I’m not known as a baseball fanatic. I enjoy the game — far more when I’m watching it live than on TV — and I’m a loyal Minnesota Twins fan, but I don’t follow statistics or players (though it has become easy to do so now that I have officially “Liked” the Twins Facebook page and followed @minnesotatwins on Twitter). All the same, I read the news about Target Field — the brand new OUTDOOR baseball stadium — with great interest, and when I realized that the Twins would be finishing up their series against the Yankees on the day we were set to arrive in Minneapolis I knew that I had to be at that game.
All props go to Dan for actually making it happen. I tried for tickets via the Twins’ site but the game had already sold out — no surprise, really, but disappointing. I was ready to admit defeat and try for tickets for another time, another visit, but Dan insisted that we be there, and he found tickets on StubHub. This is remarkable not for Dan’s facility with the Internet, but that he was determined to get to a Twins game at all. The Twins, you see, are responsible for Dan’s disillusionment with Major League Baseball. He used to love the game. But in 1987 he picked the St. Louis Cardinals to go all the way and while they did indeed make it to the World Series that year, they were defeated 4 games to 3 by . . . the Minnesota Twins (wonk, wonk). He was utterly heartbroken and couldn’t watch baseball after that. So that he was more than willing to procure tickets to fulfill one of my wishes says everything you need to know about the man’s good nature and generous spirit. Not to mention he got two extra tickets so some family members could join us.
There were two main reasons I so desperately wanted to see a game at Target Field. First, I’d never seen the Twins play outdoors before. Second, I wanted to see the showpiece of the ballpark, the big original Twins logo done up in neon, perform its magic when one of the Twins hit a home run. A tall order — someone would have to hit a home run — and I knew the odds were against it, but I had hopes. More on that later.
My first live view of Target Field did not disappoint.
There’s the neon logo, off the the right of the Jumbotron. When a Twin scores a run, the state outline lights up. For the first two runs I had a Dayenu moment because honestly, that would’ve been enough for me to feel completely satisfied. But it gets better. So. Much. Better.
Our seats were in the waaaaaaay back, all the way up at the top. However, one of the beautiful things about Target Field is that, with one famous exception, there doesn’t seem to be a bad seat in the park. This was our view of the diamond:
Far away, but still able to see everything and occasionally weigh in on whether a pitch was a strike or a ball.
And this was our spectacular view of downtown Minneapolis:
It was wonderful to watch the light from the setting sun play off the buildings.
And when the sun had all but set, downtown Minneapolis was resplendent in deep aquatic blues.
(Apologies for the brightness of the stadium lights. And the tiny dots you see at the top of the screen aren’t stars, they’re bugs. Sitting up at the top by the lights meant we got SWARMED.)
The game itself was wildly exciting. Though the Twins had lost to the Yankees by one run in both of the previous games, they had the upper hand in this game almost from the beginning. I think there was an error in an early inning, but it’s been two weeks since the game and my memory is a little fuzzy. But in the 6th inning, Jason Kubel hit a home run.
And that’s when the neon logo does its thing. It’s not just amazingly beautiful, with the Minneapolis and St. Paul players shaking hands over the Mississippi River. No, no. When the Twins score a home run, the Minneapolis player and the St. Paul player actually shake hands on a job well done. They ACTUALLY SHAKE HANDS. I was too busy jumping up and down and screaming like a teenager in 1964 watching the Beatles (tm Dan) to take a video, but here’s one I found on YouTube:
Tell me that’s not the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.
And I got to see it TWICE that night. After his solo shot, Jason Kubel hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the 7th inning, bringing the score to where it would stay, 8-2.
(I completely overlooked how the T and the s blink on and off to display “win” alternating with “Twins.” And here I didn’t think it was possible to love that logo more.)
We left after the 7th inning — my four-year-old nephew was fading fast and on top of that the bug situation was out of control (which sounds silly, but you have NO IDEA) — and though I normally prefer to stay til the end of a game, leaving on such a high note felt all right. The experience of watching a game surrounded by Twins fans — for the first time since the early 90s, and after eight years of living in New York — is not one I’m likely to forget any time soon, and one I hope to repeat as often as possible.
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