Pleasant Under Glass
Written: Apr 02 '00 (Updated Apr 03 '00)
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Pros: Has great potential; thus recommended with reservations
Cons: Hasn't realized the potential, and is drowning in ersatz and kitsch
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| mshawpyle's Full Review: Enron Field |
Enron Field is as most of the baseball world by now knows open for (preseason) business. The two night games under the stars, against the Yanks, were superb. The day game, under the roof on a raw, misty Houston Saturday afternoon, against the Washington Senators whoops, sorry, that club from Dallas did not go as well. None of the three, of course, counts.
But you're here to get an idea of the stadium, not the 'Stros.
Enron Field inevitably, if annoyingly, being called 'the Gashouse' (Houston and the old Buffs were a St Louis farm team before expansion; purists will be annoyed at the appropriation of the term for a team which, while beloved and recently successful, is not the equal of the old Dean Bros. / Durocher / Pepper Martin-era Cards) is an uneasy congeries of the sublime and the ludicrous.
At least at the Dome, the amusement park was kept separate from the field of play.
Please understand I am not panning the ballpark. For one thing, it is now a ballpark: no longer a stadium, it is a field emphasize, field - of dreams. And it has the capacity to host some real ballgames.
The nagging question is whether anyone will notice. The players essentially can't see the field from the dugouts. The fans
well, folks, welcome to modern baseball. Houston used to be a baseball town oddly, until expansion. We were the ultimate farm club town, ranking with Kansas City at times and the towns in the old Pacific Coast League, back in the days when the bigs went no further west than St Louis. Now, here as in a lot of places, far too many fans seem to be largely bereft of knowledge and a sense of baseball history. (God help us, Brooks Robinson threw out the first pitch Saturday and a shocking number of people seemed to have no idea who the heck he was.)
Enron Field, alas, has a number of distracting elements expressly to cater to these people.
Not that the club hasn't made an effort to create a field for real baseball fans. Camden Yards, as many of you will know, has a form of closed captioning at the seats for deaf fans; Enron Field has actual closed captioning on a scoreboard screen for us (look, after years of shotguns, rifles, and organic artillery attached to a light infantry unit, I need all the help I can get).
The Houston Grand Opera was the first in the country to employ surtitles; now the Astros are the first club in the bigs to do something similar. They have acquired merit in Heaven for that. (Some of that merit is immediately forfeited by the fact that if you are not hard of hearing when you get there, you will be when you leave: the monstrous new sound system has given the casual [i.e., nonserious] fans what they wanted, and the result is akin to being at a rock concert at which a ballgame has inexplicably broken out. And I have a suggestion regarding the selections, at least for preseason games in which a pitcher is trying to make the cut: Saturday, by the top of the fourth, they should have serenaded Octavio Dotel with Walkin' To New Orleans.)
The new scoreboard also does a fine fan's job with up-to-date stats in a very readable format, and the next up in each team's order remains indicated regardless of whose half of the inning it is.
On the downside, the radar gun / pitch call readings are displayed on a matrix board the size of a postage stamp, and the Astrodome's much-valued location graphic is simply missing. Depending on your seats, you may need that to know just where in or out of the strike zone the pitch was. But apparently the modern fan prefers scoreboard anime to SABRmetrics.
The Crawford [Street side] Boxes in left, and the street-level arcade under the arched windows behind, afford a superb view of the playing field. So really do all the 100-level seats down the foul lines, and the Diamond Boxes and field boxes behind home (though as I have long preached, you miss a lot of the action anywhere but along the foul lines).
After that things begin to break down badly. There is of course only one way to cram the same number of people as the Dome contained into a space about half the size: vertigo. The Terrace (300 level) and upper decks (AKA, collectively, the Upper Concourse) are steeper than many parts of West-by-God-Virginia, and should be barred to anyone over the age of sixty. They also suffer from a flaw inherent in the sliding roof design: towards the latter innings of a day game, under a closed roof, certain seats have a complex and surely blinding play of ambient exterior light and the field lights.
