Busch Stadium Tour

Prior to attending that evening's game against the Cardinals, we booked a tour of Busch Stadium. We really loved doing the tours at our stadiums, so we figured it would be even cooler to check out the tours other teams offered. The tickets were only $10/each and unlike the Yankees and Mets, the Cardinals allow tours up until 2:00 pm on days when the Cardinals have a night game (no tours when there are day games). The only downside of choosing a late tour on game day like we did is that you don't get to visit the locker room (for obvious reasons...let's face it. Serena probably would've spent time badgering Yadier Molina about how he felt he'd do that night for fantasy league purposes and Lisa would've spit on Carlos Beltran), so that was a little sucky to discover.

The tour's first stop was the field, which is normally at the end of the tour, but the tour guide wanted to get us out there before batting practice or else we'd miss that portion as well. Clearly, we didn't really think this through when we chose this tour time.

 

 

 

Pay no attention to the fact that Serena looks like a monster in this photo. She is actually travel size...like Willow. After spending a little time on the field, we headed into the Cardinals' dugout for some awesome photo opportunities.

This is Serena making a break for the clubhouse:

From the dugout, it was decided to break our abnormally large tour group into two groups. Our next stop was to learn about the history of the team's logo.

All the way to the left is The Bird encircled by "World Champions." This logo only lasted for one season because it pissed off the other teams so much that they banded together and b*tched to the powers to be, who then told the team to remove the verbiage.

From here, we headed to our first club of the day: the posh Cardinal Club.

In this club is a really lovely tribute to team hero, Stan Musial.

Our second club of the day was the Redbird Club. Not as posh or sexy, but one really cool feature of it was the décor. They had scanned and blown up the owner's baseball card collection and used it to wallpaper the club. Now we have ideas for the day we ever own our first homes.

We headed to the radio booth next. Here, our guide asked us trivia questions about the field and Serena answered one, much to the apparent shock of our guide. Not sure why. Maybe cos' we're girls. Or from New York, which makes people think we're stupid a-holes. We don't know. The question was, "Why is the area behind centerfield blacked out?" (So the batter can see the ball clearly released from the pitcher's hand)

Our final stop was the Champions Club, where the Cardinals are extremely proud of their 11 championship titles (we're not judging. The Yankees are very proud of their 27. We get it.)

Here are their rings:

Their trophies (before you get pissy that we didn't take pictures of all 11, they didn't have 11 trophies! The championship teams didn't receive trophies back in the day before Nintendo and sh*t):

 

 

 

Their titles:

And the matchups of their championship series:

And here's around the time where we got shit for being from New York. Lisa for being a Mets fan and Serena for the Yankees' 27 championships. Truth be told, the tour guide was only playful, but there was man in the group that was legitimately upset that two New Yorkers were in his group. We actually thought he was going to follow us later and kill us.

On our way out of the stadium, we passed two more items that amused us in particular. One was the 1982 World Series program on the wall, obviously commemorating the year of Serena's birth. She WAS the cutest baby alive after all.

The second was this:

We'd never seen anything like this at a stadium. Airport, yes, but stadium? No. As Lisa photographed this sign, we got a snooty comment from another one of our group members (now that we were outed to the group as New Yorkers, people didn't want to be nice to us). "Those signs were really helpful last year when there WAS a tornado." Okkkkkk. We'd assume that they were helpful otherwise why have the signs in the first place? And we were thankful for these signs because if there was a tornado, we wouldn't know the first thing to do. Except maybe run around waving our arms over our heads and screaming.