In the years between Bill Wherle becoming an adult (meaning he was earning his own money and could spend it as he wished) and a serious adult (meaning he and his wife had twin girls), he made certain each year to be among those who camped out overnight to be near the front of the line to purchase tickets. He was there every year for more than a decade, whether the weather offered a beautiful pre-spring night or an ugly extension of winter cold.
This is not all that curious, except Wherle and his friends were not seeking tickets to a U2 concert. They were hoping to get in to see a baseball game.
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Crazy, right? Except this never was a mere baseball game. This was Opening Day in Cincinnati, which is a combination of religious observance, community celebration, heritage festival and unofficial — though many have pushed for it to be granted governmental sanction — civic holiday.
“I know a lot of people who consider Opening Day their favorite holiday — not Christmas, not Halloween,” Wherle, senior corporate communications specialist at Syneos Health, told Sporting News. “Everybody’s a contender on Opening Day. People here are realistic, know we’re not going to contend every year. But on Opening Day, everybody has a shot.
“You lived here long enough to know how parochial we are. We were first. We had the first big league team. We take great pride in that.”
You could spend a significant portion of your life in Cincinnati and never fully understand the Opening Day phenomenon. I know, because I did. I lived there for 18 years, even grew to become a fan of the Reds, but the obsession with Opening Day remained a mystery.
Wherle worked for my wife at Dan Pinger Public Relations for seven years, and when I heard he’d be camping out for tickets, my reaction always was something along the lines of Doesn’t he know there’ll be another 80 games just like this one?
This assertion was horribly inaccurate, of course. There is no other baseball game like Opening Day in Cincinnati. And there never has been an Opening Day like the one that will arrive Friday, 121 days late.
The first pitch at Great American Ball Park is scheduled for 6:10 p.m., not the normal afternoon start. There will be no fans allowed inside. It will be the first of a 60-game season in which every result will be intensified. There will be no official march through the streets. Cincinnati’s Opening Day Parade, sponsored by the downtown shopping area known as Findlay Market, is a 100-year tradition that was supposed to turn 101 this past spring. That will have to wait until next year. Hopefully.
“I know that waking up on Friday morning will feel a little different. Because it’s July,” said Lindsay Patterson, a lifelong Cincinnatian who works in the city’s media, primarily covering FC Cincinnati and the Bengals. “It’s going to be a hot summer night. But I know it’ll still feel like the start of baseball season, and special, because it always is.”
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Cincinnati’s baseball history is unique. The birth of the professional game can be traced directly to the Cincinnati Red Stockings fielding 10 professional players in a perfect 57-0 season in 1869. Major League Baseball celebrated its centennial 100 years after that event, rather than the 1876 establishment of the National League. Wherever big league baseball has gone since, Cincinnati is where it began.
It was customary for years that the Reds would be the first MLB team to open, a source of pride removed in the 1990s when nationally televised night openers were scheduled elsewhere, in advance of the Reds’ first game. They still are the one team that, under ordinary circumstances, always opens at home. And, in this extraordinary situation, MLB smartly chose to honor that tradition when it established the 60-game, regionally oriented schedule comprising the 2020 season.
“The Reds are — and I’ve always said this, much to the chagrin of Bengals fans in this town — the Reds are woven into the fabric of this city. They are in the DNA,” Lance McAllister, host of the nightly “Sports Talk” program on radio station WLW, told SN. “The pride of this city comes from being the city that had the dynasty of the Big Red Machine to the underdog of the ’90 Reds. And that pride is reset on Opening Day.
“For everything we go through during the winter — the snow, the cold, the many difficult Bengals seasons — to get to that point of Opening Day kind of resets the optimism. We’re a city that’s very aware of how we’re perceived by everyone else on the outside. Once we were the epicenter of baseball; the Game of the Week was always in Cincinnati. The Reds were on the cover of Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, Baseball Digest. As years went on, it became more about big markets, big dollars, and we kind of lost the glitter.
“We were always the first team that threw the very first pitch. There was so much pride in that. As that kind of slipped away, and we got kind of pushed to the back, I think we just cling to the fact: All right, forget about the outside world, we have it as ours in this city. Now, in most years, as the big 162 is about to begin: This is who we are, throw that first pitch and let’s go. And as I say that, the hair is standing up on my arms.”
