From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Minute Maid Park is a baseball stadium in Houston, Texas, opened in 2000 to house the Houston Astros.
 | |
| Location | Houston, Texas |
| Opened | March 30, 2000 |
| Capacity
- Baseball 42,000 | |
| Current Ownership | City of Houston |
Architect
| |
The stadium is perhaps better known by its now-infamous former name, Enron Field. Astros managers faced a public relations nightmare when the energy corporation went bankrupt in the midst of one of the biggest business scandals in American history in 2001, and they bought back the remainder of Enron's thirty years of naming rights, hastily rechristening the ballpark as "Astros Field". In 2002 Minute Maid, the fruit-juice subsidiary of Coca-Cola, acquired the naming rights to the stadium.
The ballpark was Houston's first retractable-roofed stadium, thus enabling it to be hermetically sealed from hot or inclement weather like its predecessor, the Reliant Astrodome, or left open on more pleasant days. Its entrance is what was once Houston's Union Station, and one side of the stadium features a miniature train as homage to the site's history.