That said, the roof itself appears to be working, though I have not seen it in action. I wish I had: its mechanics would have to be more legitimately interesting and less banally annoying than that ersatz steam engine that runs above the Crawford Boxes, one composed of a mishmash of features from various old locomotives (the Union Station theme at Enron is woefully ubiquitous and overdone).
And that in a sense is the key to the disappointments that accompany the triumphs of the new park. It's ersatz, and it's cut and paste. So is the field of play.
It's 315 feet to left: a Fenway ripoff. Center is Texas-big, making the notoriously vast outfield of Coors look cozy: it is 15 feet further out than Fenway's, and has a cutesy hill with a padded flagpole in play, as Fenway did pre-1970, and Old Crosley in Cincy (the trainers are going to love that, I don't think). At 435 feet all told, it is only five feet shorter to dead center than is, or was, Tiger Stadium; five feet longer than dead straightaway at the old Twins's Memorial Stadium. Enron now displaces Fenway (again) as having the least amount of foul ground in the majors (fans take note: now more than ever you have to be alert for fouls, howitzering in upon you). There have been fences further from the plate but not in some seventy years (Hilltop, Forbes, Huntington Avenue, and the Polo Grounds IV).
If you wonder whence came that excess space up the middle, I can suggest a source: the seats. I have had more room on airlines. Yes, I know I need to keep dieting, but c'mon, should the ballpark be a memento mori for the waistline?
And did I mention it was loud? 9 to 3 for the bad guys, our boys trying to get a third out and get out of another bad top of the inning, and from the fan (or 'fan') noise, you'd have thought that what was going on down on the field was Slaughter's Mad Dash, the Brett Pine Tar Incident, or the Babe's Called Shot. I appreciate enthusiasm as much as the guy in the next seat (which was, on Saturday, my father, muttering into his mustache about how none of these guys would make him forget Musial, or the Splinter, or Mays, or Don Newcombe, or
); but a little analysis here, people, please.
It being Lent, and it not having been a Sunday game, I can't say much about the food, which with the exception of the soft pretzels (quite good) and the nachos (too messy to try) is wholly carnivorous; but I am told on good authority that the dogs are streets ahead of what we were used to. If High Churchmen in Lent and vegans all season will be disappointed in the food, though, I can tell you that Baptists and such small deer will be delighted by the impossibility of getting a beer timely at the game. I realize they are still working out the kinks at the new park, but
you wonder if the WCTU is running the catering here.
Among the kinks still to be debugged, please note, is parking. We parked at the 1019 Congress building (using our Courthouse reserved parking card), and hiked, which pleased his cardiologist a lot more than it thrilled Dad. The shuttle system and the closer-in parking remain more dream than reality, so be warned.
And that may in the end sum up Enron Field to date. It's very nice on the surface. The ideas were good. The amenities are potentially excellent. And despite the kitschy notions, it has the potential to be a heck of a ballpark from the serious fans' and players' perspective, though a whole new style of fielding is going to have to evolve here, and pitchers relying on groundball outs will have some adjustments to make. But there is a certain shoddiness to the FamilyEntertainFunParkThemeLand atmosphere that has been allowed to displace and distract from the game. The field even absent that factor feels 'retro' in the sense more of an academic exercise than a recapturing of the old spirit. And most of all, despite all this, the park is still awaiting its soul, though I have no doubt it will eventually acquire one.
There's only one way to achieve that, of course. So in the last two words of the National Anthem, 'Play ball!'
Recommended:
Yes
Parking Availability: What A Nightmare
Seat Location: Lower Level
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Epinions.com ID:
mshawpyle
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 - Top 500 |
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Member: Markham Shaw Pyle, JD
Location: Houston, Texas
Reviews written: 539
Trusted by: 391 members
About Me:
Historian, baseballing bon vivant, Boll Weevil, W&L man; and the Walter Mitty of field sports
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