Though I lost the official AL Rookie of the Year award to Eddie Murray, I won The Sporting News version for 1977 after being acquired from Pittsburgh along with Tony Armas.
The Astrodome is a domed sports stadium, the first of its kind.
It is located in Houston, Texas at 29.6849° N 95.408° W, and
is now part of the Reliant Park complex. It opened in 1965 as Harris
County Domed Stadium and was nicknamed the "Eighth Wonder of the
World". (A team owner is quoted as saying that the "rent for the
Astrodome was the ninth".) Reliant Energy purchased naming rights to
the building in 2000.
At
a glance...
ASTRODOME
Facility
statistics
Location
8400
Kirby Drive
Houston, Texas 77054
Broke
ground
January
3, 1962
Opened
April
12, 1965
Closed
December
21, 1996 (Oilers)
October 9, 1999 (Astros)
Apex
of Dome: 208 ft.
1965
Left Field - 340 ft
Left-Center - 375 ft
Center Field - 406 ft
Right-Center - 375 ft
Right Field - 340 ft
Backstop - 60.5 ft
1977:
Left Field - 340 ft
Left-Center - 390 ft
Center Field - 406 ft
Right-Center - 390 ft
Right Field - 340 ft
Backstop - 60.5 ft
1994:
Left Field - 325 ft
Left-Center - 375 ft
Center Field - 400 ft
Right-Center - 375 ft
Right Field - 325 ft
Backstop - 52 ft
Major League Baseball expanded to Houston in 1962 with the Houston Colt
.45s, who were later renamed the Astros. Houston's unpredictable
subtropical weather made outdoor baseball difficult for players and
spectators alike. Several baseball franchises had toyed with the idea of
building enclosed, air-conditioned stadiums. Houston mayor Roy Hofheinz
claimed inspiration for what would eventually become the Astrodome when he
was on a tour of Rome, where he learned that the builders of the ancient
Colosseum installed giant velariums to shield spectators from the Roman
sun.
When the Astrodome opened, it used a natural grass (Tifway 419 Bermuda
Grass) playing surface. The dome's ceiling was made of clear plastic
panes. Players quickly complained that glare coming off of the panes made
it impossible for them to track fly balls, so all of the panes were
painted over, which solved the glare problem but caused the grass to die
from lack of sunlight. For a time, the Astros played on green-painted
dirt. The permanent solution was to install a new type of artificial grass
on the field, which became known as AstroTurf.
This was done in time for the 1966 season.
Scoreboard
The Astrodome was well-known for a four-story-tall scoreboard,
comprised of thousands of lightbulbs, that featured animations until its
removal in the late 1980s. This loss was brought about by threats from
Oilers owner Bud Adams to move his football team to Jacksonville, Florida
unless stadium seating capacity was expanded. (Ironically, Jacksonville
won an NFL expansion franchise in 1995.) The city buckled to his demands,
and the scoreboard was removed and approximately 15,000 new seats
installed to bring total capacity over 60,000. In 1989, four cylindrical
columns were constructed outside the Dome.
Fly
to the Astrodome!
If you have Google
Earth installed, click here
to be "flown" to the site of the Astrodome. (If you do not
have it installed, get
it from Google. It allows you to view virtually anywhere on
Earth in 3D using satellite imagery.)
Recent History
The 1992 Republican National Convention was held at the Astrodome. The
Astros accommodated the politicians by taking a month-long road trip.
The largest crowd in its history took place in 2001, when the WWE
brought Wrestlemania X-Seven to the Astrodome. It attracted 67,925 fans.
The Astrodome began to show its age by the 1990s. Oilers owner Adams
issued a new set of demands, this time for a completely new stadium, but
the city of Houston refused to fund such a venture. After years of
threats, Adams moved the team to Tennessee in 1996. Around that time the
Astros also threatened to leave the city unless a new ballpark was built.
Houstonians acquiesced this time, and the retractable-roofed Enron
Field was erected in downtown Houston in 2000.
Astrodome!
Banners for the
1960 and '61 AFL Champion Houston Oilers
and the '81 and '86 Western Division
winning Houston Astros still fly in the
Astrodome.
Primary
research by Jim Herdman & David Vincent
Courtesy of Retrosheet.
The Astrodome was joined by a new neighbor in 2002, the
retractable-roofed Reliant Stadium, which was built to house Houston's new
NFL franchise, the Houston Texans. When the Houston Livestock Show and
Rodeo moved to the new venue in 2003, the Astrodome was left without any
major tenants. The historic facility now hosts occasional concerts and
high school football games. Much talk among various civic planners has
focused on converting the dome into a space-themed hotel and amusement
park or as an additional convention center for the City of Houston.
The stadium is currently called the "lonely landmark" by
Houstonians because hardly any well-known events take place there.
Although some Houstonians want the Astrodome demolished by 2009 or 2010,
and to be replaced by a large parking lot for the new Reliant Stadium, the
Reliant Center and Reliant Arena (a mini-convention center), city council
has rejected that plan for environmental reasons. They reasoned that the
Astrodome is closely surrounded by hospitals, hotels, apartments, Reliant
Stadium, the Reliant Center, Reliant Arena, a freeway, Six Flags theme
park, and that demolition might damage some of them. On September 12,
2005, Six Flags Astroworld announced the park's closure.
Hurricane Katrina
On August 31, 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Harris County
Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and the State of
Louisiana came to an agreement to allow at least 25,000 evacuees from New
Orleans, especially those that were sheltered in the Louisiana Superdome,
to move to the Astrodome until they could return home. The evacuation
began on September 1. All scheduled events for the final four months of
2005 at the Astrodome were cancelled. However, eventually officials
declared that the Reliant Astrodome was full at 13,000 and could not
accept additional hurricane evacuees from the disaster. Overflow evacuees
were held in the surrounding Reliant Park complex including 3,000 at the
Reliant Arena and 8,000 at the Reliant Center. No more evacuees were taken
into the Astrodome. There was a full field hospital inside the Reliant
Arena, which cares for the entire evacuee community.
The entire "Reliant City" (the Astrodome and surrounding
athletic facilities) was scheduled to be emptied of evacuees by September
17, 2005. The Astrodome has no other current use, aside from a handful of
conventions, and originally the Astrodome was planned to be used to house
evacuees until December. However, the surrounding parking lots were needed
for the first Houston Texans home game. Arrangements were made to help
evacuees find apartments both in Houston and elsewhere in the United
States. By September 16, 2005 the last of the evacuees living in the
Astrodome had been moved out either to the neighboring Reliant Arena or to
more permanent housing. As of September 20, 2005, the remaining evacuees
were relocated to Arkansas due to Hurricane Rita.
Astrodome!
The Astrodome is
converted to a shelter for victims of
Hurricane Katrina.
Photo
by Andrea Booher.
Related books on the Astrodome: The
Houston Astrodome by Craig A. Doherty, Katherine M. Doherty and Nicole
Bowman.
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