Why Great American Ball Park Matters

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The quick read

Professional baseball started in Cincinnati. The 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings were the first openly all-salaried team in the sport, the Reds count their history from that club, and the franchise has five World Series titles: 1919, 1940, 1975, 1976, and 1990. Every one of them was won before this ballpark existed. Great American Ball Park opened in 2003 on the bank of the Ohio River, replacing the round concrete multi-purpose stadium the Reds shared with the NFL’s Bengals.

Where professional baseball started

Professional baseball starts in Cincinnati, and the precise claim beats the loose one. “First professional team” undersells it. The 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings were baseball’s first openly all-salaried professional team: the first club to put every player on a declared salary instead of splitting gate receipts or paying under the table. MLB’s own official historian, John Thorn, has called them “the first avowedly professional team in baseball history.”

That club then won. It closed the 1869 season 57-0 against its National Association of Base Ball Players opponents, 64-0 counting every game it played that year. That record is the one the modern Reds still draw their identity from, and it’s why the franchise bills itself as the oldest in professional baseball.

Five titles and the Big Red Machine

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

1919 came against the Chicago White Sox, in the Series later exposed as the Black Sox scandal: several White Sox players conspired with gamblers to lose games. Cincinnati won it on the field, and the fixing was on the Chicago side. The 1940 title, over the Detroit Tigers in seven games, was the last for thirty-five years; the Reds clinched it at home, which remains the only time in franchise history they’ve won a title on their own field.

Then came the Big Red Machine. Through the middle of the 1970s the Reds fielded one of the deepest lineups the game has produced: Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, Dave Concepcion, George Foster, Ken Griffey Sr., and Cesar Geronimo, managed by Sparky Anderson. That’s the defining dynasty of its decade, and the criterion is specific: back-to-back titles over two different pennant winners, the Boston Red Sox in 1975 and the New York Yankees in 1976.

The fifth title, in 1990, was the wire-to-wire one. That team led the National League West from the season’s first day to its last, and its bullpen, the hard-throwing group 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: 4,256 career hits, more than anyone who has ever played.

In 1989 Rose accepted permanent ineligibility from baseball. The investigation behind it, the Dowd Report, found he had bet on baseball, including Reds games he was managing. The agreement he signed made no formal finding on the betting, and Rose denied it publicly until 2004, when he admitted it in a book. 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. The change applies after a banned person’s death, and it 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 housed the Reds and the NFL’s Bengals together until the Bengals moved out after the 1999 season. 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. Cost estimates land in the same neighborhood without quite matching: about $290 million by one account, about $280 million by the team’s own facts page. The Reds Hall of Fame and Museum is attached on the ballpark’s west side, 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. came home in 2000, to the team his father had played for. He had grown up in Cincinnati while the Big Red Machine was winning. Joey Votto, the 2010 National League MVP, spent his entire major league career in Cincinnati, from his 2007 debut 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, 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 a sloped plaza built as a deliberate homage to the Reds’ old ballpark, carries Ted Kluszewski, Ernie Lombardi, Joe Nuxhall, and Frank Robinson. 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.

None of those five championships happened in this building. Great American Ball Park is a monument to what the Reds did before it existed, and the mosaics, the statues, and the attached Hall of Fame all point at that instead of running from it.

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