Ultimate Baseball Road Trip (90 page)

Through the years the Homer Dome earned a reputation of being not only hitter-friendly but difficult for visiting teams to navigate. Perhaps trickiest of all was the off-white roof, which caused many a visiting outfielder to lose sight of the ball. Fair balls sometimes bounced off the public address speakers suspended 180 feet above the field as well. Fly balls to right would swish off the Hefty Bag—a twenty-three-foot-high plastic curtain that served as the outfield wall—and barely carom, dropping down to the warning track. A hockey-rink style stretch of Plexiglas ran atop the left-field wall, and homers to right clanked somewhat less than idyllically into a bank of folded-up football seats.

Due in part to these eccentricities, the Twins posted an 8-0 record at home in the 1987 and 1991 World Series against the Cardinals and Braves. In both October Classics they went 4-0 at home and 0-3 on the road. In 1991, the Twins won Game 6 on an eleventh-inning walk-off homer by Kirby Puckett, then won Game 7 on a tenth-inning walk-off single by Gene Larkin as native son Jack Morris, who was born across the river in Saint Paul, went ten innings for the 1-0 victory. These were some great stories spun by the hardball gods.

As for less glorious moments at the Dome, one occurred in April 1983 when the roof collapsed under the weight of heavy snow, forcing the Twins to postpone a game against the California Angels, the only postponement in the stadium’s baseball history. Three years later, a game also against the Angels, was delayed for nine minutes when high winds tore a hole in the roof. And most catastrophically of all, in December 2010, after the Twins had moved to their new yard, heavy snow collapsed and deflated the roof, allowing tons of white powder to pour down onto the fake green turf. The footage of the collapse made national news and went viral on YouTube, while the damage forced the Vikings to move their Monday Night Football game against the Giants to Detroit’s Ford Field. Now, with the opening of a real, honest-to-goodness baseball field, the Twins will have no such calamities with which to concern themselves. Sure, there will be an April blizzard or two to contend with, but that’s small potatoes compared to the drama and hijinks of playing in the Dome.

The first baseball game at Target Field took place on March 27, 2010. It was played between the University of Minnesota and Louisville. Next, the Twins played two exhibition games against the Cardinals at the end of spring training. Then, finally, they hosted the Red Sox on April 12 for the first regular season big league game in stadium history. Beneath cloudy skies on a comfortable 65-degree day, the Twins prevailed 5-2 behind six innings of one-run ball by Carl Pavano and three-hit days from Mauer and Jason Kubel. The Twins then went the rest of April without suffering a single opening-month rainout at home. Take that, you retractable-roof fanatics!

All in all, the first campaign at Target was a smashing success. Despite the team’s power-outage and the pallor cast by a season-ending concussion suffered by Morneau in July, the Twins added another Central Division pennant
to their resume before falling to the Yankees in the American League Division Series. They had the best home record in baseball, going 53-28, and finished sixth in attendance, drawing more than 3.2 million fans, or an average of nearly forty thousand per game. Comparatively, the Twins had spun the turnstiles to the tune of about 2.3 million fans per season or twenty-eight thousand per game during the final several seasons at the Metrodome. We can see why the locals are eating up their new digs. Target Field is a stellar addition to the Major League landscape and rates as a destination any serious baseball wanderer should make a point to visit.

Amidst the excitement of Target Field’s grand opening, the Twins sold out seventy-nine of their eighty-one home games in 2010, setting a new franchise attendance record along the way. While it was impressive to see the Twins outdraw such large-market clubs as the Cubs, Red Sox, Giants, Mets, and Braves, that sort of support is to be expected during the first season of a new yard’s existence. But the Twins fans carried their rabid enthusiasm into the next season, or preseason to be precise. More than 129,000 loyalists filed through the gates of William Hammond Stadium during the team’s sixteen-game home Grapefruit League schedule in Fort Myers, Florida, to set a new Twins spring training record. During the 2011 regular season to follow, the fans kept turning out at Target, even as the Twins struggled mightily during an injury-riddled campaign. For the time being, at least, Target Field is a tough ticket.

What this means to you, the traveling fan, is that you’d be wise to purchase your Twins tickets well in advance, preferably when seats go on sale during the winter. For those of you like Kevin, though, who prefer to wait until the last minute, fear not … as long as you don’t mind standing. Because Target Field offers probably the best experience in the bigs for those holding Standing Room passes. The whole first level concourse is wide open, which allows standers to camp out right behind the big wigs sitting in the boffo seats behind the plate. Or fans can stand alongside the fellow slackers on the plaza in right, or along the specially provided standing bars in center and left field. These standing rails provide something to lean on, and even room for a sandwich or drink to rest. The view from the main concourse around the infield was our first choice, but we also liked the view from the standing bars out near the foul pole. Only in straight-away center did we feel as though we were standing just a bit too far from the action to soak in the full Target Field experience. Finally, it should be noted that on a cold night some fans might be happier standing on the main concourse, beneath the overhang of the Club Level, than sitting in an Upper Level seat. The view is great and the heaters keep pumping out warm air!

