On Playing Two
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| The Metrodome, 2009 |
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
Detroit Tigers vs. Minnesota TwinsThe Metrodome
Major League Baseball, American League Central
Minneapolis, MN
7:10 PM
Outside the Game:
Another day, another not-so-early morning. My late morning flight wasn't nearly as unreasonable as some so far this trip, and I had some decent sleep in the tank. I grabbed some food at the breakfast buffet and got onto another damn shuttle to the airport.
The flight out to Minneapolis/St. Paul was delayed by about a half hour, but as I had a lot of flex in my schedule, I didn't quite mind. Outside of the minor delay, there was nothing particularly noteworthy about the flight out. I did the usual tasks of proving out my score card, reading, and working on this monstrosity. I flew AirTran for the first time, and I was quite impressed. The seats weren't sardine cans, they had in-flight wi-fi, and all the seats were wired to Sirius Satellite radio, which is a big morale boost during take off and landing when regular iPod use is verboten. The air crew even treated the passengers as though they were human beings, so one imagines sometime soon they'll realize they are doing it wrong and fall into line.
After a brief mix-up with the hotel about which terminal I was at, I was driven out to my Best Western, located in the traffic corridor between the airport and the Mall of America. There are hotels that service just the Mall of America, which implies that people come to Minneapolis just to visit the Mall of America, which as far as I can determine, is just a mall writ super-sized (...of America, one presumes). Make your own jokes here, folks. Once at my hotel, I went to the attached Deny's for lunch, hit the fitness center to pay penance, and then napped as the gods might nap.
Minneapolis actually has a light rail system of sorts that runs from the Mall of America to downtown. I was told this was the best way to get to the game, so a short shuttle ride later, I was at the rail station waiting for a train to the game. This being Minnesota and the rail stations being open-aired, there were heater buttons you could press to turn on a heater for a short amount of time. (I tried one out to the death stares of the people waiting in my area.) I can only imagine that the button-operated heat is just to save money on continually heating the stations or to discourage homeless from sleeping there. A short train ride later dropped me off at the Metrodome safe and sound. The trip back much, much later was similarly easy, if much more crowded.
The Stadium & Fans:
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| Home plate to center field, The Metrodome |
Ah, the Baggy Dome. After starting these trips several years ago, I had just missed the last days of some of the older stadiums out there. This fact did have the virtue of making these trips a little more permanent for the time being, as there would not be many new stadiums cropping up since most had just been built, but it mean I missed some of the lates, if not greats. With their new outdoor Target Field opening next year, I wanted to get to see the Metrodome before it was abandoned for greener pastures.
The big concrete blob sits semi-majestically in downtown. As with many older stadiums that don't have the interior space for the "modern" baseball amenities of play parks and specialty foods, the Metrodome uses the area right outside the stadium for these facilities. The Metrodome also specifically mentions in prominent signage that you are not allowed to bring firearms into the stadium, and from my perspective, this raises a lot more questions than it answers, and I'm sure my gentle readers can formulate them as well.
The Metrodome certainly raises some introspective question about the nature of ballparks and the way we're trending with them. One the one hand, the validity of the critiques of the Metrodome as a ballpark are certainly valid. It is tiny and cramped, and frankly the field just looks weird. It uses the bane of all god-fearing baseball fans, artificial turf. The small, claustrophobic corridors and wedged-in concession stands certainly aren't inviting, and the few X-box baseball kiosks they have scattered around are evocative of pathos on the level of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree before the Peanuts characters all waved their arms around it. And as a baseball fan, there were reminders that this was just a football stadium that you were borrowing, from the not-quite hidden ubiquitous Vikings signage to the fact that the right field wall is just a stretch of plastic holding back folded-in football seating.
