Photo: Brett Coomer, Staff Photographer Photo: Brett Coomer, Staff Photographer Photo: Brett Coomer, Staff Photographer Photo: Brett Coomer, Staff Photographer Photo: Brett Coomer, Staff Photographer Photo: Danya Perez Photo: Danya Perez Photo: Danya Perez Photo: Marie D. De Jesus

First noticed in the seventh inning and later a game-saver in the ninth, rain seeped inside an enclosed Minute Maid Park during the torrential rainstorms that soaked downtown Houston.

It's not the first time rain has been seen inside the park this season. It happened briefly during a short, strong thunderstorm on April 7, but that instance was short and was without much noticeable impact.

This time, sheets of drizzling rain were seen in the right field upper deck, where entire sections of fans fled to avoid the water. Moisture also began to seep out onto the train tracks that line left-center field, too, leaving obvious darkened stains on a normally white, concrete facade.

The center-field flags whipped in the wind, too, as hard as Astros President of Business Operations Reid Ryan can remember during a closed-roof game in his six-year tenure with the club.

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"Minute Maid Park is not a sealed building, it's not a permanent dome, it's a retractable stadium," Ryan said late Thursday night. "And, as such, there are all kinds of places where water gets into the building."

Because the separate panels of the roof require room to fit under one another in right field, there are baffles in place that restrict water or heat inside when the building is being air conditioned.

"But when you have high winds and when you have sideways rain, there are times where those things move and water permeates them," Ryan said. "It happens pretty much every time we have a really hard rain. Tonight it was raining so hard and so fast in the area in right field, people had to move because water was landing on top of them."

When addressing his city earlier on Thursday, Mayor Sylvester Turner advised citizens not to attend the game, which started at 7:10 p.m. and coincided with some of the worst of the deluge.

His pleas went ignored by 26,657 people. When all was said and done, the wild thriller on the field would rival the weather outside.

Josh Reddick made a leap to rob a go-ahead, three-run home run from Hunter Pence in the ninth inning of a 4-2 Astros win. In a full ballpark free of showers, fans would normally populate the area where Reddick's glove reached to grab the baseball. The outfielder wondered what would have happened if this occurred on any other night.

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"If (fans) sitting where they normally are, maybe a few hands in the way and not able to make that play," Reddick said. "A little blessing in disguise we had all that rain tonight."

Aside from the 70 or so regular season games for which it is closed, the ballpark roof remains open for most of the calendar year. Everything inside is made to withstand water, so nothing was permanently damaged or maimed in Thursday's theatrics.

"Tonight is the worst I've (ever) seen it in right field, on the first four or five rows of the stadium," Ryan said. "But I've seen it really bad in center field, since we took out Tal's Hill and put seats in that area there. Before, that area got a lot of water but there was that thick, green ivy that was at a 45-degree angle and it used to get soaked all the time. But there weren't people sitting out there. Ever since we put fans out there and concessions out there and other stuff, more people have noticed."

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