By John Byczkowski
The Cincinnati Enquirer

A.T. "Chico" Cotton is set for baseball. The Richmond, Ind., resident and lifelong Cincinnati Reds fan (his nickname comes from 1960s infielder Chico Ruiz) has tickets to bring his family to Great American Ball Park for three games this summer, and they're good ones: the Giants, the Astros and the Diamondbacks.

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)

Cotton paid half-price for his right-field Sun/Moon Deck seats, because the Reds gave his church group a big discount on the tickets. He'll pay $7.50 each for seats that are normally $15 - and that's all he's willing to pay.

He says he doesn't understand what the Reds are doing - trading away stars for younger ballplayers, failing to find proven pitchers. "They may have a plan, but they're not letting out what the plan is," Cotton says.

So, three games at half-price is his limit. "I'd love to go down more often," he says. "Till I know what they're actually going to do, why waste my money?"

Cotton took the bait. Facing a decline in attendance following a miserable 2003 season, the Cincinnati Reds plan to get back into fans' good graces by luring them with cheap tickets, showing them what's new and interesting at Great American, and hoping the team plays well enough to get them to come back more often.

In Reds ticket sales, "there's a decrease pretty much across the board" says John Allen, the Reds' chief operating officer. He wouldn't say how big the decline is. "I think we'll do fine attendance-wise. It certainly won't be - unless the team does really, really well - it won't probably equal last year's total" of 2.35 million, he says.

Indeed, an Enquirer review of the Reds' Web site shows more tickets available now than a year ago. Last year at this time, the Reds had sold out five home games, but so far only Opening Day is sold out.

The fans' frustrations aren't lost on the Reds, who've responded by discounting as freely as sidewalk Rolex vendors. This season, there's a discount of one kind or another for 62 of 81 home games. To the traditional half-price ticket nights for seniors, teens and college students, the Reds have added 13 nights with $8 bleacher seats at half price, more family discounts and more half-price games for groups of 25 or more.

"The research we did last year showed that fans liked the ballpark experience," says Cal Levy, the Reds' director of marketing. "But the bottom line is you can only like the ballpark experience a certain amount of times before you'd like to see what's at the ballpark.

"The challenge is to have a product on the field that will bring people to the ballpark and to have the fans start to believe again."

But there's no question some fans will resist paying major league prices for what they see as a Triple-A product. Last season, Kenneth Keck of Hanover Township bought a half-season ticket and went to more than 30 games. This year he owns just one ticket, for Opening Day.

"Love the ballpark," he says, but he'll wait until the team gets better before he buys more tickets. "They've been in a rebuilding mode now for I don't know how many years now. They don't invest any money in the team. They're still cutting payroll."

The last four major league teams to move into new ballparks all saw big declines in attendance in their sophomore years. The Houston Astros' attendance dropped by 151,000, the Detroit Tigers and Pittsburgh Pirates both dropped by more than 600,000, and the Milwaukee Brewers watched attendance fall by 841,000."Obviously we're experiencing some of the falloff in sales you might expect following an inaugural year at a new ballpark," Allen says, "and then obviously we're feeling a little bit of effect of the team performance of the last couple of months of the season."

Last year it was new

By Opening Day 2003, the Reds had completely sold out of nine price levels of seats, from $65 Scout seats behind home plate to $14 View Level Box seats in the first few rows of the upper deck. That guaranteed 16,700 seats sold for each of 81 games. The Reds had been successful selling multigame packages, luring fans with seats for the historic first Opening Day in the new ballpark and for the three-game series against the New York Yankees in June.

This year, the ballpark is yesterday's news, and the Yankees aren't coming back. The Reds have sold out of just five price levels of seats, representing fewer than 10,000 seats per game.

Larry Herges, a high school athletic director in Albany, Ohio, says he'll make it to two games this year, but doesn't think many of his friends in Southeast Ohio will bother. "They're not sure about (Reds owner Carl) Lindner and where he's going with this team. You read in the paper they made money, but you still don't have a starting pitcher."

Baseball fans "view the team as a community asset, because the players are wearing 'Cincinnati' on the front of their uniforms," says Jim Kahler, head of the sports business MBA program at the WP Carey School of Business in Phoenix. "I believe that fans think it's OK for owners to make a profit, as long as they're investing in the team and making strides to improve the product.

"They're looking at it like it's a public utility, and 'you owe it to us to represent our city. You're the caretaker of the franchise. And as such, we don't want to hear about you losing money, we want you to put a competitive team on the field.'"

Take the Florida Marlins: They won the World Series last year, but only drew 1.3 million fans, 1 million fewer than the fifth-place Reds. After the World Series, the team's owners began lobbying for a new publicly financed ballpark, and have talked about moving the team if they don't get one.

The result: Fans aren't buying tickets. "They still might not average 20,000 people a game now," says James Riordan, director of the sports management MBA program at Florida Atlantic University in Fort Lauderdale.

He says it proves winning isn't everything. Fans want management to show a commitment to excellence. "People want to see growth. They don't just want to hear, have patience with us, and then nothing's being done," he says. When things don't work out, "everything goes straight to the top. Somebody has to be blamed."

Cheaper bleacher

To help Cincinnati fans maintain their patience, the Reds are cutting ticket prices:

•  A new "bleacher discount specials" program, in which fans get $8 bleacher seats at half price for 11 games. The regular price of the bleacher seat is also $2 lower than last year.

•  An expanded "MasterCard Grand Slam Family Value Plan Games" promotion, for 26 games: Charge tickets with MasterCard, and get four seats and $15 in food vouchers at a 40 percent discount. There were just 12 Grand Slam games last year.

•  More discounts for groups of 25 or more. Last year the Reds offered half-price tickets to groups for nine games. That's been expanded to 16 games this year. "Church days" aimed at church groups, doubled to six from three.

•  Lower prices on the most expensive seats. The Diamond seats - the first few rows behind home plate - are $200 per game this year, $50 lower than last year. And the Club seat prices were lowered by $2, to $48.

That last move shows how the Reds are hoping to attract more high-rolling business people to games. "Say you've got a big group from a big corporation who wants to wine and dine, and they want to book a group of 25 in the Diamond seats," says Jenny Gardner, the Reds' director of sales. "That's been huge. That's really been a big seller this year."

Levy says despite last year's performance by the team, corporate sponsorships are up. New sponsors include Cintas, Home Depot, DHL and Cincinnati Bell Yellow Pages.

Last year's six "business day special" weekday games averaged more than 29,000 fans, up 8,000 from 2002, proving they are popular for business entertainment. That's why the Reds increased the number of business day specials this year to nine, Gardner says.

The Reds also hope the fans will find new attractions worth the trip. The Fan Zone plaza on the ballpark's west side opens this season, with batting and pitching games. Live music begins in May. Later this year, the Reds will open a new gift shop and a baseball museum.

But, Allen says, "We can't deny we need a little bit of help from the team. I think we'll get that."

Cincinnati sports management consultant Don Schumacher, who's worked with the NFL Bengals and Kentucky Speedway, says the Reds are doing exactly what he'd do to boost attendance: "Lots of promotions, lots of entertainment, and a lot of things to spur people to come down and go to a ballpark."

Because of his travels, he and his wife made it to just a few games last year, but they loved the new ballpark so much they vowed to come to more this year.

"We're contrarians," he says. "I'm going to go to more games this year than last year. They turned the roster upside down, trading vets for unproven potential. This might be more interesting than even the last two, three years, because they're going to be unpredictable."

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E-mail johnb@enquirer.com