When 247 Sports basketball recruiting analyst Brian Snow was growing up in the Cincinnati area, through kindergarten and grade school he remembered, “There would be just a parade of kids leaving school early. It was just accepted: It’s Opening Day.
“Cincinnati is a big city with a small-town mindset. With the Reds being the first Major League team, and Cincinnati identifying as a baseball town, it’s just kind of the thing. It’s a big city with a small-town mindset. People always gravitate to the Reds for that reason, and that continues from generation to generation because a lot of Cincinnatians stick around from generation to generation.”
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The city of Dayton, Ky., tucked into a bend on the Ohio River, is just a long walk away from Great American Ball Park. Its mayor, Ben Baker, is a massive Reds fans who clearly understands the importance of Opening Day to his community. He declared in February that Opening Day, March 26, would be a city holiday. When that date was swallowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, he told his staff the holiday would apply if there were an actual Opening Day in 2020.
So they’re all off on Friday, even though the first pitch won’t be thrown during normal office hours. Across the river, many employers who face trouble getting employees to show up for work on Opening Day have requested the city of Cincinnati consider making it a holiday, but as of now Dayton believes it is the only community that has made it official.
“Obviously, it doesn’t have as much resonance because there is no parade. That’s sort of the intention behind it, to celebrate Reds history and allow the city staff to go out and watch the parade and plan things around watching the game,” city administrator Michael Giffen told SN. “This is something that Cincinnatians, and the hardcore Cincinnati fans, they kind of hold sacred. They’re very proud of the kind of foundation Cincinnati has played in professional baseball.
“The mayor talked about it in theory, then decided this city should take the next step and honor those beliefs. He does want to honor it this Friday, and hopefully a little more traditionally next spring.”
This Reds season is expected to be different than the half-dozen that preceded it, the team averaging a 70-92 record and fifth-place finish in the NL Central from 2014 to 2019. (Yep, there are five teams in the division.)
The starting rotation was ranked No. 3 in the majors by MLB.com. The Reds signed outfielder Nicholas Castellanos, coming off a 27-homer season, and infielder Mike Moustakas, who hit 35 last year in Milwaukee and earned a 2015 World Series ring as an All-Star with the Royals. They also brought in outfielder Shogo Akiyama from the Japan Pacific League, the plan being to make him the team’s leadoff hitter.
“Of course, any season, it could be MLB, NFL, Major League Soccer, that first game of the season you’re like: Yep, still have a chance. Even if they didn’t have the roster,” Patterson said. “What the Reds were able to do in the offseason was exciting. The expectations, with the national media talking about the rotation, when you hear the positives from this team …
“There are some negative sports fans out there saying, ‘I don’t know. It won’t be the same. There’s only 60 regular-season games. Are you really going to remember it?’ How could you forget this season? If you find a way to win when you’re dealing with a pandemic and you’ve gone through a summer camp, a shortened second spring training, and you find a way to put it all together with some new additions you really haven’t had a chance to build more chemistry with, it’s one to remember forever.”
This isn’t one Bill Wherle is likely to forget. It will be the first without his father, who died in early July, after a long illness. All those years Bill was camping out to get tickets, including the year when the temperature plunged to 11 degrees, one seat would be for him, the other for his dad. James Wherle wasn’t much for spending money on game tickets, but there was that one time, when Bill was a high school freshman, that a vendor got them tickets and Bill got to skip class and join his dad for the trip to Riverfront Stadium.
The notion of baseball as a generational pursuit, passed from parents to children and then to their children and so on, is as alive in Cincinnati as anywhere in the country.
Wherle wishes his father had baseball to help pass the time during his final days. Were it not for the pandemic, the Reds would be 90-some games into whatever this season might bring.
“It’s bittersweet,” Bill said. “Of course everybody misses the things that make Opening Day uniquely Cincinnati. But it’s also about the love of baseball and part of our heritage; that at least is going to happen. Every time you have to cross something off the calendar that’s not going to happen because of the pandemic, it takes a little out of you.”
A while back, in a season that began on time and was greeted by an army of spectators across the continent, a friend of his from St. Louis boasted he had gotten tickets to go see the Cardinals at Busch Stadium on Opening Day.
“I told him, ‘No, you’re just going to the first game of the season,’” Wherle said. “Opening Day only happens in Cincinnati.”
