Great American Ball Park

 Cincinnati Reds (National League)

9/10

I actually quite enjoyed the outside of this place.

The Easter Bunny showed up pre-game. You can see the smokestacks in right center.

Looking back on a mostly empty seating bowl. People apparently had places to be.

I headed here from a hockey game in Nashville the night before. As of time of writing in 2021, this is my most recent, brand new MLB park. It was Easter Sunday on the 1st of April, meaning lots of things were closed, including in Kentucky on the way up and downtown once I was here. The only thing I could find that was open in the downtown was a Walgreen's. I was quite surprised to find that attendance on the first Sunday of the year looked to be pretty limited, as it was just a bit over 10 thousand, which in an MLB park, felt like nothing. The temperature was barely into the 50s, which for this area, could be considered cool, but for the first day of April, was pretty nice by my more northern standards.

I really liked this park. The lack of crowd meant it was pretty easy to go explore and after a pretty bad night for pictures a few nights prior in Atlanta, I more than made up for it here. The exterior is actually glass panels and painted steel. It's pretty staid, but compared to the bricks you see on nearly every other park, it's quite unique. The park is right between downtown Cincinnati and the Ohio River, with the headquarters of the insurance company that the park gets its name from looms large over the first base side. There's an outfield concourse with two smokestacks reminiscent of the steamboats that used to be on the river. 

The food here was not too bad, I ended up going to Skyline Chili for a chili dog. I was eyeballing Big Boy pretty hard, but a co-worker at the time who grew up here for a time said that the chili dog was required, so I did. I'm not a chili guy at all, but I did like it. Lines were not a thing due to a tiny crowd. Atmosphere was flat, but so flat that individual voices in the crowd could be heard throughout the game, which meant that some individual subplots were interesting to follow. It was more of a Triple A experience than anything.

On the whole, this is a somewhat underappreciated park, due to a pretty marginal Reds team. The facility itself, like so many others is a massive improvement over what it replaced. The food was somewhat memorable and the atmosphere for a small-market, cannon fodder organization like the Reds was pretty neat as well. I'd give a point for facility and half each for food and atmosphere, which make this a surprising 9. 

Linescore

2018-04-01

                      123   456   789   RHE

Washington    200  001   201   680

Cincinnati      000   001  022   570

Temp: 50F  Time: 2:47  Att: 10,355