By Bill Koch
The Cincinnati Enquirer

When interleague play began in 1997 and the Reds traveled to Cleveland to play the Indians, they couldn't help feeling a little jealous as they looked around Jacobs Field.

The Reds still had the winning tradition and three World Series championships in the last 22 years, but the Indians had surpassed them with a nicer ballpark, a larger payroll and a better team.

Cleveland was considered baseball's model franchise, and the Reds openly copied their approach as they moved toward Great American Ball Park.

But tonight's three-game series opener against the Indians at Jacobs Field will show how much the tables have turned. Now, it's the Reds playing in a new ballpark and drawing large crowds, while the Indians are struggling both on the field and at the gate.

It's doubtful that the Reds, or any other major league team, will ever match the Indians' record streak of 455 sellouts that ended April 4, 2001. And in contrast to the Indians, who won six division titles and two pennants from 1995 to 2001, the Reds haven't been in the playoffs since 1995.

But this year, the Reds are the club with the upper hand, and it's been a long time since they've been able to say that.

"We face an extremely talented offensive team," said Mark Shapiro, the Indians' executive vice president and general manager. "They have a chance to put a lot of runs on the board in every game. Their challenge has been pitching, but they've done a good job staying in the race."

The atmosphere is quite different at Jacobs Field now than it was the first time the Reds made the trip north.

Super fan John Adams still sits in the outfield bleachers and bangs his drum for his beloved Indians, as he has at every home game for the past 30 years, but he doesn't have as much company as he once had.

This year, the Indians are averaging only 19,958 fans through 36 dates in their 43,389-seat ballpark.

"The fans that do come are baseball fans," Adams said, "so you get a lot less of 'Oh, boy, this is the place to be. The party's here.' Some of the people who did come in like that, they didn't know how to spell baseball."

As recently as last spring, Indians fans still believed their team could compete at the same level that landed them in the playoffs year after year, especially after the club started with an 11-1 record.

11-1.

But Shapiro, who took over as GM for John Hart in November 2001, knew better. He began the season knowing that major changes were around the corner. Revenue wasn't keeping pace with one of baseball's highest payrolls, the farm system had slipped, the core players were getting older, and many of their contracts were close to expiring.

"We were kind of in the middle," Shapiro said, "which is a bad place to be."

Shapiro hoped the club would stay competitive while undergoing a necessary transition, but by the end of April, the Indians were 13-13.

By June, Shapiro decided that nothing short of a complete rebuilding process would make the Indians competitive again. The trade that sent pitcher Bartolo Colon to the Montreal Expos on June 27 for four young prospects signaled that the club was building for the future.

"We don't have the market to support artificial rebuilding," Shapiro said. "It came down to one question: Is there a way to speed up the time frame to get us back into contention in a two- or three-year period?"

He decided to trade veterans to stockpile prospects. Soon, veteran pitchers Chuck Finley and Paul Shuey were gone. The two moves didn't sit well with Indians fans.

"The fact that we were doing it against a backdrop of winning so many championships (made it harder)," Shapiro said. "It would have been more acceptable to fans if it had been more obvious to them."

A payroll that stood at $78.9 million at the start of the 2002 season, ninth highest in baseball, is at $48.8 million this year, which ranks 25th among major league clubs.

The Reds, by contrast, were at $45 million last year. This year, they're at $56.9 million, good for No. 17.

Shapiro, in his 12th season with the Indians, said that when Jacobs Field opened in 1994, the club benefited from a combination of economic factors that enabled their payroll to soar into the $90-million range. Those circumstances, he says, are probably unique.

"We had a new ballpark," he said. "There was no (NFL) team in town. We were coming off 40 years of losing. Winning was so new it was really appreciated, and coming off a strike year, the rest of the industry was depressed. We had an artificial set of circumstances that put us in the top five of payrolls.

"Our payroll is now indicative of where we'll be when we have our core. It will fluctuate between $40 million and $70 million."

If the rebuilding process has been difficult for Indians fans to accept, it has been equally disturbing to Shapiro.

"There are times when the emotional and competitive side of me is disgusted with losing," he said. "But other moments, when I look at it from the business side, I realize that we took the best course. We have a strategy and a plan. We are positioned as well as we can to get through this as quickly as we can.

"In the best-case scenario, we contend next year. I really believe, in the worst-case scenario, that we'll be competitive in '05."

E-mail bkoch@enquirer.com