Busch Stadium III, St. Louis (MLB #4 - The Arch of history)

 

St. Louis has a tradition of giving successive baseball stadiums the same name, Busch Stadium, just as France had a tradition of naming all its kings Louis (like the namesake of the city, King Louis IX). The Cardinals have been playing in Busch Stadia all my life, I’ve been to all three of them, and have a special feeling for each of them. I’m also fascinated by the twists and turns that led to there even being a Busch Stadium in the first place, what one might call the Arch of history.

Busch III:

The current stadium is a great park. One of the features I like is the various logos of the Cardinals through time scattered around the stairwells to the upper deck, tied to years they won the World Series. The Cards have won the World Series 11 times, more than any team other than the New York Yankees, and like any franchise, their logo has changed in subtle ways over the years, although it has always had the intertwined “StL” and they’ve usually had the two birds on a bat on the jerseys. You can even buy shirts with all the logos (of course I have one, although we just bought the fabric, and Kerry made the shirt).

But my favorite thing about Busch III is its great view of the St. Louis Arch. One of the joys of living in St. Louis, which we did for seven years, is the 630-foot high Arch. A memorial to the Lewis and Clark Expedition of the early 1800s and the subsequent westward expansion of the United States, it has underneath it a museum that looks at both the positives and negatives of that expansion. The everyday effect of the Arch is that you get glimpses of slivers of the Arch from all over town when your sightline to the riverfront opens up (zoning restrictions don’t permit taller buildings within the city).

About the Arch:

We have many fond memories of the Arch.

Like joining hundreds of thousands of our closest friends on the grounds of the Arch for 4^th of July fireworks.

Like riding up the tram to the top to look over the city from the viewing windows.

Like doing that and looking at the construction of Busch III going on next to the still-operational Busch II (we have a picture of that on a wall at home).

Like parking on the riverfront, and walking underneath the Arch to the stadium, then walking back under the Arch in the moonlight after the game.

That last one is intimately tied to the season when we got hooked on baseball. It was 1981, we were in our second full baseball season in St. Louis, and the Cardinals were in a pennant race for the first time in several years. A players’ strike took out the middle third of the season, and angered many fans, so in an effort to lure them back, the Cardinals offered $1 General Admission (open seating in the top of the upper deck) for the remainder of the season. I was in grad school, making a teaching assistant’s salary, Kerry was in med school, borrowing money hand over fist, and we had precious little disposable income for entertainment. But we could park for free on the riverfront, the GA tickets were only $2 total, and the team allowed people to bring in popped popcorn and bottles of water. We spent many evenings at the top of Busch II, watching good baseball and occasionally even studying (unfortunately, they’d let you bring in textbooks, as well). They missed out on the playoffs, but they won the World Series the next year.

Incidentally, one of my favorite exhibits about the Arch is the letters to the editors of St. Louis newspapers when Eero Saarinen’s design was selected. There were many people offended because it didn’t look like a traditional monument. But in the end, it became the beloved symbol of the city. Saarinen was also crucial in selecting the design of the Sydney Opera House, the amazingly hard-to-build structure that went far over budget and schedule, but again, ultimately became the symbol of the city (and country). Years later, in my hometown of Tucson, there was a decades-long series of proposals of structures or institutions to revitalize the downtown (it ultimately kind of rebuilt itself), but at one point, there was a proposal of a multi-colored bridge/museum over a dry riverbed. The letters to the editor were savage about the idea of a decorative bridge to nowhere – and I instantly concluded that if they built it (which they did not), it would become iconic.

Busch II:

Let’s get back to baseball stadiums, specifically Busch II, which was used from 1966 through 2005.

In some ways, it was a mid-60s monstrosity, a multi-purpose (there was a football team also named the Cardinals that played there when we were in town, and cured me of football) concrete bowl (with a perfectly symmetrical and boring outfield), with the field covered in Astroturf. Astroturf was in itself an abomination – modern artificial turfs are much more realistic that the stuff that gave the fast bounces and destroyed knees.

The stadium was also brutal on hot days. When the Major League All-Star Game was played in St. Louis’ new stadium on a broiling 103-degree afternoon in July of 1966, the legendary Casey Stengel was an honorary coach, and a reporter asked him what he thought of the stadium. He paused a moment, and replied that it “sure holds the heat well.” That was before the Astroturf was installed – I can’t imagine how bad it must have been to play there on a summer afternoon on that stuff.

But one salutary effect of having Astroturf in St. Louis was that Whitey Herzog (General Manager briefly, then Manager for several years) built a team that relied on hitting the ball on the ground and running fast, which made for an exciting brand of baseball. Herzog famously made an ongoing bet with a light-hitting shortstop that he’d just acquired, Ozzie Smith, because Herzog was convinced Ozzie would do better hitting ground balls than trying to hit long fly balls. So every time Ozzie hit a ground ball, Whitey owed him a dollar; every time Ozzie hit a fly ball, he owed Whitey a dollar. It worked. Ozzie had hit .211 and .230 the two years before he joined the Cardinals, but ended up with batting averages as high as .303 with St. Louis. He was a switch-hitter, so he batted left-handed most of the time, but spent more than 1000 games in the majors without hitting a home run left-handed before he hit a walk-off homer in the 1985 playoffs. Ozzie ended up with a plaque in Cooperstown at the Hall of Fame and a statue in front of Busch III.

Busch II also had a state-of-the-(mid-1960s)-art scoreboard. When a Cardinal would hit a home run, there was a huge Anheuser-Busch eagle that would light up and flap its wings, and an outline of a cardinal would fly around the scoreboard, in a surprisingly realistic version of the stuttering flight of actual cardinals.

