Cards' spiffy nest is third-generation Busch

Except for one piece of legal unpleasantness, the St. Louis Cardinals' move into the new Busch Stadium has been a stunning success — to the point that the club had to cut off season-ticket sales at 27,500 for fear of overselling the place.

"We don't have the capacity to meet the demand for season tickets that we've experienced," says Cardinals president Mark Lamping, who has promised repeatedly that there will be day-of-game tickets available for every home date.

Obviously, the club's faithful fans are falling over themselves to join the party at this 43,975-seat, $345 million "retro" ballpark, which was built adjacent to the site of its older and now-demolished namesake.

Baseball's newest jewel truly does look spectacular as designers from HOK and its architectural partners have managed to incorporate a terrific view of the St. Louis skyline and Gateway Arch — along with opening up sightlines into the stadium for the business and residential units that ultimately will be built in a unique "Ballpark Village" across Clark Street to the northeast.

The Cardinals are unveiling the first privately financed major league stadium since the San Francisco Giants began construction on its facility in 1997.

To pull it off, the club needed a $45 million long-term loan from St. Louis County, $200.5 million in bonds to be paid off over 22 years, $9.2 million in interest on the construction fund, $90.1 million directly from the team and a 20-year naming rights agreement with former owner Anheuser-Busch.

Lamping says the Cardinals seriously considered other interested companies as naming-rights partners, but in the end everyone was delighted to have the magic Busch name back on the ballpark — the Cards' third straight home since 1953 to carry the brewer's famous logo.

"It just wouldn't be Cardinals baseball without Busch Stadium," says William O. DeWitt Jr., the club's principal owner.

The only potential bobble in the run-up to Opening Day involved the Cardinals' claim for partial reimbursement of the $14 million it cost to clean up petroleum and other contaminants from the stadium construction site.

Greenwich Insurance Co. fired back with a lawsuit based on the counterclaim that the ballclub hid studies that showed the area was contaminated and "made material misrepresentations in the policy application."

Greenwich insisted in its suit that had all facts been divulged, it would not have issued the policy under which the Cardinals are seeking reimbursement.

Lamping and the Cardinals declined comment on specifics because of the ongoing action, except to say the club has a valid claim and did not conceal any information from the insurer.

None of this means a thing to Cardinals players and fans, who are thrilled to be out of the enclosed furnace that was their former home and moving into a park that looks like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Seven new parks have opened in the National League since 2000, and the new Busch Stadium is the fifth in the Central Division. A couple of the 21st century fields have become statistical oddities — Houston has a hitter's haven and San Diego is a pitcher's paradise that Barry Bonds once called "baseball-proof."

But HOK and the Cardinals are convinced that Busch will be fair, which is true to the team's long, glorious tradition.

The Cards' new home may have one intriguing quirk if club senior vp Bill DeWitt III gets his wish, however.

DeWitt researched the club's previous homes and noticed that in photos of the 1946 World Series, there was a circle of dirt around the mound at Sportsman's Park (renamed Busch in '53). Because this new park is opening on the 60th anniversary of that title year, DeWitt suggested putting back the ring.

Groundskeepers aren't so sure the dirt circle is a great idea, but it was being discussed.

"We'll see if it's doable," DeWitt says of adding a dirt halo sometime during the season. "It's something visual, not practical."

Fair enough. A great ballpark should be a combination of both, and the new Busch Stadium looks set to meet that challenge. o