Busch Stadium - 2008

We made our somewhat annual trip to St. Louis to catch the Cardinals play baseball at Busch Stadium a while back.  I say "somewhat" because our schedules wouldn't work out last year with Cindy's appendectomy and other events going on in our lives.  In fact, our friends Scott and Marcia Schroeder almost didn't make the trip down because of flooding in their basement that incurred after a major rainstorm the night before we were to leave to go to St. Louis.  Cindy and I drove to St. Louis to make sure we had the tickets for the Friday night and Saturday games.  Scott and Marcia finally decided about 1 p.m. on Friday that they did all they could do and drove down to meet us.

Cindy and I first stopped off at the Edward Jones Dome to meet up with our friend, Mike Naughton, who is the Vice-President of Finance and Ticketing for the St. Louis Rams.  Mike was the one who got us the tickets for the two games we were going to see.  We talked with Mike for about a half hour.  He usually isn't at the dome's offices, but happened to be there this afternoon.  We were talking about ticket scalping and how the state of Missouri had recently passed a law allowing the sales of already sold tickets to fans of Missouri sports teams.  To hear an interview Mike had with Paul Harris on KMOX on the legalization of scalping in Missouri, click here. 

We eventually hooked up with Scott and Marcia at The Outfield, the outdoor bar area of Mike Shannon's restaurant in St. Louis.  The Outfield is fast becoming one of my favorite places to go to before and after a Cardinals game.  Beers are $3.00 a bottle, which isn't bad considering the location of the bar in proximity to the stadium.  And the waitresses and female bartenders are top notch lookers.  Actually, we should try some of the bars on the south side of the stadium sometime, like Al Hrabosky's.

I've seen a few of these new novelty items - large fists that act as a bottle holder and cooler, usually with a team logo on the top of the hand.  I think they're kind of cool, but would probably be a pain in the butt to lug around.  Plus, I'm sure your hand would get pretty warm in the thing, especially on hot days.

After our last trip to Busch Stadium a couple years ago, I was reminded by my cousin, Tom Wehrle, that the Wehrle kids had bought a commemorative brick for their dad, Jack, who grew up in Eureka, MO and was a lifelong Cardinals fan.  Tom gave me the coordinates of where we could find the brick.  After a little bit of hunting, we found it.  It was pretty cool to see.

Our seats at Busch Stadium were prime seats for Friday night's game.  We were in the front row of the second deck in an area called the Redbird Club.  We had access to the club, which was very similar to the Cadillac Club at Soldier Field.  (To get a 360 degree tour of the Redbird Club, click here.)  It had bar facilities, different types of food to buy, and has an air-conditioned lounge that wraps around above the home plate area of the stadium.  They were great seats and you had a good view of the field, as well as part of the skyline in downtown St. Louis. 

It was kind of a coolish, damp evening in St. Louis when the game began.  It had rained earlier in the day, but the weather cooperated enough to allow the game to get in.  But it was comfortable compared to other times we've gone to games in St. Louis.  And I liked the location of the seats as we were able to follow a lot of the action by being able to focus on the field as a whole as the Cards played the Philadelphia Phillies.

Once again, satisfying my scoreboard fetish.  Actually, I think they improved the scoreboard at Busch Stadium from the last time we were there a couple years ago.  It seemed to have more information than the initial scoreboard the had in 2006.  But it's still not my favorite scoreboard in the major leagues. 

After a couple three innings, the sun began to make an appearance just before setting in the western sky.  It lit up the Gateway Arch and a number of the taller buildings downtown including the Millennium Hotel, the round building to the side of the Arch.  It also played havoc with people in the upper deck in right field who were forced to look directly into the sun for about 20 minutes before it went down behind the other side of the stadium.  After a while, the clouds had moved out and it was a great evening to watch baseball.

Unfortunately for the home team, it wasn't their night.  Here's a picture of the field and beyond just after Philadelphia scored nine runs in the 4th inning to make the score 13-1.  The Phillies went on to score four more runs to make it 17-1 before we finally decided to call it a night after the top of the sixth.  The Phillies eventually blew out the Cardinals 20-2.  The Cards got lit up pretty good that night.

The next day was just picture perfect.  Beautiful blue skies, light wind, temperatures in the low to mid 80's.  And the humidity, which can be stifling in St. Louis in the summertime, was virtually non-existent.  It was a mid-afternoon game against the Phillies and we had seats down the left field line, underneath the second deck and out of the sun.  While it wasn't quite the Redbird Club, we were happy with the location of the seats. 

Here's a pitch in the first inning from the Cardinals' Kyle Lohse to the Phillies' Chase Utley.  God, I love this Panasonic camera we have.  If you click on the picture, you can see the ball literally suspended in mid-air about 10 feet in front of home plate.  It takes great action shots for no more of a camera than what it is. 

It was a much better game than the game the night before.  The Cardinals staked Lohse to a 3-0 lead after three innings.  Lohse withstood a Pat Burrell two-run homer in the fourth and pitched eight strong innings giving up just the two runs and four hits as the Cards won 3-2.  And it was a quick game - beginning right around 2:55 and ending at 5:06. 

We had dinner reservations at 7:30 that evening, so we had some time to kill after the game.  We decided to head over to The Outfield for a few beers and to let the traffic clear out.  On the way over, I took this picture of the site of the former Busch Stadium, which was torn a couple years ago.  It's still nothing but a big hole in the middle of the lot - derisively called "Lake DeWitt" by the citizens of St. Louis after Cardinals' CEO Bill DeWitt.  DeWitt proposed a "Ballpark Village" complete with shops, restaurants, office buildings and condominiums on the site when plans were initially drawn up for the new Busch Stadium the Cardinals are in. 

Development of the "Ballpark Village" has never gotten off the ground due to a number of factors, including a soft market.  But the Cardinals are going to have to do something with the site before next summer when they host the All-Star Game.  Actually, I would have thought much of the site would have been filled in by now, but it looks the same as it did in this picture I took two years ago from the north side of the new Busch Stadium.  That's The Outfield bar in the middle background of the photo.

As we left The Outfield around 6:00 p.m. to go to our parking spot, we stopped off at the northwest corner of the stadium to look at the new statues of former Cardinal players on display.   Here are the statues of three of my all-time favorite Cardinal players - Bob Gibson, Lou Brock and Stan Musial.  To read the "Brush with Greatness" entry when I met and spent a good portion of the afternoon with Bob Gibson one time, click here. 

And here's a the big Stan Musial statue just outside the west main entrance of Busch Stadium.  My uncle Jack adored Stan Musial.  I was too young to remember Stan Musial playing, but from newsreel clips and other replays I've seen over the years, he became one of my all-time favorite Cardinal players, if not my favorite.  Stan the Man.

Here's a short clip from YouTube with the legendary Jack Buck talking about Stan Musial with some footage of Musial playing in his prime. 

I'm slowly warming up to the new Busch Stadium.  It had more of a "lived-in" feel to it on this visit than it did a couple years ago.  It's not perfect, but it's home to some of the best and most knowledgeable baseball fans in the country.  It's always fun to go to a game in St. Louis and the most sad thing is when the final out is made in the ninth inning.  There are times I could just sit and watch baseball for hours.  And Busch Stadium isn't a bad place to see a game.