St. Louis: Busch Stadium
Can't rain on this parade...
The prospect of a rainout has been terrifying, considering that my travel plans to reach all 30 MLB ballparks need to be executed with extreme precision. A postponement or cancellation due to weather can wreak havoc on my schedule and would make the possibility of being unable to complete this mission in one season all too real.
I obsessively check weather reports for all the cities I’m visiting several days before I travel, and, of course, saw that St. Louis was about to be hit with the northern reaches of Hurricane Beryl on the day that I was going to be there. I had already bought a game ticket, so all I could do was wait to see if the storm would blow by in time to squeeze the contest in, or if it would have to be rescheduled.
Knowing roughly how baseball teams handle postponements, I made a hard bet that, if Tuesday were rained out, the game would be made up Wednesday afternoon as part of a doubleheader before the regularly scheduled night game. I was planning to be at a day game in Chicago on Wednesday1 and a Brewers game in Milwaukee on Friday, so I preemptively amended my schedule to go Cards Wednesday afternoon, Brewers Thursday afternoon and White Sox Friday night. If the Cardinals game didn’t get rained out Tuesday night, I’d just have a luxury travel day on Wednesday. Easy peasy.
When I rolled into St. Louis around noon on Tuesday, a notification popped up on my phone: that night’s Royals-Cardinals game was postponed due to the relentless rain. As I suspected, it was rescheduled for a 12:45 p.m. start on Wednesday and my ticket would be valid for that game only. My Plan B had fully come into effect, but I did need to figure out how to spend a rainy day in St. Louis.
I have visited the city on several occasions, generally while passing through with the rock band. Some past highlights:
Pappy’s Smokehouse: this was perhaps my first introduction to real barbecue, as opposed to the sloppy, unimpressive northern version that’s oversauced to hide a lack of technique or inferior meat.
City Museum: less a museum than an urban playland for adults and children alike, built from salvaged industrial items and massive, intricate sculpture. Every trip to City Museum is different as there are hundreds of secret passages, tunnels and hideaways throughout the building.
Gateway Arch: OK, I’ve never been up the Arch — someday, maybe — but the iconic symbol of St. Louis is impressive from any viewpoint, especially up close where you can get a sense of its majesty.
I wanted to get off the beaten path on this bonus day, so I consulted the Atlas Obscura for odd attractions after consulting my trusty Moon travel guide for lunch options.
Revisiting Pappy’s sounded tempting, but it’s closed on Tuesdays. Plus, there’s often a long line stretching out to the parking lot and I wasn’t terribly interested in standing in the rain for any longer than I had to. The Moon guide suggested Bogart’s Smoke House, which is an offshoot of Pappy’s located in the Soulard neighborhood just south of downtown. The small dining room was packed when I showed up, but a table opened up just as I was about to place my order.
I went with a combo platter of pulled pork and pastrami, plus a side of slaw and the house specialty fire and ice pickles: sliced sweet pickles with a pleasant hint of spice. The pork was excellent, especially with the cranberry cayenne BBQ sauce available on the table. The pastrami could have been better: it was thin sliced and flavorful, but relatively tough, necessitating a knife. I ended up piling most of it between the two half slices of white bread and making an impromptu deli sandwich. The pickles were the star, which is a weird thing to say about a barbecue joint, but they were really tasty and complemented the savory meats in the best possible way.
Listen, I know I should’ve ordered ribs — St. Louis does have their own namesake cut, after all — but I was intrigued by pastrami since maybe the very best version of it I’ve ever eaten came from a barbecue place in Chicago.2 If you have the stones to put it on the menu, I’m probably going to give it a shot to see if you’ve got the skills to pull it off.
With a full belly, I needed to find a way to walk it off while still staying dry. Many of Atlas Obscura’s suggestions were outdoor attractions, but then I found the listing for the Laclede’s Landing Wax Museum. Normally this kind of thing wouldn’t interest me, but it seemed sufficiently weird and, of course, indoors. The museum is spread out over five floors of a building near the riverfront in a developing warehouse district next to a casino. Easy enough to get some steps in.
When I arrived, I think I woke up the employee working the admissions counter/ice cream parlor. I paid my $10 and climbed to the top floor to work my way down, per his suggestion. The very first exhibit is baseball related, with predictably bad wax renditions of St. Louis superstar Mark McGwire, Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Jackie Robinson, who was for some reason dressed in street clothes while his fellow players had homemade or thrift store uniforms.
