Cincinnati, OH

Park # 171

What I Remember

I remember thinking that Riverfront Stadium was in a great location…and that it was too bad you got almost no sense of that inside the ballpark. Riverfront, for those that don’t remember it, was yet another of the big donut-like multi-use stadiums that were all the rage in ballpark construction around 1970. The big discs, which included Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta, Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Three Rivers in Pittsburgh and Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia all felt virtually identical and because I grew up in their era, they often represented what I thought of when I thought of professional stadiums.

During our trip, though, Sue and I saw stadiums from a different viewpoint. Our trip to the yard was usually our only chance to see a city we were visiting for just a few hours and in these big bowls you could not see outside..really at all. There were restaurants along the Ohio River, downtown just blocks away and Cincinnati’s iconic bridges all just outside the ballpark but once you went through its gates that was all left behind.

The company I work for has been headquarted in Cincinnati for the last decade and I’ve had a few opportunities to see the Great American Ballpark, which replaced Riverfront in 2003, and I found that it was an improvement in every respect – now the neighborhood feels like an extension of the ballpark experience and vice versa.

We did enjoy our Friday night in Cincinnati 30 years ago. We were interviewed by longtime Reds broadcasters Marty Brennaman and Joe Nuxhall on the Reds television network.

The Game

San Diego Padres 8 Cincinnati Reds 3

The Box

A Note about this Site

This site is intended to be a companion to the upcoming book In League with America. Although some games were particularly notable and will appear in the book, most of the results of the 199 games we saw over the course of the 1991 season will not. Our journey was never really intended to be at the games themselves, it was about the places we saw and the people we met along the way.

However, there is now an historic nature to the results from this season. All of the players we saw then, even in the minors, have long since retired. Some of the players we saw at Class A are now members of the Baseball Hall of Fame. These pages, then, will function as kind of a digital appendix with a brief recollection of each day, the result of the game(s) we saw that day and a map of our daily drive.