Busch Stadium Field Trip

Beth's spring school field visit was to Busch Stadium (the home of the St Louis Cardinals MLB team) - Go Cards! Since the stadium is just a few blocks form my office, I met Beth at the stadium & accompanied her on the tour.

Our first stop was to look at a plaque that showed how the old & new Busch Stadiums overlapped. The old stadium was originally a multi-purpose venue that was used for both football & baseball, which after renovations in the mid-1990s was used exclusively by the The Cardinals. It was a fully enclosed (circumferentially), 'cookie cutter' style stadium, that was designed by the consulting engineering company that I now work for & opened one year after the Gateway Arch was completed (which is what the 96-arch 'Crown of Arches' roof was designed to reflect). The tour guide noted how the new stadium was built around the old stadium (the first base line of the old stadium is painted on the new stadium concourse) & that it was originally planned to demolish the old stadium at the end of the 2005 season. Unfortunately (for the construction schedule) The Cards made it into the playoffs so work on the new stadium was halted. When I first arrived in St Louis, the playoffs had just finished so i didn't get the change to go in the old stadium, but I got to see the stadium being demolished. Lots of items from the stadium were auctioned off (e.g. bleacher seats) & I remember some of my co-workers coming back all excited one lunchtime because they had managed grab some of the stadium concrete from the demolition site!

The new stadium is a much more open-air design. Not only does this provide a panoramic view of Downtown St Louis & the Gateway Arch, but it also provides ventilation at pitch level. Apparently, the pitch was four storeys below ground level in the old stadium & for one of the playoff games although it was 'only' about 110 degrees F outside, at Home Plate it was almost 130 degrees F. The new stadium architecture also includes references to The Arch & other significant St Louis landmarks, for example the Gate 3 entrance on the west side of the stadium includes a large truss resembling Eads Bridge (the first bridge over the Mississippi River connecting Missouri & Illinois).

The tour lasted about an hour. We visited the various 'club' party rooms, the pre-game show TV 'studio', the press room (where radio commentary is broadcast from & is probably the best seat in the stadium), & The Cardinals Club, which includes a high-class eat & drink as much as you can buffet service & the best public seats in the stadium (all for a mere $14,000 per ticket, per year, but you have to buy two). We then went out to the Cardinals' Dugout where all the students (& Beth's teacher) not only got to sit where The Cards do for their home matches, but also got to sing 'Take me out to the Ball Game' (which is an early 20th century song & is the unofficial baseball anthem which is traditionally sung by fans during the seventh-inning stretch of a baseball game) from the dugout - very cool!