I cannot overemphasize how crappy this wax museum is, which, of course, made it amazing to walk through. Poor lighting, malfunctioning displays, even a couple of wax figures that had fallen over and not been stood back up… this place had it all. An entire floor was dedicated to the life of Christ, including a Last Supper recreation where each figure had a name plate in front of them, as if Jesus and his apostles were breaking bread at an airport Ramada conference room.
The bottom two floors consisted of the Chamber of Horrors — as if the top three floors weren’t horrible enough — a hodgepodge of scary movie characters, mild gore and the occasional classroom skeleton thrown in to occupy empty space. The flickering motion lights actually did a decent job of making the poor statues at least a little creepy, but that also may have just been an effect of being alone in a 200-year old-basement, where I suppose I could’ve been murdered and no one would ever find me. Highly recommended.
I continued to bounce around in the afternoon, driving over to the site of the former Sportsman’s Park, which hosted Major League Baseball games from the turn of the 20th century until 1966, and boasts the claim that more MLB games were played there — by the St. Louis Browns and Cardinals — than at any other ballpark. The site is currently a Boys and Girls Club named after Herbert Hoover, which I have to assume is the best thing ever named after Herbert Hoover.
My surefire solution for killing time when I’m at a loss for ideas is to hit up a record store. I had been to Vintage Vinyl in the Delmar Loop neighborhood on a previous visit and really dig the impressive mix of new and used records. I ended up buying a few records that I had previously mentioned in the “Soundtrack” suggestions I was making in earlier posts on this blog3: Shellac’s To All Trains, Up on Gravity Hill by METZ and Jeff Rosenstock’s Hellmode. Our band buddy Matt from Bunnygrunt was working that day, so we took a few minutes to catch up before I moved along.
After checking into my hotel, I wanted to explore the St. Louis dive bar scene a bit. Atlas Obscura hipped me to Venice Cafe, an old corner house just a couple blocks from the Anheuser Busch brewery that the owner had been decorating with anything and everything he could find. After welcoming friends and interested parties to drink in his home, he applied for a liquor license and opened to the public. The bartender, Zach, who’s been working shifts there for a decade, described it as a “bedazzled dive.” Must be seen to be believed. Absolutely stunning.
Next stop: CBGB. Back in 1999, I was lucky enough to make it to this bar’s namesake, the iconic club in New York that launched the American punk scene in the ‘70s. The St. Louis version does a decent job of trying to capture the vibe, with the exception of having windows that let natural light in. The bathrooms may have been a notch too clean compared to the NYC original, though still pretty gnarly. The bartender said that the ladies room had two toilets facing each other with no walls. What’s more punk rock than making intense eye contact with someone while you’re taking a shit?
I wrapped up the evening with a burger at Iowa Buffet — not from Iowa, not a buffet — a neighborhood corner tavern with cheap beer and food cooked on a decades-old salamander broiler right behind the bar. Pair a charbroiled burger with a bottle of Stag and act like you live just up the street.
If you’re looking for a Cardinals parking hack, here it is: go to the Draft Kings casino on the waterfront in East St. Louis — across the Mississippi River from downtown — park in their free lot and catch the westbound red or blue line Metro train to Stadium station. A Metro day pass will cost you all of $5 and gives you unlimited rides on the trains and buses if you want to explore the city. If you feel even a little bit guilty about parking at the casino, just go inside and place a bet on the Cards game at the sports book, then, if you’re lucky, you can come back and collect your winnings after the game when you pick up your car.4 The casino also offers a shuttle to St. Louis sporting events for bettors and guests at the attached hotel.5
Turn left after you get off the train, climb the steps and you’ll be at the corner of 8th and Clark, the grand entrance to Busch Stadium. Clark Avenue is where the pregame action happens in Ballpark Village, a small entertainment district that is teeming with Cardinals faithful. I popped into the local Baseballism outlet, one of a chain of stores selling mostly unlicensed team merchandise in several major league cities, and scored a new phone case textured like baseball leather with actual raised stitches. I was in dire need of a case upgrade and this one is pretty tight. Recommended if you’re a tactile person or someone who drops their phone a lot: just grip on the stitches like you’re about to throw a two-seam fastball.
My second St. Louis barbecue lunch in two days came from Salt + Smoke next to the ballpark. I made the right choice today, getting ribs on my two meat platter. Perfectly cooked and coated with a sweet sauce, this was maybe my favorite bite I had on this whole visit. Unfortunately, my least favorite bite was on the same plate: the brisket was dry, tough and unpalatable. My theory is that it was yesterday’s sliced brisket warmed up in the microwave. That said, I powered through it, slathering the leathery beef with excess sauce from the ribs. The disappointing brisket aside, a nice vinegar slaw and tasty green bean and tomato salad on the side made this a decent if unnecessarily upscale barbecue lunch, finished with plenty of time to spare before gates opened across the street.
