of 2,572 baseball games at Cinergy Field today, it might be well to remember that it was only a building, a pile of concrete and steel. The players who wore the red-and-white jerseys are the ones who enlivened it. They are the ones who hit, pitched and threw their way into the individual and collective memories of Reds fans.

        It's for those players that a sell-out crowd will pack Cinergy Field today.

        “It's going to be big,” said pitcher Jose Rijo, who will start the final home game. “It's going to be exciting. I don't think it could get any bigger.”

        Shortstop Barry Larkin said Rijo was the natural pitching choice.

A man and a boy will remember this moment from Saturday afternoon's game at Cinergy Field: diving for a foul ball behind home plate. (Ernest Coleman photo) | ZOOM |

        “It'll be fun,” Larkin said. “Having Jose out there makes it really nice.”

        More than 50 former Reds players from the Big Red Machine era to the “Wire-to-Wire” World Champions of 1990 will be on the field today. They will be introduced at the closing ceremonies of the place they knew as Riverfront Stadium.

        Saturday morning, before the 2002 Reds played the first game of a rare day-night doubleheader, they reintroduced themselves to one another at the Millennium Hotel downtown. They came to autograph baseballs to give to each other as mementos, slap each other on the back, and relive the days when they wore Cincinnati red.

        “It's the fans who count,” said Johnny Bench, who came up as a 20-year-old raw-boned rookie from Oklahoma in 1968 and went on to become the consensus choice of baseball people as the greatest catcher who ever lived.

        “This is just a building we're talking about here,” Bench said. “What I'll remember is not the place, but the players I was on the field with and what we did out there.

        “The fans, that's where the real love of the game is,” he said. “The guy who has been down there in the front row for 32 years. The memories that guy has are priceless. I do think about what we have done and how much we have changed people's lives, how much we meant to them. It is awesome.”

        Those fans have memories of almost every one of the former Reds.

        There was Danny Jackson, the 23-game-winning pitcher of 1988; Mario Soto, the right-handed starter who carried the team through the dismal years of the early 1980s; Jack Billingham, the lanky right-hander who won 19 games twice for the Big Red Machine; Rob Dibble, the fire-balling “Nasty Boy” of the 1990 World Champions.

        In one corner were Pedro Borbon and Clay Carroll, the two rubber-armed mainstays of the Big Red Machine's relief corps, greeting each other with a handshake and a laugh.

        “There's my partner,” the 61-year-old Carroll said, “My main man.”

        Borbon is now 57 years old; he has a son, Pedro Jr., who is a reliever with the Houston Astros. He spends most of his time at home in Texas, raising canaries and parrots for a living. But when he was asked Saturday how his pitching arm was, he rolled up the sleeve of his right arm and flexed his biceps.

        “If I could go in a game and face just one right-handed hitter,” he said, in a dead serious tone, “I could pitch tonight.”

        Carroll, too, was ready to play.

        “My arm's great,” he said, wind-milling his pitching arm around his head. “See? Perfect.”

        They were the workhorses of manager Sparky Anderson's bullpen in 1970, each routinely pitching 100-plus innings a year.

        “We didn't worry about days off, or if we had pitched three innings yesterday, or if our arms were sore,” Carroll said. “We just went out and did it.”

        As he talked, Tony Perez walked by, slapping him on the shoulder and flashing his ever-present smile.

        “Hey, hoss,” Carroll said.

        The colorful Dominican pitcher talked about the wild bench-clearing brawl he found himself in the middle of against the Pirates in July 1974, where Borbon pinned Pirate Daryl Patterson to the ground, pulled his hair out in clumps and bit him on the side, requiring a tetanus shot.

        “The public-address announcer in Pittsburgh announced me as "the Dominican Dracula,”' Mr. Borbon said. “I didn't like that much. I just got over-excited.”

        For Billingham, who came to Riverfront Stadium in 1972 in a trade with the Astros that brought Joe Morgan and Cesar Geronimo along, the day was the chance to be “part of something really special.”

        “I didn't know it at the time, but I'm glad I was here,” Mr. Billingham said.

        He remembers with no fondness at all his stint as Opening Day starter in 1974, when the Reds played the Braves at Riverfront.

        It was the day he made the record book - Hank Aaron hit a first-inning home run that was his 714th, tying him with Babe Ruth.

        “The first inning and I've got 55,000 people booing me at my home ballpark,” said Billingham, who works now in the Astros' minor-league system. “That's baseball for you.”

        Reporters John Fay and John Erardi contributed.

        Relive 40 years of memories in our special section

Reds greats gather for one last Cinergy memory Cinergy's perfect ending? Fans write similar scripts Watch stadium's greatest moments online Game 1: Phillies 5, Reds 3 Game 1: Reds Box, Runs Game 2: Phillies 5, Reds 4 Game 2: Reds Box, Runs Reds Notebook: Dunn ends homer drought Dodgers stay two behind Giants

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