MLB Stadium #42!

As I've shared many times, back in 2004, we finished our travel checklist of going to a baseball game in each of the 30 MLB ballparks. While it was a big deal to us when we finally accomplished our goal, by the time we got to the last one, which happened to be San Francisco Giants, there were already some stadiums that had been replaced! Since then, we've been playing catch up sporadically when it's been convenient for us to go to a game in a new ballpark, but getting to these new stadiums certainly hasn't been at the top of our travel plans.

When we were planning what to do on our big road trip last summer, we had six new ballparks left to visit. It wasn't possible to get to all six on that trip simply due to scheduling and logistics, but we did get to three: the Cincinnati Reds, the Texas Rangers, and the Atlanta Braves. That left us with three, so we decided to try to get to them during this school year. We went to see a Minnesota Twins game this past September and then a Miami Marlins game last month, which left us with just one to go.

Today we went to a St. Louis Cardinals game, who we saw play in their previous stadium more than twenty years ago when we lived in Chicago. Their "new" stadium opened in 2006, but we've not had a chance to get to it until today!

Busch Stadium is very nice and they've done a beautiful job with the area surrounding it! We had some time before the game to wander around and we were pretty impressed. We've been to St. Louis three times before today: once when we saw the Cardinals in their previous stadium; once when we went as part of a road trip and we did touristy things, including going up inside the Gateway Arch; and once when we went to see the St. Louis Blues play as part of our NHL Arenas travel checklist. It seems to me that the city has put a lot of work into sprucing itself up, because it was much nicer than I'd remembered!

The Cardinals lost to the Brewers 8-0, so not a great result for the hometown fans, but a fun afternoon for us, because we weren't really cheering for either team! Our seats were literally in the last row of the stadium and we had a chain link fence behind us, but for baseball, we've always been perfectly fine sitting in the upper deck because you can enjoy the game from different vantage points.

This brings me to a little brief cost break down. The tickets were only $10 each, and with taxes and fees, we paid a total of $28 for them. An amazing price for sure! The parking cost more ($30), as did the food and drinks ($54) we bought, but we were happy to find seats with a pretty decent view at such a reasonably low price. We were thinking back over the other baseball trips, and we're both pretty sure that's the lowest we've EVER paid for tickets to an MLB game! Contrast that with hockey, our true favorite sport, where we've paid upwards of $400 a seat to go to a game because where you sit makes a gigantic difference in your experience!

The only negative thing I can say about the game is the during the seventh inning stretch, they played "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," which of course is absolutely fine – but when we went to the Cardinals games all those years ago, they played "Meet Me in St. Louis" and all of the fans sang along. It's one of the things that made it a unique and memorable experience and we were looking forward to hearing it today. No such luck!

For now, until one of the baseball teams decides to build a new stadium, we're all caught up on MLB ballparks!

Happy Tails to you!