The first All-Star Game played in the state of Texas occurred in 1968 when the Houston Astros helped stage the event at their state-of-the-art indoors facility, The Astrodome. It was the first Midsummer Classic played indoors and on plastic. It was theoretically perfect, but the All-Star came it produced was not.

Playing indoors was a concept that had its origins with Walter O’Malley, then the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. However, he eventually decided that, rather than argue over real estate in the borough, with its hot summers and snowy winters, he’d just move to California. There, he built an outdoor facility, arguably the finest of its time in weather perfect Los Angeles.

Houston, on the other hand, had stifling heat and humidity, insects, especially mosquitos, most of the year, and it’s fledgling franchise played its games in an antiquated minor league ball park. It needed a stadium to attract fans, not bugs. And that’s how things changed:

Roy Hofheinz, a hard-charging entrepreneur who served as Houston’s mayor and as Harris County judge (the county’s chief administrator), supervised the construction. When it was built, the feasibility of a huge indoor sports facility was not fully certain. However, the engineers and architects were confident in their ability to follow through on a previously untested concept.

Hofheinz exerted his political power to construct an ultra-modern stadium that could be used not just for baseball but for other sports and events, too. The building, with exquisite luxury boxes, sophisticated computerized scoreboards, and perfect environmental conditions, easily earned it the nickname “The Eighth Wonder of the World”:

Among the most prominent features of the new venue was a $2........

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