A PNC - Cincy Roadtrip

By David Marasco

After almost no baseball in a month I had a big weekend. Friday night I went up to Milwaukee to see the Brewers face the Royals. Or at least that was the plan. There are still bugs in Miller Park, and there was a big one in the electrical system. The end result was that they lost a bank of lights and power to a good portion of the thirdbase side of the stadium. The umps suspended play after one inning. That was sort of silly because there was plenty of daylight left. No, they couldn't have gotten in a full nine innings, but heck, they could have played five and made the game official. Instead they waited until nine to call the game. In theory this new ballpark meant that if you drove to the stadium you would see a game. Not the case Friday night!

Saturday Tom and I woke up early and hit the road. We swung through Lafayette to pick up Jaime and Nate, and then took a left-hand turn at Indianapolis to catch I-70 east. Somewhere between Columbus and Zanesville we lost some odds and ends out of the exhaust system, so we were a very loud car through the remainder of Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Let's just say that the people in Pittsburgh knew we were coming.

PNC Park was the first stop on the weekend's road trip. Tom and I had been planning a return to Pittsburgh ever since the last game in Three Rivers. We parked across the river from the new stadium and crossed the Roberto Clemente Bridge to the ballpark. PNC is right up there with Pac Bell and the dear, departed Tiger Stadium. It is just an amazing place to watch baseball. From the seats you get a view of the river and the Pittsburgh skyline. It really highlights what a poor decision Three Rivers Stadium was. Three Rivers was built on almost exactly the same site, but offered little of the beauty of PNC. Ignoring the great backdrop, PNC stands on its own merits. It is built on a small scale; the capacity is only around 37,000 fans. They didn't put in fifty levels of luxury boxes, and this has allowed them to put the upper deck close to the field. How cozy is the stadium? You know how some teams shoot T-shirts into the crowd? We saw a T-shirt go over the roof and out of the stadium. Try that on for size! The architects put in some odd quirks in the outfield walls, but didn't overdo it. Crowd flow seemed to work fairly well. Overall my reaction to the new stadium was the same I had in San Francisco - after all those years of the old ballpark, the fans deserve to have one as nice as this.

The Cleveland Indians were in town doing the interleague play thing. The pitching matchup was Jason Schmidt and Jaret Wright, so it promised to be a good game. Four batters into the affair the Indians had a three-nothing lead, mainly on the strength of a Juan Gonzalez rope over the wall in left-center. Schmidt threw thirty-seven pitches in the first, but managed to survive.

Things didn't look good for the Pirates. Their first two hitters were Derek Bell and Jack Wilson, hitting roughly .140 and .200 respectively. Bell was hazed by the hometown fans throughout the game. When he was out in the field the fans in the bleachers started up a "Derek, Derek" chant ala the glory days of Strawberry. Let's just say that it is getting ugly in Pittsburgh.

Schmidt righted his ship after the first. While there always seemed to be an Indian on base, Schmidt managed to keep things under control. Meanwhile the bottom of the Pirates lineup got to work. In the third Young and Meares got on and scored, and they repeated the trick to take the lead in the fifth. They got some important insurance runs in the eighth, highlighted by Wilson's 423-foot shot to center for a six-three lead.

The Indians turned on the machine for the top of the ninth, and were able to score a run to push the score to six-four. They were able to get the tying run to the plate in the form of Juan Gonzalez, but he popped out to short to end the game.

We drove all the way back to Columbus that night. After some shuteye, and an early-morning car repair in the parking lot of a Sears, we were on our way to Cincinnati. The Reds are building a new stadium that will go by the name "The Great American Ballpark." In doing so they've torn down the outfield section of what used to be Riverfront Stadium. Between that and the real grass, the place has been upgraded from a stadium similar to the Vet in Philly to a ballpark similar to Shea minus the airplanes. Needless to say, I'm happy that it will be replaced, but it does look a lot better than the Vet or old Three Rivers. There are several annoying things about the place. First, the rows are too narrow, so anytime a fan wants to do something everyone needs to stand up. You end up missing a good amount of baseball because people are getting hot dogs or heading for the bathroom. Also, there aren't enough exits in the upper deck, so crowd flow is a real problem. We had a sparse crowd, I can't imagine what it would be like for a full stadium.

We saw the one non-interleague affair, the Rockies at the Reds. With Bohannon vs. Dessens, it didn't promise to be as good as the previous night's encounter. Well, if nothing else it had high entertainment value, especially with Ron Gant trying to play left. He managed to drop one flyball, misplay another, and catch a third before he was yanked. His replacement, Jacob Cruz, managed the second error on a leftfielder in the game. The Rockies brought the lumber and scored four runs, all on account of the long ball. Helton and Larry Walker were the sluggers.

The Reds were having hitting problems, despite the help they were getting from the Rockies' left fielders. They didn't manage a hit until the fourth. Their first run came on a bases-loaded walk to Griffey in the fifth, yet they couldn't get more than one run out of that situation. Griffey lead off the bottom of the eighth with a single to right, and made third on a Boone hit to left. Boone tried for second and was cut down. That became a big out when Cruz misplayed a flyball into a double on the next batter. Again the Reds would score only one run in the inning. They got a pinch-hit homer from Selby to lead off the bottom of the ninth, but couldn't get anything else. The Rockies took the day four-three.

The road trip reminded me of a visit to San Francisco to see Pac Bell Park and the Oakland Mausoleum. One very nice place to see baseball, and a stadium in need of a replacement.

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