Enron Field should have been the tip-off

I'm afraid I'm another guy who dropped the ball on Enron, the troubled power company in Houston, Texas.

Like the poor souls on the financial pages who didn't see the hijinks with the stock price, like the dunderheads on the political scene who were influenced by the company's financial muscle, I didn't recognize the irregularities on the sports front.

In the summer of 2000, I was assigned to do a story on Enron Field, home of the Houston Astros. I spent a weekend crawling around the new ballpark named after the energy giant.

I rode the steam engine on the little track along the left-field wall. I described the hill in center field, designed to make catching a fly ball harder. Oops, there was a flagpole in play at the top of the hill. I described that. There were a couple of concrete pillars in play and there was a little home run porch down the left-field line and a manual scoreboard ... dozens of quirks built into the park to make it retro and, well, quirky.

Looking back, I can see how weird all this was. Why wouldn't you put the flagpole out of play so some poor soul -- maybe an Enron investor -- wouldn't clunk his head? Why wouldn't you have a flat outfield rather than a hill? Why, if you're an energy company, wouldn't you be tying your name to a vision of the future rather than a look of the past?

I apologize. I should have known something was strange with Enron when I was riding that steam engine across the left-field wall.

Leigh Montville's commentaries appear regularly on CNN/Sports Illustrated. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.

 

Related information
Stories
Leigh Montville Archive
Multimedia
Visit Video Plus for the latest audio and video
Search our site	Watch CNN/SI 24 hours a day
	Sports Illustrated and CNN have combined to form a 24 hour sports news and information channel. To receive CNN/SI at your home call your cable operator or DirecTV.