Cincinnati Reds Opening Day Game

The Cincinnati Reds are baseball’s first professional team and are the only franchise that opens each year at home.  Opening Day in Cincinnati has become an unofficial holiday, and bosses and school principals gladly look the other way if one of their charges has a ticket and skips out for the day.

Frank Bancroft, the Reds’ business manager from 1892 to 1921,  had previously been an advance man for the circus, and used  “The Circus is Coming!” approach to whip the city into a baseball frenzy by Opening Day.

In 1921, the merchants of Findlay Market, a public market only eight blocks away from the Reds’ Crosley Field, decided to kick off the season with a parade, and it has begun the Opening Day festivities each year since.  It winds its way through downtown and leads people down towards the ballpark and the season’s first pitch.

Rain or shine, hot or cold, good team or bad, it doesn't matter.  On Opening Day, these Cincinnatians descend on downtown from the city's fabled seven hills like a horde of red ants attacking the season's first picnic.  They arrive early.  They stay late.  And they devour everything in sight in between.