In composing a seating map for their new yard, the Twins broke Target Field’s thirty-nine-thousand-plus seats into twenty-three different pricing categories. Then they broke the regular season schedule into three different tiers, depending upon the quality of each opponent. That means your ticket to Target could cost any one of sixty-nine different prices if our math is right. But wait, it gets worse. Just before the start of the 2011 season the Twins tossed this little curveball fans’ way, issuing a presser that read:

New for 2011, the Minnesota Twins have chosen leading demand-based pricing provider, Digonex Technologies, Inc., to provide demand-based pricing for some sections of Target Field…. Seats in the Home Plate Box and Home Plate View seating sections of Target Field will be priced according to fan demand.

Kevin:
So, if there’s no regular price for those primo seats, how can we tell fans whether they’re a good value?

Josh:
I remember when I used to go to Fenway as a kid. There were three options: Bleacher, Grandstand, or Field Box.

Kevin:
And?

Josh:
Life was a whole lot simpler.

Anyway, describing all of Target Field’s seating categories individually—including the ones subject to an eBay-like pricing scam—would present a lot of redundancy and confusion for you, the reader, and would very likely make Kevin’s head explode. So, to keep things reasonably easy to understand and assimilate into your ticket-buying plan, we will
take a level-by-level approach to rating the views instead of a price-category-by-price-category approach. There are three main decks at Target, although the top one might as well count as two mini-decks, since the 200 Level Terrace and the 300 Level Terrace are separated by a big height difference. In general, the view from the third-base line is preferred, as it places the city skyline directly in one’s line of sight and also offers a good view of the Minnie and Paul sign in center. The massive hi-def video board in left, though, is a bit easier to see for those sitting on the right-field side.

Approximately half of Target’s seats are at field level in the lower bowl. The first twelve rows around the infield lie below an interior walkway, behind which appear another 25 rows. The seats in the lower twelve are owned almost exclusively by season-ticket holders and run between $72 and $295 per game. Chances are you won’t be sitting in them. But you might well have the opportunity to purchase nearly-as-good seats in the “demand-base-priced” Home Plate Boxes directly above them. Section 115 is behind the plate, 108 is at first base and 120 is at third. Take your pick; you really can’t go wrong here.

Farther down the lines in outfield territory, four sections of Diamond Boxes pick up where the Home Plate Boxes leave off. Sections 104–107 in shallow right and 121–124 in shallow left offer great seats, particularly 104 and 121 from which the views are practically indistinguishable from the higher-priced Home Plate Boxes. As we said above, if all things are equal, you’ll probably be happier on the third-base line than on the first.

Still farther down the lines, three sections of Field Boxes fill out the spaces that remain before the foul poles. Here the seats are not bisected by a midlevel walkway and the vertical aisles that lead all the way from the concourse down to the front row seats by the field are the only means of entry or egress for fans. For the price, these are good seats but once we got into the outfield corners (101 in right; 127 in left) we felt as if we’d have been better served sitting in the field level home run territory seats.

Throughout the lower bowl, we found the seats and rows plenty wide and thought the grade of the rise was just right. Sure, the stadium is squeezed into too small a parcel of land, but this minor defect shows up on the crowded concourses, not in the seats around the field. The overhang of the Club Level around the infield does not interrupt views for those seated in the Home Plate Boxes or first sections of Diamond Boxes. Those seeking shelter from the elements should aim for (Rows 19–28) of the Home Plate Boxes.

Of the twenty Sections on the Club Level, only four are accessible to ordinary fans. The rest are reserved for the special fannies who sit in the broad wooden seats that mark, apparently, one’s placement a few notches above the Average Joe on the Twin Cities food-chain. But wait: It gets worse, as these Club sections usually do. There are also three bars that are open to season-ticket holders only—The Sky 36 Legends Club, the Champions Club, and the Metropolitan Club. These establishments combine to showcase two-story-high laser-burned murals of Kirby Puckett and Rod Carew, as well as some other really neat memorabilia that ordinary fans just can’t access during the game. In any case, Sections A through R on the infield are the domain of these corporate
mucks and high-rollers. The other four sections are in left field, above the Field Boxes. These aren’t really “Club” seats, but are a solid midlevel option. Appearing in Rows 1–14 in banks that begin with Section S in shallow left and end with Section V closer to the left-field foul pole, these so-called Skyline Deck seats offer a nice raised view of the field and downtown, but we preferred the sight lines in the comparably priced Field Boxes where we didn’t feel like wannabes.