Ex-Minnesotan Todd just visited from Arizona and mentioned part of the agenda was a shopping trip with his wife. It was too bad the Mall of America wouldn't open until after they left, I said.
He smirked.
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| "Hell, you mean we're INSIDE the Met?" |
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"I wouldn't go there. They tore down Met Stadium and put up that place."
Well, it wasn't as if they ripped down Metropolitan Stadium just to erect the Mall of America. But he insisted he would never set foot in the place "on general principle," never mind that as an Arizona resident he would have made very few trips to the Met during the past decade.
I guess "general principle" covers plenty of ground, especially if a ballyard was on it.
People seem to have an automatic affinity and nostalgia for old ballparks, even if many were fire traps or had no parking, which was true of inner-city ballparks after World War II. Suddenly, baseball fans had cars and no place to leave them.
Places such as Forbes Field, the Polo Grounds, or Shibe Park held plenty of history, but to say older is better is like saying happily married men prefer their high school sweethearts to their wives.
And Metropolitan Stadium wasn't exactly steeped in baseball lore. The place was around for only 25 years.
I'll concede a sliver of significance if it was your first major league ballpark. But even the pathetic Metrodome has a more nostaligic aspect to it: It's downtown, where a ballpark should be.
You could see cows from the second deck in Metropolitan Stadium when I saw my first Major League game there. Like a lot of yards, it stood in acres of nowhere. The was no neighborhood feel to it.
Suburban Metropolitan Stadium essentially replaced downtown Nicollet Park in 1956 as home of the Minneapolis Millers, and Nicollet Park probably deserved more tears than the Met. Ted Williams and Willie Mays were hot-shot minor leaguers in Nicollet Park. General Mills first plastered the words "Breakfast of Champions" in an ad panel there after the Millers won the 1933 American Association title.
I never saw Nicollet Park, but a guess says memories there would have been of baseball. Most of my memories of Met Stadium involve the parking lot.
That was one thing about those good old days: Going to a ballgame wasn't like living in occupied France. You were allowed in the parking lot about three hours before the game, and once you paid your buck or two it was pretty much anything goes as long as it was borderline legal.
The parking lot was where a half-dozen of us, including Todd, enjoyed hours of sun, football and Frisbees before a Twins-Yankees doubleheader 15 years ago. The recollection of the game was the long lines at the refreshment stands.
Among the parking lot delicacies we prepared were "pavement burgers," the occasional patties that fell off the Hibachi. We figured the blacktop was over 100 degrees in that sun, and what germs the heat didn't kill the beer would. They were succulent.
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| Geez, I hope this cheap looking ceramic model of the Met doesn't look too appealing as a small digital image. |
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The postgame highlights consisted of teeing golf balls in cracks of the parking lot and trying to drive them into the stadium over the left-field facade. It drew quite a crowd, and a round of applause for former state amateur golf champion Mike Fermoyle when he became the first to accomplish the goal.
I saw Mickey Mantle, Joe Namath and Pele work for pay at the Met, but my most vivid sporting memory involved Twins' pitcher Ray Corbin. Ray had a large rectangular head, and how his cap defied physics and stayed put only God knows. In making an early exit from a game one sunny Saturday, he hurled his glove as he came off the field. An innovative profanity gushed from his mouth and seemed to act as a munitions charge, propeling the glove into the back of the dugout.
From box seats immediately behind the dugout, my high school buddies and I no longer viewed Ray as a miserable wretch of a pitcher, but as a guy with a remarkable ability to creatively manipulate English.
Truly, if Metropolitan Stadium meant anything to me, it was the friends. Of the nine others involved in parking lot golf and the Ray Corbin Language Lesson, I've seen eight of them in the past year. One of them I see only at Twins' openers.
As for the Met, it was a fairly ugly structure, traffic was often snarled and it was poorly maintained. Perhaps its biggest attribute was that, being in Bloomington rather than downtown Minneapolis, it was a 75-minute drive from Rochester.
In the early '70s, the Twins were so awful you could decide at 5:30 on a nice summer night to make the drive, breeze into the parking lot and sit anywhere. The ushers wouldn't ask if your ticket corresponded to the seat you were in. Trendy, front-running cake-eaters didn't bother you. You had a personal vendor.
But if it's any consolation to Todd, there will be a marker in the Mall of America to designate the location of home plate at the Met. And a special chair will mark the spot where Harmon Killebrew's longest home run landed.
The chair will be in Camp Snoopy, where more people will have fun than was ever the case at the Met.
