I attended my first game at the new Busch Stadium last week (the Cards’ 11-inning loss to the Brewers), and I came away impressed. First the caveat: I’m not a St. Louis native, and attended only a single game at Busch II, the final game before the 1985 mini-strike on August 5, 1985. Therefore, my memory of the old stadium is not clouded by emotion. Busch II was an abomination, part of the fleet of UFOs that dropped in on National League cities in the late 1960s. There was absolutely nothing memorable about those round, astroturf-laden, multipurpose monstrosities. Luckily, with the demolition of Busch II, all four are now relegated to the dustbin of history.
There’s a strange backlash against the New Retro stadia, such as David Bonetti’s architecture column in the Post on Sunday:
How exciting it would have been for the new St. Louis if a truly contemporary stadium had been built here. Like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; Rem Koolhaas’ Central Library in Seattle; or Chicago’s Millennium Park, it would have said to the world that St. Louis was a city of ambition and worthy of attention, as it was when it commissioned Eero Saarinen to build the great Arch that defines the city and continues to shame its current timidity.
Ironically, contemporary-style stadiums are being built all over the world, including in the United States, to great popular appeal. The age of the retro stadium is over.
Egad. The Bilbao Guggenheim as baseball stadium. The thought of it makes me cringe. Ultimately, a baseball stadium exists as a venue in which to play baseball, not as a work of art. The new retro stadia are successful because they have clean sight lines, the fans are close to the field, and the layout makes no concessions to the multipurpose stadium of old. And that’s the key to a successful baseball stadiuym design - what is it like to watch a game?
On that front, the new Busch is a triumph. It’s intimate and none of the sight lines are obstructed. The porches in left and right offer good standing room and a perch to try to catch a home run ball. The view from the plate offers a beautiful panorama of downtown.
My favorite feature? Information. Baseball, more than any other sport, appeals to the stat junkie, and Busch III abounds with data. The bullpens tell you the pitch count and ERA of the current pitcher and the stats for someone warming up. The center field scoreboard not only reports out of town scores, but shows who is on base, who is pitching and who is at bat in each out of town game. You get not only batting average, but OBP and slugging percentage for hitters.
These are the reasons Busch III is a great stadium, not because it is retro. Once Cards fans let go of the memories of six World Series at Busch II, they’ll recognize that the new stadium is a vast improvement.
