What I Hate About Minute Maid Park!

Thanks to my best friend Paula and her lovely husband Larry, I get to go to Minute Maid Park a LOT and if you are around something long enough it starts to bug you. Or at least it starts to bug ME, so in an effort to soothe myself I'll list the gripes....to wit....

1) The beer sellers and other peddlers are just too much. I think it might be just isle 113, but I'm not sure. I do KNOW they come down that isle in droves. About 4 or 5 DIFFERENT beer sellers come one right after the other and they don't just scream BEER/WATER at the top of their lungs, they stand in the isle and block the view(s). Naturally they spot the ones drinking beer and that is like chum to a shark. They KNOW if you drink ONE you're going to just keep on buying until Last Call so they just keep circlin'.

So how would *I* fix it?

I'd do like they do to wrecker drivers. Give them a chip and then let the folks in the red shirts pick ONE and that ONE would be allowed to peddle on THAT isle or maybe that isle and a couple on either side of it. Better yet would be that one isle and assign them another isle clear across the stadium so it'd take them some time to get there and back. Brilliant!

See it's not just the beers sellers. They also have the frozen lemonade (Minute Maid, of course!) sellers, the Peanut Man (who's pretty cool and really more fun than irritating, so, okay, he can stay), the giant 'Rita with the little-or-no-alcohol so-why-would-anyone-buy-one? sellers, the cotton candy and assorted memorabilia pushers and I'm probably forgetting one or more of them. Ever so often you get the hot dog sellers, but not that much 'cause most folks go get their own which is a good idea for ALL that stuff except maybe the beer 'cause then they buy it in open cups and spill half of it before they get seated again.

Oh and the really, really irritating part is that they hold up these little stop signs to keep the fans from running down the isles while folks are batting and yet they don't stop the peddlers from doing the same thing!

2) My 2nd biggest gripe is the give-aways. Now they have done a tremendous job this year of HOW they give stuff out, but why oh why do the sponsors give out 10,000 of something knowing that 20k plus are going to be upset THEY didn't get one? We'd get there way early and always got whatever it was being given away, but that's not the point. It's like if you bought one super good toy at Christmas and had 3 or 4 kids and the first one in the den got it. Well you can imagine the angst that would ensue!

3) My final gripe (at this time!) is about sound. They like to play stuff on the big screen and some of it like the 1 minute player to player interviews are cool except that you can't hear what's being said....probably because some half dozen beer sellers are screaming all around you! Turn up the volume on the teevee and shut the sellers up!

I've also got a similar gripe with FSN when they have the after game autopsy questions and answers by the team manager and you can only hear HIM and not the questions and he's not about to respond by repeating the question so it's like...

Manager: Yes, I do.

blah, blah, blah

Manager: That's not a bad idea. We might implement that some time in the future.

You get the drift. Can't blame THAT one on the beer peddlers.

See if Drayton sat in the real seats he'd know this stuff. He sits in his ultra cool, got their own wait staff assigned, no peddlers yelling in HIS ear or blocking HIS view seats and could care less what the rest of the fans are going through.