Rollin' On The River

We’re really not Chicago Cubs fans. Honest. Still, we’ve seen two Cubs games on successive nights 350 miles apart. Sunday night in St. Louis and Monday night in Cincinnati. The Cubs lost both of them.

We always knew the Cubs had very loyal fans. But they also have bad reputations in at least St. Louis and Cincinnati. Alta asked one of the Cards’ ushers if he was a volunteer and he answered, “No. I wouldn’t take all the abuse off the Cubs fans unless they paid me.”

In Cincinnati, at least one-third of the 20,000 people in Great American Ball Park were Cubs fans and saw the Reds break a five-game losing streak with a 5-3 win. They also made a lot of noise. After the game we were listening to one of the sports talk shows on radio and one of the listeners called in and said Cubs fans “are like cockroaches. They come out at night when their team is in town.” The talk show host agreed. Maybe it’s just Central Division rivalry. Or maybe there’s something to it.

Great American Ball Park is a great park, hunkered down on the banks of the Ohio River looking toward a line of 1800s houses in Covington, Kentucky. There’s a pretend paddle boat out in center field that’s some sort of restaurant/bar. We walked all around the field and happened to be standing above the seats in centerfield when Ken Griffey Jr. saw what might have been his 598th career home run fall into the glove of Chicago’s Felix Pie, just a few feet short of the top of the wall.

Foodstuff: We were looking for two special treats in Great American Ball Park. We found one, the pulled pork sandwiches by the Montgomery Inn. The restaurant operates a small stand near the entrance of the park. The buns were fresh and the meat very tasty. We failed on our second quest –fried Twinkies and friend cookie dough from the Foul Pole Desserts stand. The stand is gone, given over to a Reds souvenir store. We really wanted a fried Twinky just to see if they are as gross as they sound. Instead, we had chocolate malts from the United Dairy Farmers stand – so thick you eat them with a spoon.

Road Noise: If you come to Cincinnati, bring a GPS device and a lot of patience. The maze of convoluted highways and interchanges would get any rat lost. I’m sure no one designed the system; it just happened. We drove through Kentucky three times in one day and that was the easy part.

The Game: The Reds’ Adam Dunn hit a two-run home run in the 3rd that proved the difference in the game. The Cubs had a chance to win in the top of the 9th when Reds’ closer Francisco Cordero gave up two singles and then added two straight walks. The Cubs countered by stupidly trying to steal home on a wild pitch and never capitalized on Cordero’s gifts.

The Reds brag about being the first professional baseball team, in 1869. That is true, but they also were the first franchise to move. That first team was the Red Stockings, which left to become the Boston Red Sox.