June 10, 2002 [LINK]
"Minute Maid Field"
After paying off the bankrupt Enron Corporation to get that filthy name of their new stadium, the Houston Astros just made a deal with Minute Maid (a subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Corporation) to put their name on "Astros Field," as the stadium has been called since March. There was no fanfare or any public announcement that I knew about, and in fact the Astros web site glosses over this embarrassing situation, pretending that the name Enron Field never existed -- flushed down the old "memory hole." George Orwell would be proud. Why Minute Maid? Well, they have to keep up with Tropicana, whose name adorns the dome where the Tampa Bay Devil Rays play. In light of the embarrassing stadium name changes occasioned by the financial debacles of Enron, PSINet, and WorldCom, etc. (see below), I will henceforth refer to stadiums exclusively by their historical names.
D.C. says "YES" to baseball!
A recent poll showed that 84% of Washingtonians are in favor of a major league franchise returning to The Nation's Capital, although they are about evenly split on whether the D.C. government should help pay for it. What about baseball in Northern Virginia? Even though the state's financial pinch means that public funding can't be counted on, it's still a strong possibility. Check out http://www.baseballinva.org/ The way the Montreal Expos have been playing, it would appear that franchise is alive and kicking, so the possibility of contraction may be fading away, which bodes well for a relocation to D.C. next year.