This is the inaugural season for the new Busch Stadium in St. Louis and we went down last weekend to catch a couple games with the Cardinals hosting the Los Angeles Dodgers. We went with our good friends Scott and Marcia Schroeder (Scott is a die-hard Cardinals fan).
The new stadium has a lot of an old world traditional ball park look to it, with a lot of up-to-date amenities and fan-friendly areas.
The sight lines are very good all through the ball park, the seats seem a little scrunched in compared to the old stadium. The park was finally finished in late May and it still looks like there's some work to do in some areas.
It reminded me a lot of Atlanta's Turner Field - it looks good when you see it on TV. But when you go through the concourses, you can see a lot of little things that just didn't seem to be right - steel girders sticking up out of nowhere, signage missing letters, concrete work that looks sort of hap-hazard. It's a nice stadium, but nowhere close to the nicest Major League Baseball stadium I've been in.
The food is nothing special. I tried the hot dogs - both the steamed and the grilled. Stay away from the steamed hot dogs and look for the grilled ones. They've got a barbecue place along the outfield concourse and a couple "El Birdo" Mexican food booths. I think I even saw an Italian food booth. No, I don't think I'll try any of that at a ball game, I'm sorry.
Beer was unbelievably expensive. A 24 oz can of Anheuser-Busch products was $8.25. I had to try me one of those and it wasn't much different than the $7.75 24 oz. draft beers; or the $7.00 16 oz. bottles. But it was hot - very hot - and the beer did go down pretty well.
Busch Stadium is literally sold out this season. But thanks to my good friend, Mike Naughton, the V.P. of Ticket Operations for the St. Louis Rams, he did the legwork to get us tickets for a couple games. Scott and I did the standing room only thing on Saturday ($18.00 plus $5.00 handling fee per ticket). That worked out pretty well.
All in all, it was a great weekend. We saw the Cardinals win three games against the Dodgers (they actually swept all four games of the series), we ate on the Hill a couple nights, and we got to see the new Busch Stadium.
To check out my pictures of the new Busch Stadium, go to the Photo Album section of my blog.
Did you happen to go to the 8th and Poplar entrance and look at the bricks? There's one for Dad, in section J, Row 2...it's an 8x8 logo brick, inscribed
Jack Wehrle
Eureka, MO
Cardinal Fan
Since 1922
Posted by: Tom Wehrle | July 19, 2006 at 12:01 PM
Shit, God darn it! No, I didn't see the brick. We did see a lot of bricks and I do now vaguely remember a brick was bought in Jack's name.
If I'd known it was there and where it was at I would have gotten a picture of it. Lord knows we had tons of time to do it.
Posted by: Will Veber | July 19, 2006 at 11:32 PM