Minneapolis: Target Field
Two — or even three — is better than one.
Somewhere around my St. Louis stop as I was relentlessly texting Erin and some friends, I realized that maybe the hardest part of this journey was having to do a good deal of it alone. Not so much because I’m dependent on others for logistics, but just because this trip is giving me the opportunity to see some really cool shit and I can’t just turn to somebody next to me, slap them on the arm and point at the thing, knowing that we’re sharing an experience. The closest things I have had to that on the solo legs of my journey to all 30 MLB ballparks are this blog, my Instagram account and a series of text threads that I assume is trying the patience of the recipients. While I truly, truly appreciate all of you that have been following along virtually, the self-guided portions of my tour have felt a little lonely.
Enter: Scott. My good buddy and former college housemate, an educator by trade and a baseball fan by upbringing, offered to ride along with me for a good chunk of the summer, starting after the Friday afternoon game at Wrigley Field in Chicago. He’ll be my co-pilot from the Upper Midwest, through the Great Plains, across the Southwest and up the Pacific Coast, attending 11 games with me in all.1 We hit the road on Friday evening,2 the Mazda 3 loaded to the gills with luggage, beers and snacks, sharing an adventure that, for the 25 or so years we’ve known each other, neither of us would’ve imagined we’d be having.
We were also picking up a third wheel — actually, let’s call it a training wheel — as my friend and mutual best man, Erik, also a college housemate of Scott’s and mine, flew to Minneapolis from Columbus to get a bite-sized portion of the baseball road trip experience. He was supposed to arrive in the Twin Cities on Friday night, but the global CrowdStrike internet outage caused his flight to be cancelled. While he was able to reschedule for Saturday morning and our Minnesota antics could resume with just a slight delay, it’s getting harder to ignore the fact that we’re always going to be a couple of bad lines of code away from the possibility of the entire world as we know it screeching to an unceremonious and tumultuous halt.
When the three of us were finally united on Saturday afternoon at our hotel room near the airport, we set off to make up for lost time, grabbing a nearby Metro blue line train to get us downtown for a late lunch before the game. We weren’t the only ones with this idea: even though our departure stop was just the second one along the line, the train cars were almost full of Minnesota Twins and Milwaukee Brewers fans who had parked their cars at the Mall of America. It being a hot, muggy summer afternoon and with people crammed into the train like a can of cocktail wieners,3 I broke into a full sweat, to the obvious disgust of my fellow densely packed passengers who don’t suffer from abnormal, profuse perspiration.
We deboarded at U.S. Bank Stadium and took a short walk over to Boludo, an Argentinian pizza and empanada joint downtown. Despite the heat, I was swayed by the raves from locals on Reddit and by the unique diamond shaped pizzas churning out of their kitchen. We settled on two pizzas — the Campo, topped with Argentinian chorizo, mushrooms, onions and mozzarella, and the Porteño, topped with smoked mozzarella, pickled peppers, pancetta and red onions — as well as an empanada for each of us. Everything was deliciously spicy, rich and hearty, and we devoured every last bit whether that was a good idea or not.
The Twin Cities have had an outsized influence on me, particularly in music, as I was hipped to The Replacements and Hüsker Dü at a formative time, not to mention having been exposed to a healthy dose of Prince as a youngster. Later I’d stumble across Lifter Puller, The Hold Steady, Low and Dillinger Four as I combed through the stacks at WBGU in Bowling Green, Ohio, where Scott, Erik and I all deejayed. On my last trip, I got to see some of the sights like the house from Purple Rain, the bar that Bob Stinson frequented with and without his fellow Replacements, and the famed First Avenue/7th St. Entry rock club. We didn’t have time to hit all of those things between lunch and gametime, but we did manage to find the Mary Tyler Moore statue at the corner of 7th and Nicollet for a photo op that I’m sure no one else has ever done.
Gates opened two hours before first pitch at Target Field, and the team was giving away Royce Lewis replica wooden bats to the first 10,000 fans. I knew I didn’t want to miss out on this promo, so I insisted that we get to the ballpark as early as we could, which ended up being minutes after gates opened. Gate 34, adjacent to the Metro line, appeared to be clogged with fans lined up to get their souvenir bats. We, however, walked up to Gate 294 and waltzed right in, grabbed our bats and set about doing the traditional lap around the main concourse.
Saturdays at Target Field are “612 Saturdays” where the team offers $6 Bud Light pint cans and 12 oz. Carbliss ready-to-drink cocktails, along with $1 snacks and $2 food specials, including hot dogs. Being full of Argentinian pizza, we eschewed the discount dogs but made sure to score a couple of budget-friendly drinks. None of us had heard of Carbliss before: it’s relatively new vodka-based cocktail in the market, established by a couple from Sheboygan and produced under contract in Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio.5 It’s also intensely cloying, due to the use of the artificial sweetener sucralose, which keeps the calorie count down but makes even any natural flavors used taste fake. One can was more than enough.
The visiting Milwaukee Brewers brought a throng of their fans out for the contest, understandable as the two cities are only about five hours apart. If you weren’t paying attention to the game, it would be almost impossible to tell from crowd reaction alone if a play benefited the home team or the guests, as the crowd seemed to be split nearly down the middle with a spirited ovation coming at the conclusion of every plate appearance. In fact, when the attendance was announced as 41,679, it was noted as the largest regular season crowd in Target Field history. And, boy, did we all get our money’s worth.