But the best thing about the stadium, by far, was its one truly unique architectural feature. Busch II opened the year after the Arch was finished. In an homage, the top of the concrete bowl, above the upper deck, was a series of 96 arches. From many parts of the stadium (including the upper deck in 1981), you could see the St. Louis Arch rising out of the arches of the stadium. That was truly memorable.

Busch I (Sportsman’s Park):

Any baseball fan remembers the first major league game they went to. My first MLB game was in the first Busch Stadium, also known as Sportsman’s Park, in 1965. It was an afternoon game, and a family friend invited me along for a day trip (we lived three hours away). I remember a lot about the game – Frank Robinson hit a homer for the Reds, who won; Roger Maris of the Cardinals sat out the game. And there are parts I wouldn’t have remembered without the help of the web: Bill White hit two homers for the Cardinals, and the final score was 8-7.

What’s most interesting to me about Busch I is the history involved. Kerry says this part is boring, so you can skip it, but if you like historical stories with twists and turns and what-ifs, this is for you. Busch I was on the site where the Cardinals’ predecessors first played major league baseball, in 1881, although the area had been used for baseball at least 25 years earlier. The stadium, and several baseball field/grandstand configurations before it on the same location, had all been known as “Sportsman’s Park,” even though it wasn’t given a roman numeral. When the main grandstand of the final configuration was constructed in 1909, the Cardinals were playing elsewhere in town, and the park was owned by the American League St. Louis Browns, who had more money, more talent, and more of a following than the older Cardinals franchise. Although they hadn’t won an American League pennant, the Browns had come close, and the Cardinals were pretty hapless.

When Sam Breaden bought the Cardinals in 1920, he abandoned the old stadium, and they rented from the Browns. Around this time, the Browns’ owner predicted they’d be playing a World Series in Sportsman’s Park by 1926. The Browns came very close in 1922, finishing in second place, one game behind Babe Ruth’s Yankees. But the Browns regressed the next year, and the Yankees won the first of their many World Series. In 1926, there was a World Series in Sportsman’s Park, but it was the Cardinals playing, and they beat the Yankees in seven games, the last one ending with Babe Ruth getting thrown out trying to steal second (WTF?).

Over the next quarter century, the Cardinals became the first major league team to have a minor league farm system, and won six more World Series, while the Brown only appeared in the World Series once, in the war year of 1944, when their most memorable player was one-armed outfielder Pete Gray.

But in 1947 Breaden was ill, and sold the team to local businessman Fred Saigh. It wasn’t obvious at the time, but the Cardinals’ two-decade run of dominance (six World Series wins in 21 seasons) was at an end. By 1951, the Cardinals were struggling, the Browns had an imaginative new owner, Bill Veeck (who earlier brought Spring Training to Tucson and won a World Series with the Indians, but that’s an earlier blog), and there were growing cities that wanted major league teams. When Saigh was convicted of income-tax evasion, Veeck thought he could run the Cardinals out of town. Indeed, Saigh flirted with a group of potential buyers from Houston, but ultimately took a lower offer from a local power who wanted to keep the team in St. Louis, Augustus Anheuser “Gussie” Busch Jr. At this point, Veeck knew the gig was up, and moved the Browns to Baltimore to become the Orioles. The owners of Sportsman’s Park, the heirs of a previous Browns owner, sold the park to Busch, who wanted to rename it “Budweiser Stadium,” after his company’s main product. But the baseball Commissioner vetoed that, not wanting the name of a product as the name of a stadium. The era of naming rights was about a half-century in the future, but Gussie Busch was leading the way. He named it Busch Stadium, after himself (many team owners had named parks after themselves). The next year, Anheuser-Busch introduced a beer called “Busch,” and Gussie had outmaneuvered the Commissioner.

Incidentally, Busch III is named “Busch” because Anheuser-Busch bought naming rights. I think Gussie would be proud.

The game:

The Cardinals are having a terrible season. Despite high expectations, they have the worst record in their division. That’s unfamiliar territory for the Cardinals, who have only finished last in a division or league once in more than 140 years of play. As a result, when we went to buy tickets, it was cheaper to buy them from the resellers (StubHub, SeatGeek) than from the ticket office, because the scalpers are selling tickets for a loss. In addition, the team sells most tickets before the season starts. So the line outside the stadium was only a half-block long when the gates opened, and the crowd, for a losing team on a Tuesday night, was over 41,000.

On the first pitch of the game, the Astros’ leadoff hitter hit a ground ball to the Cardinals Gold Glove second baseman Brendan Donovan. Who booted it. The next batter got a hit on the first pitch, so the Astros had two runners on base after two pitches. One of them scored, and they got a home run from their light-hitting catcher, Martin Maldonado, and were ahead 2-0 after an inning and a half.

But the Cardinals’ Paul DeJong hit a home run, and then a sacrifice fly a couple of innings later to tie it. Then Nolan Arenado hit a run-scoring double, then scored on a wild pitch on a play close enough for a replay challenge to give the Cardinals a 4-2 lead.

The critical pitch of the game came in the 7^th inning. The Astros loaded the bases with two outs, the Cardinals brought in Giovanny Gallegos to pitch, and he ran the count full to pinch-hitter Bligh Madris. With the crowd roaring, and the game on the line, Madris hit an easy fly ball to left field, and the score stayed 4-2. Neither team threatened to score for the rest of the game.