Hot and Humid in Houston

This is the first of some long overdue posts on a few baseball trips I took this summer.  My first trip was the first week of summer vacation, before my trip to England.  I took a trip to Houston because Jet Blue had a sale and I could get cheap flights to Houston.  It was my first trip to Texas.  I'll be back there in October.  The first thing I noticed about Texas is that you see the Texas state flag everywhere.  I know what the New York state flag looks like, but I can't think of anywhere that I would ever see it other than maybe government buildings like a court or something.  But that's cool, I like Texas.  Anyway, the Astros had a two-game series with the Cardinals on June 25 and 26.  The flights would have been a little bit cheaper for me to go to the game on June 26, but if I had done that, I would have been flying home when the NBA Draft was happening on June 27.  I wanted to watch the draft with my dad, and I ended up doing my first draft diary, so it worked out well.  Except the game I went to was much less interesting than the one the following night, but whatever.

The American flag and Texas flag.  Maybe Yankee Stadium and Citi Field have New York flags, but I can't think of where they'd be.

Anyway, it was mid-90s and humid in Houston.  Adam Richman never did a Man vs. Food episode in Houston, so I didn't have anything in particular that I wanted to other than the game.  I was staying within walking distance from the stadium, so I did a stadium tour in the afternoon and the game at night.  I've done stadium tours at Dodger Stadium, Chase Field, and now Minute Maid Park.  Minute Maid Park is easily my least favorite of those three stadiums, but it had the best tour.  This was the only stadium tour I've been on so far where we got to walk the entire warning track.  One of the first stops was the Astros' dugout.

Me in the Astros' dugout.

We also got to go in the visitors' bullpen.  A cool feature of the visitors' bullpen was that it had Astroturf taken from the Astro Dome.  But bullpen was a dungeon.  It was kind of dank in there and it's totally enclosed.  There's a ceiling overhead.  I would imagine that it gets really hot and stuffy in there.  I would hate going to Houston if I was a relief pitcher.

Visitors' bullpen/dungeon with Astroturf

The tour guide had a great Texas twang (although maybe it wasn't a twang, wikipedia says the twang is more of a western Texas thing) and she explained how the hill ended up in center field.  Tal Smith was the president and/or GM of the Astros on a few different occasions.  He had also worked for the Reds when they played at Crosley Field.  Crosley Field had a 15 degree incline in left field.  So Tal Smith wanted they hill for Houston's new stadium.  The Astros put a hill with a 30 degree incline in center field in the plans for the new stadium, figuring that Major League Baseball wouldn't allow it.  It turns out that they did allow it.  On the hill is a flagpole that's on the field of play.  The flagpole is right by the wall, about 430 or so feet from home plate.  The only player to ever hit the flagpole was Richie Sexson in 2003.  He ended up with a triple and didn't score.  I like having the flagpole in play (I'd be opposed to it if it wasn't so far from the plate and so close to the wall), but I think the hill is silly.  Although I think the hill is silly, I like that baseball teams have the freedom to be creative and have something like that in their stadium.

Tal's Hill.  The flagpole on the left is in play.

As for the game, you'd figure I'd be able to get a cheap ticket for a team as bad as the Astros.  I ended up paying $35 to sit in the first row on the top level, just a little to the first base side of home plate.  Not terrible, but I was hoping to pay less.  Here's my economic analysis of why I couldn't find a cheaper ticket:

1.  The Astros are terrible so demand is low.

2.  Despite their terrible team and the lack of demand for tickets, the Astros are overpricing their tickets.

3.  Overpricing leads to tickets sales being even lower than you'd expect.

4.  Few tickets being sold leads to few tickets being available on the secondary market.

5.  The low supply on the secondary market makes prices higher than they should be.

6.  And finally, the Astros were playing the Cardinals.  The Cardinals have a large fan base and they used to be a division rival of the Astros.  That made demand for this game slightly higher than it would be for most Astros games on a Tuesday and that made prices a little higher also.

Anyway, the roof was closed for the game.  I had checked the Astros website and the roof had been closed for every game since the middle of May.  My bias against indoor baseball has been mentioned on this blog, and that definitely hurt my opinion on Minute Maid Park (I'll have an updated list of stadium rankings when I get through blogging my summer baseball trips).  If it had been an afternoon game, I would have been fine with the roof being closed.  But I felt like the roof could have been open at night.  And actually, it didn't seem to be doing much good as I was pretty hot for the first few innings of the game.  I guess you could argue that I would have been even hotter if the roof had been open.  My counter to that is that I would have been outside, so I wouldn't mind being hotter.

My view for the first seven innings.

As for the game, the pitching was good for the first three innings.  Nobody scored until the fourth when the Cardinals put up 7.  Matt Carpenter tripled with the bases loaded to put the Cardinals up 6-0.  Carlos Beltran homered in the sixth to make it 9-0.  There was no doubt about the outcome of the game.  What was interesting was that Jake Westbrook didn't allow a hit for the first five innings.  As I mentioned when I went to Pittsburgh this year, I think you can start to get excited about the possibility of a no hitter after five.  You're more than halfway there at that point, but there's still a long way to go.  So after five you think "maybe this could happen" and the excitement starts to grow with each out.  Well, the excitement didn't grow.  Matt Dominguez hit a home run leading off the sixth and there was nothing interesting about the game from that point on.  On the bright side, I did get to see the train that carries oranges move across the track for an Astros home run.  The Cardinals ended up winning 13-5.

The train is a nod to Houston's Union Station, which was at the site of the stadium.  The oranges are a nod to Minute Maid.  This is definitely not as good as the Citi Field home run apple, but it's better than whatever that thing is the Marlins have for when they hit home runs.

I ended up moving down to the first level for the last two innings.  There was a foul ball that went up near where I had been sitting.  From my new location, I could see the guys that had been sitting next to me.  The foul ball ended up landing maybe three seats to the right of my original seat.  I wouldn't have had a chance for it, but it would have been cool to have a foul ball come that close.  I've never caught a foul ball, but I do have a story about not getting a ball at Yankee Stadium when I was young.  I'll save that for another time.

My view for the last two innings.