Busch Stadium

The new Busch stadium is one of the parks I have only attended once so far. I didn’t make it to the old Busch stadium so I can’t make any direct comparisons. However, I did attend games at the Vet in Philadelphia and Three Rivers in Pittsburgh. If it was anything like those two parks, good riddance. The saving grace for the old park was their decision to replace the artificial turf with real grass. But I digress…

This is an impressive park. The exterior is red brick. Once inside, the walkways behind the seats are spacious and easy to orient yourself to where you are in the park. The game I saw was the first game in the 2007 Butthead Ballpark Tour. We were sitting in the cheap seats for this game – upper deck right field by the foul pole. There is an impressive view of downtown St. Louis from our seats. One of the most impressive sights was the Cardinal fan base. You expect to see fans wearing the home team gear, but this was over the top. I would venture that over 90% of the people in attendance had on at least one item.

The Cards were mediocre this year and would finish under .500. The previous year they lost to Boston in the World Series and still had much of the talent on offense. They had Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen, Jim Edmonds, and Rick Ankiel. They had questionable pitching. Chris Carpenter was out for the year. In contrast they were playing the Philadelphia Phillies who were a year away from winning the World Series. They had Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, and Pat Burrell. They had Adam Eaton and Cole Hamels. This was the year they experimented with Brett Myers as the closer. The game I saw was an easy win for Philadelphia on a good Jamie Moyer outing. 

The three of us [Marc, John and I] flew in to St, Louis from our respective home cities that afternoon. We ate lunch at a bar near the arch which also happened to be near the park and the hotel we were staying in. At the bar, Marc somehow finds out from the waitress that there is a gay pride march scheduled for the next day. [I’m still not sure how that came up in conversation.] We checked into the hotel and walked over to the ballpark. As we were watching the game, these two guys sat next to Marc. Both with lots of gang tattoos. Marc turns to them and says, “My friend Dave is here for the gay pride march tomorrow.” They didn’t laugh. Thanks Marc.