BBBLEACHER BOUND

Why Great American Ball Park Matters

The quick read

The Cincinnati Reds are the oldest professional franchise in baseball. The team traces to the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first openly all-salaried professional club, and it has won five World Series across the century and a half since. All five titles came before this ballpark existed. Great American Ball Park opened in 2003, on the bank of the Ohio River, replacing the concrete multi-purpose stadium the Reds had used since 1970.

Baseball’s oldest franchise

Professional baseball starts in Cincinnati. In 1869 the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first team to put every player on an open, declared salary, and they went undefeated on a national tour that season. That is the line the modern Reds draw back to, and it is why the franchise calls itself the oldest in the sport.

The 1869 club is also why so much of the ballpark’s design points backward. The team’s identity was built on being first, and the exterior, the statues, and the museum inside the gates all keep returning to that starting point.

Five titles and the Big Red Machine

The Reds have won the World Series five times: 1919, 1940, 1975, 1976, and 1990.

The 1919 title came against the Chicago White Sox in the World Series later exposed as the Black Sox scandal, when several White Sox players were found to have conspired to lose games. Cincinnati won the series on the field; the scandal that followed sat on the losing side. The 1940 championship, over the Detroit Tigers, was the franchise’s last for thirty-five years.

Then came the Big Red Machine. Through the middle of the 1970s the Reds fielded one of the deepest lineups the game has produced, with Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, Dave Concepcion, George Foster, Ken Griffey Sr., and Cesar Geronimo, managed by Sparky Anderson. That group won back-to-back World Series in 1975 and 1976, beating the Boston Red Sox and then the New York Yankees.

The fifth title, in 1990, was the one nobody outside Cincinnati expected. That team led the National League West from the first day of the season to the last, and its bullpen, the group of hard-throwing relievers known as the Nasty Boys, carried it into October. In the World Series the Reds swept the heavily favored Oakland Athletics in four straight games.

Pete Rose, the facts

No player is more tied to this franchise, or more complicated, than Pete Rose. He is baseball’s all-time hit king, with 4,256 career hits, more than anyone who has ever played.

In 1989 Rose was banned from baseball for life for betting on the game, including on Reds games while he managed the team. The ban kept him off the Hall of Fame ballot for the rest of his life. Rose died on September 30, 2024, at age 83. On May 13, 2025, Commissioner Rob Manfred removed him from Major League Baseball’s permanently ineligible list, a change that applies after a banned person’s death and makes Rose eligible for Hall of Fame consideration through the Classic Baseball Era Committee, which is scheduled to vote in December 2027. A statue of Rose was unveiled outside the ballpark in 2017.

The park that opened in 2003

Great American Ball Park opened on March 31, 2003, with a game against the Pittsburgh Pirates. It replaced Cinergy Field, the round concrete stadium that had opened in 1970 as Riverfront Stadium and served the Reds and the NFL’s Bengals for more than three decades. The move traded a multi-purpose bowl shared with football for an open-air ballpark built for baseball, sitting right on the Ohio River.

The park was designed by HOK Sport, now Populous, with the Cincinnati firm GBBN Architects, and cost roughly $290 million to build. The Reds Hall of Fame and Museum is attached to the ballpark, so the franchise’s record and its trophies sit inside the same footprint as the current team.

The modern era added its own names to the wall. Ken Griffey Jr., a Cincinnati kid whose father had played on the Big Red Machine, came home to play for the Reds in the 2000s. Joey Votto, the 2010 National League MVP, spent his entire career in Cincinnati from the mid-2000s through 2023.

The statues and mosaics

The history is spelled out on the outside of the building. Two mosaics made of Italian marble face the street, one for the 1869 Red Stockings and one for the Big Red Machine, tracing the arc from the first professional team to the 1970s dynasty.

The statues fill in the rest. The Crosley Terrace group on the front plaza shows Ted Kluszewski, Ernie Lombardi, Joe Nuxhall, and Frank Robinson in mid-play, sculpted at the incline of an old ballfield. Johnny Bench stands outside the Hall of Fame, and the Big Red Machine core was added over several years: Joe Morgan in 2013, Tony Perez in 2015, and Pete Rose in 2017.