I remember having a fantastic weekend enjoying my visit to Houston and Minute Maid Park the end of Sept, 2011. My Colorado Rockies were the visiting team this weekend.
I stayed at the Inn at the Ballpark. I didn't even need to rent a car, just took a taxi to the hotel (it's right across the street from the park).
I did get very favorable promotional ticket rates at the end of the 2011 season.
I attended the 200,000th game played in MLB history, so they announced,
Minute Maid Park is located downtown Houston. There are several entrances into the venue one of which is the former Houston's Union Station, a bustling railroad station back in its day. It has a retractable roof which was closed for both of the games I attended.
It seats close to 41,000. There was minimal music and noise blasting my ear drums which I found quite refreshing.
It has a great score board/video board. Very clear and crisp and easy to read. Not a lot of clutter. In the photo above to the left and right of 'Minute Maid Park' you'll see baseballs with red numbers. These are the retired numbers of the Houston Astros.
Houston's bullpen is shown here just in front of the Lexus advertisement on the bottom portion of the photo. And there's the cleverly marketed Chick-fil-A 'Eat Mor Fowl' on the right field foul pole.
During batting practice, do stand out in left field in and around the Conoco Pump for a few moments and expect to get an opportunity to get several homerun balls. This area is known as the Home Run Porch.
There is a manual out-of-town scoreboard in left field that is different than the manual out-of-town scoreboard at Coors Field. When a game ended, they removed all the scoring results by inning and only showed the final score.
The visiting teams bullpen is unique. The Astro's bullpen is in right center field, open for fans to see/watch as pitchers warm up; the visiting team is in left field behind a partition (looks like a garage door) - to the right of the manual out-of-town scoreboard in this photo - underneath the Conoco Home Run Porch. A fan couldn't see very well who was warming up.
Then there's the train above the Home Run Porch.
Visit the Conoco Home Run Alley (first level - out field concourse) which houses fabulous displays of Astro's greats including Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell.
There are far better eating choices on the first level than the third level. One of the concessions (could have been a cart) did serve Saint Arnold Amber from a local Houston brewery.
The first game I attended went 13 innings with the Rockies winning 4-2. The following day, the Rockies slaughtered the Astros 19 -3. Both teams were out of the playoffs by this time of the season, so the fans were treated to seeing future Rockies and Astros players.