Hamilton will take off the middle three innings of Astros home games this season, giving way to Bret Dolan and Dave Raymond, but will spend that time meeting and greeting advertisers and other corporate clients at Minute Maid Park.

“There are a lot of requests from sponsors to visit with Milo,” Astros executive Jamie Hildreth said. “But taking off two innings doesn’t give him the chance to do much of that, so we’ve been bringing people into the booth.”

This season, in the interests of a less cluttered workplace, Hamilton will take off the fourth through sixth innings and meet with sponsors elsewhere in the ballpark. The Astros used a similar format, Hildreth said, in the days when Hamilton split time between TV and radio before moving full time to radio.

Dolan and Raymond will alternate play-by-play duties for the middle three innings at home, as they do on road trips. In case of extra innings, Hamilton will call the 10th and 11th, Dolan and Raymond will do the 12th and 13th, continuing in two-inning increments as long as necessary.

Meanwhile, the Astros got off to a quicker start on the Nielsen meters than they did on the field, thanks to a boost from the visiting the Cubs and the fact that they opened at home rather than on the West Coast, as they did in 2008.

The three-game Cubs series averaged 4.6 Nielsen rating, with ratings of 4.3 and 4.2 on Fox Sports Houston and 5.1 for one game on KTXH (Channel 20), compared to 3.5 for their opening series a year ago against the Padres.