Cardinals fans are often lauded as the “best fans in baseball,” authentically by the team’s longtime backers and derisively by rival Cubs fans. To that end, the ballpark experience at Busch Stadium is centered firmly on the game itself, not being concerned with cultivating a party atmosphere or needing outlandish attractions to entertain the casual spectator. Most of the concourses are of the “closed” design so the game can’t be seen while you’re in line for beers or hot dogs, but the sightlines from the seats are exceptional all over the park, even up in the ‘bleeds where I was sitting.
It’s Busch Stadium, so as you can probably guess, most of the beer options are Anheuser-Busch/InBev products. However, you can find a decent selection of local craft beers in a dedicated pub on the 100 level and at a few of the grab-and-go market coolers peppered around the park. St. Louis has a really great beer scene, with breweries like Perennial, Side Project, 4 Hands and Urban Chestnut making exceptional beers in the shadow of the A-B beast.
If you climb all the way up to the Budweiser Terrace in the upper level behind the right field foul pole, you can find 12 oz. cans of Bud and Busch Light for $5.25 each until first pitch. That’s the best deal in the place and a good place to take in the whole of the park and a great spot to strike up a pregame conversation. I talked to another guy who’s working his way around to all 30 parks as well — just not in one season because he’s reasonable and smart — and we shared some of the highlights of our journeys.
The night before the game, I found out that my work colleague Paul from New York was going to be at Busch Stadium that afternoon as well. He and his family were on a pretty epic road trip themselves, trucking across the Upper Midwest and Great Plains taking in sights and ballgames as they went. Absolute happy coincidence that we happened to be in the same place at the same time, and it’s always fun to meet up with people in our very specific line of work in other states. Plus, Paul’s a seamhead and worked at the Hall of Fame for years, which made for great conversation during the game.
Oh right, the game.
The Cardinals broke out to an early 3-0 lead behind home runs from third baseman Nolan Arenado and right fielder Alec Burleson. The visiting Kansas City Royals rallied back to tie in the top of the fifth on RBI doubles by MJ Melendez and Garrett Hampson. KC’s slugging catcher Salvador Perez hit a solo homer in the next frame to give the Royals a lead they would not relinquish. Final score: Kansas City 6, St. Louis 4.6
Royals-Cardinals never struck me as the same kind of rivalry as Cubs-Cardinals, likely due to the longevity of the latter two franchises and the frequency with which they meet playing in the same division. However, the two Missouri-based teams are only about 230 miles apart, leading an impressive number of Royals fans to make the intrastate trek to cheer on their squad on a Wednesday afternoon. Every bit of game action was met with a raucous cheer from one of the two fanbases, which was slightly disorienting but nonetheless amusing. Unlike an east coast tilt, the “best fans in baseball” are for the most part welcoming to folks sporting the visitor’s colors. In a place like Philly or Boston, you’d never hear the end of it. “Midwest nice” is a real thing, even when you wear your passions literally on your sleeves.
Shame on me for scheduling myself for a day game in Chicago after a night game in St. Louis. I’m not sure what I was thinking.
And yes, I’m putting that ahead of the pastrami from Katz’s that I regularly have when I’m visiting New York City.
With all the driving I’m doing, it’s been hard for me to really keep track of new music, so I decided to retire that feature. And, to be honest, I got to thinking that it was pretty lame that I should think my taste in music was so good that I’d presume to make seemingly objective suggestions. Listen to what makes you bop your head, not whatever pretentious bullshit is pumping from my speakers.
I’m generally not a fan of gambling and I rarely, if ever, make bets on things in which I cannot in some way influence the outcome, i.e., fantasy baseball, poker, a chili cook-off, etc. That said, there is an undeniable exhilaration to rooting for a team when you’ve got a little skin in the game. Just remember that adrenaline is an addictive drug. Be careful out there, my draft kings and queens.
I stayed at this hotel. It’s cheap and kinda run down, but the room was clean and got the job done for a night. I did wander over to the casino for about five minutes before I got overwhelmed and had to leave.
Home teams are now 5-8 on my trip. At some point, they’re going to put pictures of me up at the gates and deny me entry to the park.
The Wax Museum tour was absolutely hysterical. Well done sir
Draft Kings?!? Well there goes your endorsement deal with Bareback Sportsbook Pal!