A consumer's guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it's in play here.

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

By EARL GUSTKEY

Feb. 28, 2000 12 AM PT

Title: “Colts: A Six-Gun Salute”

Authors: Robert Reed, Rusty Staub

Publisher: Lone Star Books

Price: $34.95

Nothing, not even a marker, commemorates the the northwest corner of the Astrodome parking lot, where the Colt .45s played while the world’s first domed stadium was under construction next door.

You may not even remember them, or where they played, but this book takes the baseball fan back to where (Colt Stadium) and when (1962) the Houston Astros began as the Houston Colt .45s, when the club’s uniform logo was the single-action Colt .45 revolver.

The Colt .45s live on, the authors report, most robustly at sports collectors shows, where a Colt .45 warmup jacket can cost you $2,200, a Colt .45 seat cushion goes for $100, as does a 1962 opening day ticket. The book opens with the first recorded Houston baseball game, on April 21, 1867, when the Houston Stonewalls played the Galveston Robert E. Lees. It moves rapidly through Houston’s Texas League decades to 1946 when sportswriter-turned-publicist George Turner Kirksey, launched the first sustained effort to bring major league baseball to Houston. Kirksey first tried to buy the St. Louis Cardinals and move them, then the Chicago Cubs and White Sox, and the Cleveland Indians. Finally, under auspices of the Houston Sports Assn., the National League announced on Oct. 17, 1960, that expansion teams would be placed in Houston and New York.

A contest to name the team brought suggestions such as Rangers, Sams, Robins, Sheriffs, Crows and Lone Stars. Los Angeles native William Nedes, a Houstonian at the time, suggested the winning entry: Colt .45s. His prize: A paid trip to the 1961 World Series.

Colt Stadium, the rainbow-sherbet colored, 33,000-seat temporary facility, was built for $2 million in a five-month span. After the Astrodome opened in 1965, colorful Colt Stadium was painted battleship gray--so as not to detract from the Astrodome’s splendor. In 1970, Colt Stadium’s light towers and grandstands were cut up and moved to Torreon, Mexico, where they were reassembled for a Mexican League team.