A baseball museum and gift shop connected to the ballpark.
None of these images is on paper, but Reds Managing Executive John Allen sees them as possible elements in the club's new ballpark, which he hopes will balance 21st century amenities and 19th century ambiance.
The team and Hamilton County announced Wednesday that a new Reds stadium will be built on the riverfront by 2003. Now that the location has been established -- west of The Crown -- the question becomes: What will it look like?
Mr. Allen doesn't know whether the stadium will look like the retro parks of the early 1990s, such as Baltimore's Camden Yards or Cleveland's Jacobs Field.
But he wants to avoid the cookie-cutter syndrome that infected the National League 30 years ago with bowllike stadiums, such as Cinergy Field.
"We don't want all the stadiums to look alike," he said Thursday. "We want to avoid that pitfall. It should be uniquely Cincinnati, and in some way, we're going to have to play off the river."
This rendering for Hamilton County shows the riverfront with Baseball on Main.
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Top ballpark designers agree that new baseball stadiums must reflect the communities in which they're built so that each one has something that distinguishes it from the rest.
"You have the river, the Roebling (Suspension) Bridge. You can orient the seating bowl to face the skyline and the Roebling Bridge," said David Murphy, a principal at Ellerbe Becket Inc., a Kansas City, Mo., architecture firm that specializes in major sports projects.
Mr. Murphy was involved in the retrofit of the 1996 Olympic Stadium into Atlanta's Turner Field and the design of Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Turner Field has become the envy of other ballparks because of the money it generates for the Atlanta Braves. Fans show up at the stadium three hours before game time, spending money at the stadium's brew pub and restaurant, and spending time with interactive games.
"If the revenue equation is good for the team, that in all likelihood will relate to player quality on the field," said Robert White, vice president at HOK Sport, the architecture firm that has credit for designing more Major League ballparks than any other.
Also based in Kansas City, HOK is responsible for Camden Yards, the new Comiskey Park in Chicago, Jacobs Field, Coors Field in Denver and is working on ballparks in San Francisco and Houston.
Mr. White and Mr. Murphy agreed there is no generic ballpark that can be dropped into a community and succeed. But Mr. White said all new ballparks typically have some of the same amenities that enhance fan comfort and team revenue. For example, wider concourses and lots of restrooms directly improve the sale of concessions, he said.
"The amenities and revenue issue tend to be one and the same," Mr. White said.
Ron Turner, a principal at NBBJ Sports and Entertainment, predicted that ballparks in the generation of the new Reds stadium will find new technologies and entertainment uses to provide excitement for fans and more money for teams. "That's where baseball hasn't taken care of itself," he said.
County officials expect the new Reds stadium will be a project that interests all the leading stadium designers -- HOK, Ellerbe Beckett and NBBJ, the Los Angeles firm that designed the Bengals' new riverfront stadium.
HOK, because it has been consulting on the project for two years, and NBBJ, because of its work on Paul Brown Stadium, would appear to have an early edge.
But Hamilton County's public works director, Gary VanHart, said the county will be open to all the proposals it receives, just as it was with the football stadium design. "Everyone that was trying to get it the first time (with the football stadium) has a feel for the community," he said.
Diagram of Wedge site illustrates how it overlaps Cinergy Field.
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County officials acknowledge the site will be a challenge. The new ballpark is expected to overlap Cinergy Field's current site. Known as Baseball on Main or "The Wedge," the site likely will require partial demolition of Cinergy while the Reds continue to play there and the new ballpark is being built.
The $235 million cost announced Wednesday for the 45,000-seat stadium doesn't include additional costs that could stem from site complications.
The preliminary stadium deal gives the county 60 days to hire an architect and construction manager for the new ballpark.
Since the deal also stipulates the Reds get all stadium revenue, Mr. Allen envisions a year-round restaurant that could be tied into a river view in the outfield.
Another uniquely Cincinnati item is the professional museum dating to pro baseball's origins with the 1869 Red Stockings. The club would consult a curator and make it accessible from the street so it could also be open year-round.
Mr. Allen also sees the possibility of club seats on the field level, which would be accessible to the club section upstairs. The food court would include recognizable Cincinnati businesses. "What's good for us is we'll be able to see what the new stadiums did right and what they did wrong," Mr. Allen said.
A source familiar with how Major League Baseball has engineered its ballpark boom maintained Thursday that the average fan won't be priced out of games.
"The people in the premium seats between the bases and on the club level are paying the prices that make the rest of the seats affordable," the source said. "Baseball has done a better job than football and basketball in doing that."
The Reds have historically had some of the lowest ticket prices among baseball teams. But new stadiums generally mean higher ticket prices for fans.
A Reds blue seat, for example, costs $14 while a comparable box seat at Jacobs Field costs $26.
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