By John Erardi
The Cincinnati Enquirer

John Allen got to do the next best thing to hitting a home run in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series.

The Reds chief operating officer got to be point man in the design of Great American Ball Park, the nation's newest ballpark for baseball's oldest professional team.

When the ballpark opens officially in just two weeks, fans will see a place that clearly bears Allen's fingerprints. The big statues of Reds greats, a 50-foot tall limestone sculpture and seats that seem to be right on the field - all provide the kind of picture-postcard moments that Allen envisioned for the $280 million ballpark.

"With John, we learned to listen carefully," says HOK architect Greg Sherlock, the project designer. "He was a good filter for our ideas. If I had to describe what that filter is, it's that he knows what the fans want. He knows how much they wanted intimacy and a sense of history in their ballpark."

Allen's philosophy - be different, be picturesque, and above all, be a ballpark that puts fans' comfort first - guided architects through the design process.

"John was big on 'neighborhoods' with us, and that really comes across well in this ballpark," Sherlock says. "One of John's big objectives was 'anything but that,' and by 'that' I mean the sameness of Riverfront Stadium."

Many unique views

Allen brushes off any credit for a ballpark he is sure fans will love. "It's a team effort," he says.

But his vision paved the way.

No matter where you sit or stand in Great American, the backdrop is different. Thanks largely to Allen, the effect of taking a walk around the concourses is kaleidoscopic.

There's "The Gap" in the upper deck on the third-base side of home plate that offers a fine river view. There's a third-base-side, upper-deck concourse from which to watch the game, something no other ballpark has. There are seats so close to the field that fans there shouldn't just wear baseball gloves, they better know how to use them.

The "Machine Room" brew pub features a porch for standing in front. The double deck in left field has top-deck bleachers that will collect well-struck home runs. A replica Crosley-Field era clock will keep time above the left-field scoreboard.

A boxy "batter's eye" in center field has a spectacular, low-to-the-field party room inside. Double smokestacks in right-center will emit fireworks from the top and misty water from underneath to cool fans on hot days. A right-field seating section will remind old-timers of the "Sun Deck/Moon Deck" at old Crosley Field.

And there's the Art Deco touch of silhouettes of three ballplayers on the wall beneath the press box that reads: "Home of the Reds."

Precisely.

A Cincinnati postcard

Great American is character-filled, without having a lot of expensive architectural touches.

It couldn't afford them.

"John kept emphasizing the need for 'picture postcards,' " says environmental designer Ray Berberich, who at the time was with FRCH Design and assembled the teams to produce the giant bas relief outside the ballpark and the two, big Italian-glass mosaics inside that pay tribute to the Big Red Machine and 1869 Red Stockings.

The 50-foot-tall bas relief will be the first thing to "greet" fans arriving at Great American. Titled "The Spirit of Baseball," the scene depicts a boy, clad in a baseball uniform, looking into the clouds where there are three major-leaguers - a hitter, catcher and another fielder.

Crosley Terrace, the focal point of the main entrance, will contain the statues of slugging outfielder Frank Robinson, pitcher-turned-broadcaster Joe Nuxhall, big-hitting catcher Ernie Lombardi and muscular first baseman Ted Kluszewski. All of them played in Crosley Field, the most beloved of all Cincinnati's ballparks (1912-70).

"We were in a cookie-cutter stadium (at Cinergy Field)," Allen explains. "Everybody was going 'retro' in their new ballpark design. Twenty years from now we didn't want to be saying, 'Oh geez, we're just like Camden Yards (in Baltimore), we're just like The Jake (Jacobs Field in Cleveland). Let's do something different. Let's do something Cincinnati. Let's not forget our history and our tradition. Let's make sure we pay homage to that.' "

Everything that's part of Great American's main entrance are signature pieces whose costs were borne by the Reds.

Maybe an accountant from Norton, Kan., whose high school didn't even have a baseball team is what Cincinnati needed at this point in its ballpark history. Allen grew up on the plains of western Kansas and still remembers fondly taking a train by himself at 11 years old to Chicago in 1959 to see his first major-league game at Comiskey Park.

In 1990, he chucked his accounting career in Kansas City to pursue a career in baseball. He earned his master's in sports management from Ohio State, worked as an intern for the Triple-A Columbus Clippers and soon rose to its director of business operations. He joined the Reds in 1995 as controller, was named interim managing executive in 1996 and chief operating officer in 1999.

In effect, a bookkeeper built a ballpark.

"I never envisioned that," he says.

Built by a fan

Allen also picked up a lot of ideas in his travels to other ballparks.

He liked the St. Louis Cardinals' party room inside the "batter's eye," which is the dark-colored wall or building that provides a background for batters facing a white ball coming at them at 90 mph-plus. The party room in the batter's eye at Great American is one of the hidden gems of the ballpark.

Allen liked the "Chop House" brew pub in Atlanta; Cincinnati may have done it one better with the Machine Room, the glass-enclosed brew pub that has a wonderful view of the field.

Allen didn't like the narrowness of concourses in some of the new ballparks, so, being a big believer in creature comforts, he made sure Great American has a third-base concourse so spacious that two double-wide mobile homes could pass each other with ease.

During the ballpark's design, Allen relied heavily on HOK architect Joe Spear, who relished the opportunity to oversee a "different" ballpark design in Cincinnati.

And Spear was nothing short of amazed when Allen was so open to the idea of having a "gap" in Great American's upper deck, an opening that would help "connect" the ballpark to downtown and the river.

Nobody had ever before designed a gap in an upper deck. Visually, "The Gap" pokes a hole in the sameness of every other baseball park in America - the continuous upper-deck seating bowl that horseshoes out in either direction from behind home plate.

Allen was guided in the design of Great American by having been, for 15 years, a season ticket-holder at Royals Stadium (now Kauffman Stadium) in Kansas City.

In typical Allen fashion, he doesn't volunteer this fact.

"I was wondering if you were going to figure that out," he says.

Royals Stadium is the only ballpark built in the 1970s that wasn't maligned as being a "cookie cutter," the way Riverfront and Three Rivers and Veterans and Atlanta-Fulton County all were.

Now, Great American is about to become most recognized on national TV for its fireworks-belching smokestacks in right-center field with the "misters" beneath them.

Says Allen: "I might spend some time out there myself."

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E-mail jerardi@enquirer.com