Crack Out a Home Run, Shout a Hip-Hooray

Today marks the last scheduled major league baseball game in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. Happily, it may not be the last game played; the Minnesota Twins have managed to draw even with the Detroit Tigers in the AL Central after 161 games. Should the Twins and Tigers both win or both lose tomorrow, the last regular season game at the Dome will come next Tuesday; a Twins win and Detroit loss, either tomorrow or in game 163, would guarantee at least one final postseason game in one of the worst, most beloved baseball stadiums in Major League Baseball. And I’m hoping that the Twins get there thanks to a routine fly ball, lost in the ceiling by a right fielder, that drops for a bloop triple. It would be fitting.

The Metrodome is, to be blunt, a terrible baseball stadium. It’s not a terrible stadium; for football it actually is quite nice. But as a baseball stadium, it makes a really good football stadium. The seats aren’t angled for baseball, meaning that if you sit down the third- or first-base lines, you face out into the outfield, rather than home plate. Watching the game from those seats all but guarantees a sore neck the next day. And of course, baseball is an outdoor sport. There’s no dumber way to enjoy the summer than inside a pressurized dome, under a yellowing teflon roof that, bizarrely, is stitched together in such a way that it forms a perfect Nazi swastika at its center. I am not making this up.

The roof, of course, has been at the center of bizarre plays throughout the history of the stadium, including the May 4, 1984 pop-up by Dave Kingman of the Oakland A’s that never came back down — it found an air hole in the roof, and Kingman found himself on second with one of the stranger ground-rule doubles in baseball history. (Corey Koskie repeated the feat in 2004.) And its off-white color is almost the same as the color of a baseball, meaning innumerable routine fly balls have ended up base hits for the Twins over the years.

Right field features the Hefty Bag — a tarp stretched above the right field wall to make it harder to hit home runs. Like Fenway’s Green Monster, only squishier. And above it, in the right field upper deck, is the area Star Tribune columnist Pat Reusse refers to as the “casbah,” a curtained-off section of the stadium where you simply can’t see anything happening in right field. (The seats are opened up for the postseason. Hooray?)

At least the field is now covered in FieldTurf, which makes it a little less like playing baseball with a SuperBall on concrete. In its earliest days, the field was SuperTurf or AstroTurf, and in an attractive shade of neon green, too.

Comparing watching baseball at the dome to watching a game at Wrigley Field or Camden Yards or Dodger Stadium or, heck, monstrosities like Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum or the late Three Rivers Stadium is like comparing a film seen in Imax with a film seen streaming over a 56.6 kbps modem.

And yet.

And yet the Metrodome was home for the Twins for 27 years, and 27 pretty good years. It was the home ballpark for all of Kirby Puckett’s storied career, the place where he hit the “We’ll See You Tomorrow Night” home run in game six of the ’91 series. It was the place the Twins had clinched their first series title in 1987 — the first major pro title for Minnesota in any sport since the Minneapolis Lakers in 1954. It was where they clinched their most recent series title in 1991 — the most recent major pro title for Minnesota in any sport. Kent Hrbek, Johann Santana, Torii Hunter, Dan Gladden, Brad Radke, Scott Erickson — these guys spent their Twins careers in the stadium. And Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, Michael Cuddyer — these guys started their careers there.

The Metrodome wasn’t the first place I saw a major league game — that was the old Met Stadium, which sat on the site now occupied by the Mall of America. But it was the stadium I’ve seen the most games in. It was where I saw the only World Series game I have ever seen, or am likely to see — Game 1 of the 1987 series, Twins 10, Cardinals 1. I have never heard a sound louder than that stadium when Dan Gladden hit his 4th-inning grand slam, blowing the doors open, the stadium erupting into a sea of white Homer Hankies.

And it was the first place my daughter saw a baseball game.

I will always remember the crowd cheering as the late Bob Casey admonished us that there was no smoking in the Metrodome, always remember the way he’d call out, “Batting third, the center fielder Kirbeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Puckett!” I’ll always remember watching blurry replays on the stadium scoreboard, before they put in the jumbotrons. I’ll always remember getting blown out the doors by air pressure after a game. I’ll always remember watching them win it all in ’87 and ’91, even if I watched both game sevens on television. I’ll always remember watching Johann Santana in 2002, a few weeks after my daughter was born, with a possible strike and contraction of the Twins looming, in what could have been the last baseball game in Minnesota, and saying to friends that this guy’s gonna win the Cy Young some day. I’ll always remember bringing my daughter to watch her first game, an extra-inning loss to the Tigers during the miracle 2006 season.

It wasn’t a good baseball stadium. That will be Target Field, which opens next year, and which appears to be phenomenal. I’m sure many more memories will be made there.

But there are a lot of good memories being left behind at the Metrodome — indeed, the best memories in the history of Minnesota sports. Here’s hoping the old, dumpy, grey football stadium has a few more great baseball moments left, to add to the many great baseball moments that have come before.