By John Byczkowski
and John Erardi
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The first real pitch is still two days away, but baseball fans want to know:Is Great American Ball Park the great American ballpark?Reds officials say yes, definitely. Others say a definite maybe.

"I think it's a keeper," says John Pastier, an architect and national ballpark consultant. "When you're in Cincinnati, you're going to know you're in Cincinnati. This is not going to look like the other `retro' parks very much."

The new riverfront park is named after the Cincinnati insurance company headed by the team's majority owner, Carl Lindner. But "Great American" is more than a name. It's an aspiration, a daring grasp at immortality, a claim that this ballpark is the best place in America for the great American pastime.

Great American does enough things well to make it a contender: The red seats that buck the boring trend toward green, the view of the river, the Sun/Moon Deck in right field and the vast Crosley Terrace entrance. The bridge in the upper-deck "gap" may be one of the best places in America to stop and watch a ballgame.

But there are glitches, too: Views of the bullpens would be among the best in baseball if the fences weren't so high. The administration building and ticket office are ho-hum, and the monstrous simulated smokestacks block way too many seats. Architects who reviewed the park for the Enquirer (March 28 story) panned it for adding too many features to please too many people.

Keep in mind, though, that Great American isn't finished yet.

When the rubble of Cinergy Field is fully cleared away, Main Street will be extended to the river and the ballpark's plaza extended westward. The surrounding area will feature a museum, a festival area to rival vibrant Eutaw Street at Baltimore's Camden Yards, and a capital R "Rose Garden," on the approximate spot where Pete Rose's 4,192nd hit landed.

Finding the perfect park

Great American is in the running for America's greatest because the perfect ballpark doesn't exist. Even the best have their flaws. Fenway Park in Boston is cramped and uncomfortable. The concourses in Chicago's Wrigley Field are tight, and screens in the outfield - put there by management to block views of the game from nearby buildings - make it hostile. Even the best of the new ballparks, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, has a few too many bad seats.

People who know ballparks have definite ideas of what a great ballpark should be. And Great American measures up.

Bob Bluthardt, head of the ballparks committee for the Society of American Baseball Research, doesn't like big parks, those with more than 40,000 seats, because they typically have too many bad seats. Turner Field in Atlanta can hold 50,062, but rarely does, and the Braves have cut prices on many tickets for the past two years to try to fill seats.

Great American has 42,263seats, which makes it one of the smallest of the dozen new ballparks born in the building boom that began with Camden Yards.

The ideal ballpark also has to be in the city, not the suburbs, Bluthardt says. Fans need to pass shops and restaurants on city streets on their way in.

"The walk to the park, there's nothing like it," Bluthardt says.

The Ballpark in Arlington is well designed, but sits in the middle of a Texas-sized parking lot halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth.

"It's a nice architecture, but it's connected to nothing," he says. Some people in Cincinnati still argue - and probably always will - that Great American should have been built between downtown and Over-the-Rhine at Broadway Commons. But others consider being downtown and on the river a plus.

Reflecting a city's character

Simply incorporating the best features of great ballparks, however, won't produce a great ballpark. Pastier, the architect who consulted on Camden Yards and the ballpark under construction in San Diego, says a ballpark has to reflect the city it's in. It has to contribute to the diversity of ballparks nationwide. It has to do something that hasn't been done before.

"The more I looked at ballparks, I thought, hey, there's a lot of ways to do this. There isn't only one best one," he says. With that standard, "You can even appreciate at the extremes some of the cookie cutters."

Those are the nearly identical concrete donuts conceived during the 1960s in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Cincinnati. "I was impressed in certain ways with Riverfront (Stadium)," Pastier says. He compares it to a bull ring.

"You could argue (those stadiums) were too big, but you did get the sense of a contained universe there. I'm not saying the cookie cutters were the best thing, but even they have their merits."

Among the new ballparks, Pastier likes the Iron-Age scoreboard at Camden Yards and the views from PNC Park in Pittsburgh. At Coors Field in Denver, he likes the row of purple seats that mark one mile above sea level. At PacBell Park in San Francisco, he likes the spot where you can watch the game through a chain-link fence, without having to buy a ticket.

And he likes Great American. He toured it two weeks ago. He likes the batter's-eye pavilion in center field, and the fact that the first-base-side decks are stacked differently from those on the third-base side.

"Overall I just think the place has a good feel to it," he says. "When you're in the seating bowl, looking around, it's asymmetrical, it's a little irregular, it's not crazy, it's not contrived. I think it feels right."

Other things give a ballpark an edge, too. And even flawed ballparks aspire to greatness when good decisions are made - in the stands and on the field. Take Jacobs Field in Cleveland: There are too many luxury suites. The upper deck is too high. Too many fans are watching the game on TV monitors, because in most of the park, you can't see the field from the concourses.

But it seems there's an usher every 20 feet, waiting to serve. Anyone seen wandering aimlessly - not uncommon in ballparks - is almost sure to be asked Do you need help? Can we help you find something? The Indians run Jacobs well, and that makes up for a lot.

Winning does, too. The Indians won 651 games over seven years from 1995 to 2001, and sold out 455 straight games. Meanwhile, crowds are shrinking at beautiful new ballparks in Pittsburgh, Detroit and Milwaukee because the teams there lose too much.

More smarts, more success

Architects can put up steel, and cooks can grill hot dogs, but only Reds management can put a winner on the field.

"People ask me, will a new ballpark save a franchise?" Bluthardt says. "A new ballpark will not save a franchise, just as money will not save a franchise. What will save a franchise is smarts. Smarts come from making good decisions."

Riverfront Stadium was far from perfect, but it had an aura. Gods had played there, assembled by general manager Bob Howsam: Pete Rose, Hall of Famers Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez, with Dave Concepcion and George Foster right behind them and manager Sparky Anderson in the dugout.

Inside the main entrance of Great American are two large mosaics, one honoring the original 1869 team, the other honoring the Big Red Machine of the 1970s.

"You've got these two beautiful mosaics, but guess what?" Reds chief operating officer John Allen says. "There's an empty wall next to it where the next era can go."