The first All-Star Game played in the state of Texas occurred in 1968 when the Houston Astros helped stage the event at their state-of-the-art indoors facility, The Astrodome. It was the first Midsummer Classic played indoors and on plastic. It was theoretically perfect, but the All-Star came it produced was not.
Playing indoors was a concept that had its origins with Walter O’Malley, then the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. However, he eventually decided that, rather than argue over real estate in the borough, with its hot summers and snowy winters, he’d just move to California. There, he built an outdoor facility, arguably the finest of its time in weather perfect Los Angeles.
Houston, on the other hand, had stifling heat and humidity, insects, especially mosquitos, most of the year, and it’s fledgling franchise played its games in an antiquated minor league ball park. It needed a stadium to attract fans, not bugs. And that’s how things changed:
Roy Hofheinz, a hard-charging entrepreneur who served as Houston’s mayor and as Harris County judge (the county’s chief administrator), supervised the construction. When it was built, the feasibility of a huge indoor sports facility was not fully certain. However, the engineers and architects were confident in their ability to follow through on a previously untested concept.
Hofheinz exerted his political power to construct an ultra-modern stadium that could be used not just for baseball but for other sports and events, too. The building, with exquisite luxury boxes, sophisticated computerized scoreboards, and perfect environmental conditions, easily earned it the nickname “The Eighth Wonder of the World”:
Among the most prominent features of the new venue was a $2 million scoreboard. It was 474 feet wide and weighed over 300 tons. It made all other scoreboards in use at the time look puny. It could be programmed to celebrate home runs, lead fans in cheers, and run between-inning advertisements.
But Hofheinz’s personal Xanadu was far from perfect. The indoor facility that was built specifically to combat the hot, humid south Texas environment demanded constant air conditioning, usually set at 72 degrees. This perfection, ironically, made for a stale, stagnant air with no wind or natural currents. While it greatly benefitted the pitchers, it played hell on offense.
In short, the manufactured conditions meant that batted balls didn’t travel as far, frustrating power hitters and often providing pitchers with another fielder. Action and drama were greatly reduced, as they were dulled and flattened by the lack of offense, especially dramatic home runs.
It was as if baseball was transported to the old “Dead Ball Era” in the early 1900s. Negro League great and Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige, who threw in the Astrodome as a publicity stunt in February 1965, “loved the idea, calling the windless conditions ‘a perfect pitcher’s dream.’”
Anecdotally, it also seemed that people who had listened to open-air games on the radio or watched them on television also struggled with the transition. Astrodome games seemed staid, stale, and stark, given the A/C’s constant humming, which was like Muzak in a dentist’s waiting room. Additionally, the annoying noise drowned out many of the natural sounds of a baseball game, integral to the enjoyment of the game.
For those at the game, there was a sense of distance from the field and the players, without the fun of the “bleacher bums” sections. The park seemed dark, cold, and vacant. The friendly confines and coziness that defined Fenway Park or Wrigley Field were absent from the Astrodome.
Fan participation was vacuous and premeditated instead of passionate and extemporaneous. The blame or culprit may have been the computerized scoreboard, the “AI” of its time, which the stadium used to prompt the fans to yell conventional slogans and war whoops. Instead of a building tidal wave of natural emotions, it seemed as if the scoreboard directed all fan reactions to events on the field.
The Astrodome had another problem, something the engineers, architects, and bureaucrats never calculated into the construction. This was the grass problem. The tinted glass panes on the Astrodome—installed to help players locate flyballs—soon browned, dried, and died without direct sunlight.
Thus, Astrodome management went artificial. For the first time, baseball would be played on “plastic grass,” a.k.a. “Astroturf,” which Monsanto created in the 1960s.
With all these factors, the Astrodome was more like a mausoleum than a ballpark.
Nevertheless, in 1968, Houston and its new facility were given the privilege of staging baseball’s All-Star Game. Sadly, that game itself came to the boring, inert, and dreary perception associated with all Astrodome games.
The National League walked away with the game (1-0, its sixth straight) when San Francisco Giants great Willie Mays singlehandedly won the game in the bottom of the first. Mays singled, advanced to second on a pick-off throwing error by Cleveland Indians pitcher Luis Tiant, and scored when Willie McCovey, Mays’ teammate, hit into a double play.
It was quintessential Mays, displaying his usual All-Star brilliance, witnessed by a national TV audience. The Giant’s superstar ripped his last hit and scored his final run. But still, it fell flat.
Like the inorganic cheers from a scoreboard, the fake green-colored plastic grass, and the manually controlled biome, stadium logistics forced Mays to manufacture the only run produced by both squads in the game. Instead of powering a home run over the wall with steely muscle, hitting a laser into the gap and blazing into third for a triple, or scorching a hit down the line and galloping into second with a standup double, Mays had to score an unearned run in an assembly-like fashion, moving base to base until he crossed home plate.
At least, he provided excitement in those first few minutes of the game, earning the game’s MVP.
This game was the last of a troika of low-scoring All-Star affairs in the sixties (1966 and 1967). Unlike the 1966 and 1967 games, which went to dramatic extra-inning finishes, the 1968 contest after the first inning had eight frames of goose eggs, with the players clubbing only eight hits but batting into two double plays, hitting three popup outs, and striking out 20 times. In reality, 26 of the 51 outs registered (50.9%) never made it past the “infield carpet.”
Perhaps it was the absence of any power generated by sluggers in the Dome in 1968 that was the final straw for baseball to infuse the game with more offense. It lowered the pitcher’s mound to create a more even playing field and more action for the fans, giving the hitter a psychological advantage. Certainly, the magnificent Astrodome proved that, too often, when we create seemingly perfect situations, we destroy the human element that brings human excitement to life.
Image: The Astrodome by EricEnfermero. CC BY-SA 3.0.
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