That said, the place is clearly loved. As a fan of a team that until last year had what was considered by most to be a crappy park, I can get the emotion. It may be crappy, but it was your crap. You had your memories here. You had your championships here. You know your way around in the dark. And when the crowd gets into it (and they do get into it), it gets loud, and that can't help but be good for the home team. The sight lines weren't bad, the seats downstairs weren't far from the action, and the smallness of the place gave it a certain immediacy. I can see why people would be sad to not play their anymore. The fans seemed optimistic about their new outdoor stadium, and an in-game event marked the countdown to "outdoor baseball," but one has to wonder if all those involved haven't considered strongly enough the idea of putting a park without a retractable roof in an area prone to so much rainfall. Perhaps they forgot about the Seattle Pilots.
The stadium was a little too persnickety about letting people without tickets into the lower deck, even for batting practice. I had to sneak in with a group of other people just to go into the lower deck. I did, I'm proud I did it, and I would do it again in the future. So there.
They had some rather idiosyncratic contests, including a closest to homeplate pitching wedge challenge and throwing baseballs into an inflatable pool from the upper deck competition.
The fans were simply great. Although the seating capacity is on the low side, the place was fairly packed, and stayed fairly packed through the entire game, which was saying something when faced with a 16-inning marathon. When the last out was made, at least a majority of the fans were still there. Those, my friend, are die hards. There were several good-natured shouting matches with a minor Detroit contingent, and the way the game went back and forth, victory and crow changed plates on both sides with great regularity.
At the Game with Oogie:
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| The 14th-inning stretch |
I was in the upper deck right behind home plate again, and surrounded by a many people who would end up as tired as I was in a bit. There were a number of people keeping score in my area, and the crowd was packed and in for the midweek game.
The Game:
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| First pitch, Tigers vs. Twins |
Well, there sure was a lot of it. Detroit jumped out to an early lead with two three-run innings in the second and third, and it looked like this one might be over quick. But the Twins roared back to tie it up in the 6th, with a rally featuring back-to-back triples, the first time I had seen that in person, and probably the last time I ever would again.
And then the game just went on. There was little scoring, or even hitting after the 6th, and the innings just got chewed up. The game went to extra frames and just kept going. The Tigers put in a fireballer in the 9th that stymied the Twins for three innings, blazing 100+ mph pitches past clearly fatigued Twins batters despite a legitimate Twins threat in the 11th. But the Twins pitchers matched them, until Detroit broke through with a run in the top 14th. It seemed it might be over, but the Twins tied it in the bottom of the inning, and then blew another chance to put it away.
Most of the crowd remained at the 14th inning stretch as the game trotted easily into its second day. It seemed to just be a matter of time until one team ran out of pitchers, or a lucky hit put it away. The two teams seemed to have finally gotten the two pitchers out there who were going to win or lose it for them for however long this was going to go on. And the Twins knuckleballer broke first, letting a torrent of hits through, giving the Tigers three runs in the top of the 16th. The Twins answered with one in the bottom of the inning, but with seemingly nothing left in the tank, they closed it out, finally putting this unofficial double-header to figurative and literal bed, 11-9.
The Scorecard:
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| Tigers vs. Twins, 07/03/09. Tigers win, 11-9, in 16 innings. |
The $1 scorecard was separate from the $3 program. It proved... inadequate for the task at hand, but frankly, there is no current stadium scorecard equipped to handle a 16-inning game. Even without that handicap, the card was average at best. It had team-specific information for the game itself, but it was a little cramped for its purpose, even given it was an AL stadium. After running out of space re-using the stats columns for innings, I was forced to forge my own territory into the printed area, switching to line notation from alpha to try and keep it as legible as possible. An older lady sitting next to me who was also keeping score watched me bemusedly, eventually whispering conspiratorially to me, "It's okay to stop." That, ma'am, is quitter talk.
The Accommodations:
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| Best Western |
The suite in the Best Western was cheap by NY standards, but it did provide the extra fru-fru I was looking for on this leg of the trip. I was getting in early, had a late morning departure time the next morning, and was looking forward to loafing around again. The huge ass-bed (xkcd readers will get that one) even came with a Levenger lap desk to use. The boss' son was just in NY last summer working as an intern for the Late Show. Having just graduated college as a communications major, he turned down a summer internship at the new Late Night to work as a camp counselor with his college friends. Although he didn't actually do it, I could hear the owner's head shake as he relayed this information.
2009 The Rest
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