Dome Sweet Dome
Gene Mauch, left, and Dick Allen
After checking out the interior of baseball’s first domed ballpark with Philadelphia manager Gene Mauch, Phillies third baseman Dick Allen becomes the first player to hit a regular-season homer at Houston’s Harris County Domed Stadium (aka the Astrodome) 59 years ago today.
Allen’s homer comes with two outs in the third inning off Houston starter Bob Bruce and also scores Ruben Amaro Sr., accounting for both runs in Philadelphia’s 2-0 victory before a Monday night crowd of 42,652.
Allen’s homer is a shot to straightaway center field, clearing the fence 410 feet from the plate.
For the record, Phillies second baseman Tony Taylor collects the new stadium’s first hit – a leadoff double in the first inning – while left-hander Chris Short pitches a four-hit shutout with 11 strikeouts.
“The big news of that first official game was not Allen’s homer, Short’s pitching or the Phillies winning,” Astros center fielder Jimmy Wynn says years later. “It was the fly balls that we couldn’t see.
“I remember running in on a short fly ball, then looking up to see it nowhere,” Wynn says. “The next thing I knew, the ball was falling to the ground beside me for a ‘lost-in-the-sky-on-the-way-up-or-down’ base hit. Everybody else was having the same problem. You just couldn’t see the ball a lot of times once it blended into all those clear glass panels and close-to-ball-color girders in the Astrodome roof.”
The team soon paints over those clear panels, which cuts down the glare but also kills the natural grass on the field.
That move leads to the installation in 1966 of artificial grass, which quickly becomes known as AstroTurf.
The official opener at the Dome 59 years ago today comes three days after an even larger crowd of 47,876 – a record at the time for an indoor game in any sport – watch the Astros beat the New York Yankees 2-1 in an exhibition game that ends on an RBI single in the 12th inning by pinch-hitter and future Hall of Famer Nellie Fox.
The Yankees’ lone run in that game comes on a homer by another future Hall of Famer, Mickey Mantle.
The pomp-and-circumstances of that exhibition game includes the attendance of President Lyndon Johnson, Texas Governor John Connally, 21 NASA astronauts and 175 newspaper and magazine writers to record every nuance of baseball’s grand experiment with its first domed ballpark.
The Astros call the Dome home through the 1999 season before moving eight miles north into a new $250 million, 40,000-seat facility with a retractable roof.
“The Astrodome is like an old car,” Houston Hall of Famer Craig Biggio later tells the Chicago Tribune. “It’s dependable. It’s reliable. It still gets you to work every day, even though it may make a lot of noise along the way.”
Inside the Astrodome in 1965