Minute Maid Park Tour

As hubby is on a mission to see all the baseball parks in the country, we decided to take a closer look at our own park & do a little behind the scenes tour.  The Astros offer several types of tours & this past Saturday we opted for the clubhouse tour.

I don’t miss the Astrodome at all & I’m so glad we have a pretty new field.

Minute Maid Field is built at the location of Houston’s original train station- Union Square & the tour started inside.

I love big beautiful areas with grand architecture like these columns and arches, adorned with tiny details.  You can rent out the area for parties or wedding receptions.

The tour was pretty cool & it was neat to be walking around when the place wasn’t packed.  They gave us little tips & told us things I never knew- like the food stand above serves food themed around the visiting team that day and all the drinks are centralized in the stadium and go through miles of pipe to get to each of the concession stands.  We checked out the weight room & batting/pitching cages.

Then headed over to the Diamond Club- a super swanky lobby for the top ticket purchasers to hang out before the game & very close to their plush seats with waitresses right behind home plate.

We stopped by the press conference room & got to peek into the coaches offices, which were right outside the locker room.

The coolest part of the tour was by far the club house- a huge circular room with all the players lockers on the outside & fancy chairs for watching the big screen TV on the inside.

It was fascinating checking out all the lockers & seeing what types of stuff they had hanging around.  I felt like a total creeper and like I was spying on the players- I wouldn’t want anybody checking out my closet!  Some had personal things & some had large collections of shoes, gloves or bats.

We strolled through the training room & physical therapy area before heading to the dugout.

I made a pano of the view from the dugout & you can click on it to see the full size version.

In keeping with the railroad theme, the train engine will make noise & move when we score or there is a homerun.

We made a loop around the field, checking out the bullpens, behind the scoreboard, the hill in the outfield and other features of the park.

Wide angle lens probably wasn’t the best for taking a photo, but we had fun on the tour!

I thought it was great to see the stands totally deserted & I could really get an appreciation for how close fans in the first few rows really are to the field.

This is the view from as close to home plate as we could get & our last stop on the tour.  We covered a lot of ground in about an hour & we are going back next week to do a twilight tour where they take you up into the roof structure for a birds eye view.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: September!! It’s going to be an awesome month with trips to Philly & Colorado!