...to attend a baseball game at the Great American Ball Park, hosted by the Cincinnati Reds, the so-called "Royalty of Baseball," the oldest team in major league baseball, established in 1869, that's four years after the end of the Civil War, the first team to host a night game under the lights, and be subjected to the same slew of asinine between-inning "promotions" and contests, not to mention the pre-game cheerleaders...
...and the made-up "mascot" Gapper that you might find at a Tampa Bay Devil Rays "game." Even the hydrocephalic yet strangely magnetic Mr. Red...
Nice enough park, though, but as a replacement for a riverside concrete doughnut, nothing can compare with Pittsburgh's PNC Park, where we saw a Pirates-Brewers pitching duel in July 2001. Too bad the Pirates should be relegated, European soccer-league style, to the minor leagues, along with my boyhood idols the Kansas City Royals. (Calls to mind the time that I watched, alone, in my Hutchinson, Kansas basement, Chris Chambliss end the Royals' inspired 1976 playoff run with a toilet-paper festooned walk-off home run in Yankee Stadium.)
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