The Last Game in the Dome

By David Marasco

Monday night as we walked to the parking lot I turned to my friend Tom and said "The last game at the Astrodome won't even come close." It didn't. The last game in Tiger Stadium dwarfed Sunday's Astrodome happenings.

There were some mitigating circumstances. Tiger Stadium was built in 1912 and was home for Tigers fans for many generations. There are players older than the Astrodome. The game in Tiger Stadium was final. Sunday in Houston was merely the last regular season game, playoff tickets were being sold for future games. Detroit is a solid baseball town, Texas is football country. There was a good game in Michigan, there was a farce in the Dome.

This time I didn't fold my ticket prior to ripping, so of course they ripped it. I later had it embossed, as that seemed to be the thing to do. I also was given a souvenir Astrodome tin as a handout, I guess I'll use it to hold extra-special ticket stubs. A pair of programs were also embossed with the final game date. That seems to be the craze these days. While at the Astrodome you were limited to programs and ticketstubs, the Tigers embossed anything and everything. You want to emboss your nachos? Go at it... In 20 years it will fetch a good price on Ebay.

I believe that Tiger Stadium's finale sold out exactly 37 nanoseconds after the tickets went on sale. Tom and I got our Astros tickets in May, meaning we were in the top deck, down the rightfield line. After finding our seats we ate lunch. Hotdogs were pretty good, but vendors were few and far between.

After a while they got rolling on the pre-game ceremonies. They brought out the surviving engineers, who got a good round of applause. The national anthem was sung by country singer Charlie Pride. Pride was a pitcher in the watered-down Negro Leagues of the 1950's. Riley's Encyclopedia mentions that there is an unconfirmed story that Pride and a rightfielder were once traded for a bus. His rendition was perfect, right up there with one by a champion whistler I heard at a Giants game more than a decade ago. After the singing was done we were ready for ball.

But there was a bad taste in our mouths. No, it wasn't the tasty food, it was the Dodgers lineup. Davey Johnson was in a fix. On the last day of the season the Astros had not finalized their place in the playoff picture. Ismael Valdes was not with the team, he was with his father who had suffered an accident. It was Ismael's turn in the rotation, so who to pitch? The obvious answer if you are concerned about winning is to go with Kevin Brown one day early. And how about Gary Sheffield? He was out of the lineup protecting a batting average just above .300. Johnson went with a rookie pitcher named Checo. He struck out Biggio looking, and then proceeded to walk the next four batters. He gave up a bases-clearing double before walking a fifth batter, and his day was over.

Sadly, at 4-0 with one out in the bottom of the first, the game was pretty much over before it started. Sure, plenty of teams have come back from 4-0, especially with 8 more innings worth of batting, but this one felt like it had come on a silver platter for the Astros. Also on the silver platter was a National League Central Division title. Remember that Davey Johnson has some bad blood with both the Mets and the Reds. Those are the two teams that got screwed when Houston got a pushover in the final game.

In certain baseball circles Gary Sheffield's name is spoken in tones of disgust. Shef once admitted to dogging it while playing for Milwaukee. He wasn't happy in the Brewers organization and wanted to be traded, so quite simply he didn't put out his best effort. He was looking out for his own interests, not those of his team. In Johnson's defense, he was looking out for the best interests of the Dodgers by his actions. He wanted to stroke the ego of one of his superstars by allowing him to finish with a .300 batting average without risk, and didn't want to take chances on his bazillion-dollar pitcher by bringing him in on short rest. Yet I feel that as much as a player has an obligation to put out his best effort for his team, a team has an obligation to put out their best effort for the league. The purity of the pennant is blemished if one of the teams involved is getting gimmees. If, in the middle of a playoff race, a player didn't dive for a catchable ball because he was more concerned about his long term health he might be benched or fined by his manager. If the powers that be had guts there would be suspensions or fines for the Dodgers actions.

While in Detroit we were given a nip-and-tuck game that was won on a late-inning grand slam, the Houston affair was a snoozer. Caminiti's bomb to centerfield was fun (and the cannon blast for dingers sure beats Bennie Brewer sliding into a giant beer mug), but I have to admit I spent a good part of the game staring at the New York vs. Pittsburgh line that was slowly being posted on the out-of-town scoreboard. The 1-1 had me on pins and needles. With so little information I was reduced to "man, they've been in the bottom of the sixth for a long time, what's going on out there!" When a lone run was posted in the bottom of the ninth I knew it had to have been one hell of a game. Little did I know that they road to the playoffs had been set by a wild pitch.

The final in the Astrodome was 9-3, and it wasn't even that close. The Dodgers put three excuse-me runs on the board in 9th, helped by an outfield error. Even before the end of the game people were leaving. In fact, although it was an announced sell out, there were large patches of empty seats the entire game. The people sitting next to me left after the 8th. You would think that for the last regular season game in the Astrodome they would stay. You would think that to watch the Astros clinch the central they would stay. But no, many fans left early. Like I said before, Texas is football country.

As in Tiger Stadium, the last out was a K. With the victory the Astros took the Central. Red, white and blue confetti dropped from the roof. I've never been to a clinching before, and it was sort of neat. While the players went to celebrate in the locker room the fans were presented with a video of the history of the Astrodome. I'll admit that I was rather taken with the black-and-white film of engineers in big cowboy hats going over the plans with the ironworkers. After the video the show was turned over to Milo Hamilton, voice of the Astros. He started introducing players from the 1965 team, the first in the dome. I have to say that I thought that the Tigers way of doing this was better. Rather than a name followed by stats on the loudspeaker, the Tigers didn't use the PA to identify the players. As the old Tigers entered from centerfield you would get a closeup of their faces, and and they ran by the camera you would read the name on the back of the uniform. The understatement worked very well. Somehow it made it more special that the fans would recognize the players instead of the PA man.

After the 1965 team had taken their place, they went to the runners up for the all-time Astros team. Once they had run through these players, they assembled the actual all-time squad. Yes, Nolan Ryan was there. No, I wasn't as excited about seeing him as I was seeing Frank Tanana in Detroit. I did get a kick out of seeing the likes of Mike Scott, Bill Doran, Glenn Davis and Dickie Thon. A lot of them made the "runners up" squad rather than the all-time team, but who cares?

The next event was to be a concert by Willie Nelson, but we were worried about getting to the airport. There would be a few more going-through-the-motions events after Willie, but it didn't hold any meaning to me. Nor to most of the fans, the Astrodome got empty fast after Nolan was announced. Unlike the people around us who loudly complained whenever a rap tune was played, I decided to act on my musical prejudices simply by not listening to Mr. Nelson. We headed outside and found a taxi.