The first seven innings of the contest — started after a 14 minute rain delay from clouds that popped up out of nowhere — was a brilliant pitchers’ duel between Milwaukee starter Freddy Peralta and Minnesota ace Pablo Lopez. Peralta gave up just two hits and two walks while striking out eight over his six innings of work, while on the other side, Lopez threw seven strong innings, striking out seven but giving up the game’s only run to that point. The Twins would tie the game at 1-1 in the bottom of the seventh on a very close play at the plate that held up under replay review.
Still tied after nine innings, both teams trotted their closers out for the tenth, and each retired the side without incident. As both teams got deeper into their bullpens, the bats came alive in the 11th inning, with Milwaukee putting up two runs in the top of the frame, only to have the Twins counter with an improbable, two-strike, two-out, two-run home run by first baseman Carlos Santana to tie the game at three runs a piece.
Unfortunately for the home faithful, the Brewers would put up five runs in the top of the 12th inning, countered only by a lone Twins run in the bottom of the frame, resulting in an 8-4 final score.6
We had spent six hours at the ballpark, undoubtedly the longest on this trip so far with the exception of the doubleheader in Detroit, and I was eager to keep the party going for the three of us. Said party was dependent on us finding food, so we strolled over to Modist Brewing for a night cap and a huddle to formulate a late night meal plan. Most of the food options in the Warehouse District to the north of Target Field had already closed,7 so we ventured downtown in search of a mythical all night breakfast place that appeared to be more nightclub than diner when we arrived. The “party” had dissipated from our party, so we decided to just get on the train back to the hotel where we could nosh on some of the meat and cheese treats I had acquired in Wisconsin.
Just one small problem: in researching the Minneapolis/St. Paul mass transit system, I neglected to confirm how late the blue line runs on Saturday nights. Turns out the last train back to the airport departed while we were sipping on beers at Modist. Just a stunning logistics failure on my part. That said, I hailed us an Uber and about 20 minutes later, we were back at our hotel.
As we were about to get in the elevator up to our room, Scott realized he had left his souvenir bat in the car, which had already sped away in search of more fares. Too tired to deal with it, we tore into the Thuringer sausage and port wine cheddar spread in our fridge and conked out for the night. Hopefully our driver found the bat before his next pickup and was able to sell it on eBay for a pure and tidy profit.
We built in an extra day for a side quest on our way to Kansas City. The three of us — with Erik drawing the short straw and having to contort himself into the back seat of the Mazda 3 — went the distance to visit the Field of Dreams movie site outside Dyersville, Iowa. Arriving around 12:30, we joined dozens of fellow travelers to bask in the magic of the iconic ballfield.
Some more poor planning on my part: I neglected to pack gloves and a ball so we could have a catch on the field. However, we did re-enact the scene where Dr. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham uses a pre-Heimlich technique on young Karin Kinsella to dislodge a hot dog from her trachea after she fell from the bleachers. Burt Lancaster and Gaby Hoffmann may star in the movie, but Scott and Erik, respectively, truly capture the spirit of the scene as the masters of the craft that they are.
After our pilgrimage to Dyersville came another three hours in the car to Des Moines, where we dropped Erik off at the airport to get him back to Columbus. While Target Field probably isn’t going to rank very high on my list as a baseball facility,8 the chance to share this experience with two of my oldest friends — and set ourselves up for many more years of “you had to be there” inside jokes — made this stop one of the best so far.
This includes the Cubs-Diamondbacks game at Wrigley, but his seats were up in the high class Catalina Club behind home plate, not with the Windy City hoi polloi out in the bleachers with us.
It’s not totally germane to the story about Minnesota, but we stopped in Madison for a Friday fish fry and brandy old fashioneds at Mickey’s Tavern in Madison, a neighborhood corner bar that my friend Mark turned me and Erin onto when we vacationed there last year. Totally worth a stop if you want a crash course in Wisconsin tavern culture.
Standing up, not lying down like clichéd sardines. Stacking horizontally would be a weird move in a light rail car, but we obviously haven’t done the research yet to see if this is an unknown, untapped efficiency.
No, there aren’t a shit-ton of gates at Target Field. In fact there are just five, but numbered to honor Twins legends Harmon Killebrew (3), Tony Oliva (6), Kent Hrbek (14), Rod Carew (29) and Kirby Puckett (34).
Though not sold in Ohio (yet), which is interesting.
Home teams are now 5-12 in the games I’ve seen, though this one doesn’t bother me as much because I was secretly rooting for the visiting Brewers to win.
We walked into Graze food hall, which had closed all of its vendor stalls and converted to a young people bar for the night, still carrying our replica baseball bats, much to the consternation of the security detail.
Listen, Target Field is a perfectly fine place to see a baseball game, and has a lot of nice touches: good food and beer options, mostly open concourses on both levels, great artwork and signage, a house organist that you can actually chat with in the Twins Pub before the game. But like a lot of modern ballparks trying to follow in the footsteps of Camden Yards, it sacrifices a cozy feel by pushing the upper deck further up and away from the field to eliminate obstructed views in the lower bowl and make room for a full complement of luxury suites. The giant roof overhanging the upper bowl, while architecturally distinctive, makes the place feel much bigger than it actually is and is about as far as you can get from the pastoral roots of the game without putting a full dome over the field. Also, the team leans on their audio/visual department to an extent I haven’t noticed in the past, with flashy video clips and blaring music played seemingly between each pitch to get the crowd involved in the game. If you need to constantly trigger dopamine rushes in your fans to get them to cheer, maybe you’re doing something wrong with the product on the field.
What did the graffiti on the FoD bleachers say?