#20 Minute Maid Park

Minute Maid Park

501 Crawford Street

Houston, Texas 77002

Capacity:  41, 547

Indoors/outdoors:  Retractable Roof

Selected Game Attended:  Cubs at Astros; October 2, 2010

One of the biggest reasons I enjoy traveling around the country to visit various baseball stadiums is the uniqueness of the parks themselves.  It makes for an easier blog to write because I rarely feel like I am retelling the same things.  This is unlike any other sport in our country.  For the most part, if you have seen one NHL/NBA arena you’ve seen them all.  The same goes for NFL stadiums where the dimensions are precisely the same and, unless you’re in a historic venue like Lambeau Field, chances are that very little about one stadium would separate itself from another.  Sure, I love the sport and would probably be convinced to take any number of road trips rather easily, but the fact that each stadium is so different from the other is the added bonus.  Baseball stadiums each have their own personality.  A homerun that just clears the right field wall in Yankee Stadium would be a loud out in San Diego.  A screaming line drive that hits the top of the Green Monster in Boston is likely a single there, whereas it would be a home run in every other park in baseball.  And O.Co Coliseum has robbed countless batters of precious batting average points when what should be an out of play foul ball lands safely in the glove of a fielder.  Often times the park you’re visiting also symbolizes the city you’re in.  Some parks do this very well (as we will see) and others, well, not so much.  Such is the case with Houston’s Minute Maid Park, a carnival of a stadium located in a rather conservative city and number 20 on our list.

In the interest of full disclosure I should probably let you know that I have never done acid.  I have, however, seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas so I can surmise that the closest thing to watching a baseball game on acid has to be at Minute Maid Park.  You immediately get a sense that the designers of this place did everything they could to make it stand out as loony and unique as possible.  Some of it works and some of it does not.  Let’s start with the obvious and that is center field.  It is hard enough to play center field in major league baseball without having to worry about running up an incline.  However, at Minute Maid Park outfielders are tasked with doing just that (there’s also a flag pole in the field of play, because running up a hill isn’t hard enough).  Luckily balls are rarely hit there on the fly – the center field wall is an absurd 436 feet from home plate – and thus the most action the hill sees are fielders running up it to chase balls that have rolled to the wall.  In addition, the Astros have announced that the hill and flag pole will be removed following the 2015 season, brining a much needed sense of normalcy to the park.

Mitigating the cavernous center field are cozy corners where even a hard hit pop fly can sometimes find its way out into the bleachers.  Sitting atop the left field section are train tracks in honor of Union Station, whose grounds the stadium was built on.  The train above the tracks actually moves when the Astros hit a home run and one of the cars is filled with oranges (a friend of mine thought they were pumpkins, considering we were attending the last games of the year in October).  I think this whole thing looks tacky and doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the park or downtown.  The tracks and wall just sort of end and immediately transform into what looks like an otherwise standard indoor/outdoor stadium.  

The roof is located above the right field stands and the scoreboard, in my opinion, is tucked too far back into the roof’s skeleton.  I was sitting down the third base line and it was tough to see.  The scoreboard itself, I should note, is nice enough.

So, while Minute Maid Park is certainly tacky, there is a lot to like here.  The location is near downtown (although I counted, I think, three different skylines down there – the zoning laws are wacky which is a big reason why the city is so expansive) and parking is a breeze.  There are a few bars near the park with a solid atmosphere (when I attended the Astros were dead to rights and there was still a solid crowd) and the tackiness of the park, for all its faults, is still pretty interesting to look at.   You won’t see a ball game anywhere close to a place this unique and for that I commend them for at least trying – there is nothing worse than a plain park with nothing going for it, a huge reason why the cookie cutter era is so universally hated.  There is also great food in the region.  Whether you want a steak or some great Tex-Mex, you can find a place to fill your belly in the country’s fourth largest city.  

So there is Minute Maid Park.  It doesn’t resemble the Houston that most people know and that’s OK.  It stands out on its own and, for all its blemishes, is still a nice place to see a game.  We have advanced to the middle 3^rd of the rankings list, so congrats as well for not being in the dreaded bottom 10!