By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

As they have year after year, baseball fans will file into the ballpark this afternoon, filling every seat and then some, for Cincinnati's unique holiday, Opening Day.

How many of them come back between now and the end of baseball's marathon season might be up to the 25 men who take the field.

OPENING DAY 2004 • Fresh hope, old questions • Reds offer discounts to try to get more fans into seats • A symbiotic relationship • Larkin will put on reflectors after game • Reds-Cubs series preview Click to view a detailed, printable map of the parade route, parking and street closings. (Acrobat PDF, 84k)

"This year, Reds fans will be from Missouri," says Helen Thomas, owner of the Skywalk Baseball Card shop downtown and the kind of devoted baseball fan who was up before dawn last Tuesday to watch the Yankees and Devil Rays play in the Tokyo Dome on ESPN2.

She does not mean they will switch allegiance to the St. Louis Cardinals.

What she means is that, after the disappointing and sometimes bewildering season the home team had in its brand-new ballpark, Reds fans will look at the reconstructed Reds and say, as Missourians are wont to do, Show me.

Except for the buzz from the opening of Great American Ball Park, 2003 was a year most Reds fans want to forget - an unpleasant nightmare, a six-month prison sentence with no possibility of parole.

A fifth-place finish. A record of 69 wins, 93 losses. An unending string of injuries. A series of trades that left Reds fans scratching their heads - Aaron Boone, Scott Williamson, Scott Sullivan. A roster that, in the final death throes of the 2003 season, might as well have been the Dayton Dragons, for all Reds fans knew about names like Dan Serafini, Scott Randall, Eric Valent.

But today, every team in the National League is tied for first place. Or last place, according to your point of view.

It is a clean slate, with a new general manager in Dan O'Brien and a field manager in Dave Miley who vows to wipe out the bumbling defense, boneheaded base-running and players' seeming lack of interest in fundamentals.

They may still be learning some of the names on the 25-man roster, but Reds fans seem to be willing to give the hometown team another chance.

"It's got to be better than last year; it's got to be," says Pete Pierson of Edgewood, Ky., a 31-year-old lifelong Reds fan who took some time off from his job at Batesville Casket in March to see the new-look Reds in spring training.

The young pitchers Pierson saw toiling in the Florida sun at Sarasota's Ed Smith Stadium looked pretty good to him - Aaron Harang, Jose Acevedo, Ryan Wagner and the rest.

Like most Reds fans, Pierson is not willing to predict an October playoff run or a World Series ring for these Reds, but he does believe it may be a better ball club than the skeptics expect.

"I think it would be great if they made a run at it with some of the young guys," Pierson says. "That would put people in the seats. I can see this as a third-place team."

Thomas says that while she hopes the Reds could at least match the 2.35 million-attendance figure in their first year at Great American Ball Park, early season injuries could empty the ballpark in a hurry.

"If they get back to having a triple-A and double-A line-up, people will stay away," Thomas says. "But I can't believe that's going to happen two years in a row."

U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine is one of the Reds' highest profile fans; he shares upper-deck season tickets with friends and has had Reds seats since the early days of Riverfront Stadium, back when he was Greene County prosecutor.

Last month, he went to Sarasota to visit his dad, who lives nearby, and the two of them sat in the sun for several Reds' spring training games.

He'll be at Great American Ball Park today, too.

"The Senate is cooperating; there's no votes scheduled Monday, so I can go and stay for the whole game," DeWine says. "I can't wait."

DeWine says he is "cautiously optimistic" about the team the Reds will field.

"It looks like it is going to be a back-to-the-basics team,'' DeWine says. "Dave Miley doesn't seem like the kind of manager who is going to put up with some of the sloppy play we saw last year."

Sandi Wilcox, the West Chester woman who is immediate past president of Rosie Reds, the 41-year-old booster organization, agrees that Miley's influence should be a positive.

"Who knows what the Reds will do?" says Wilcox. "We'll hope for the best. I do think they are going to be better."

The best thing this Reds team has going for it, according to lifelong fan Greg Vehr, may be that there are no high expectations.

"You've got a lot of young players trying to prove something and, if they have any success at all, it will be all that much more fun," says Vehr, who is vice president for governmental affairs at the University of Cincinnati. "And anything would be an improvement on last year."