Minnesota Twins tickets

THE MINNESOTA TWINS began playing in the American League in 1961, having moved from Washington, D.C., where they were called the Senators: "First in war, first in peace, last in the Ameri¬can League." The newly relocated and renamed team was not much more suc¬cessful, until they captured the pennant in 1965.

The Twins played at Metropolitan Stadium in nearby Bloomington until 1982. The Met was known to be a decent baseball park, similar to County Sta¬dium in Milwaukee. But it was replaced by the Metrodome, which was among the last of the multipurpose stadiums to be built. Now, less than twenty years later, the Twins have announced that the stadium is obsolete and that baseball is doomed in Minnesota without a new ballpark. And so it goes.

The most notable aspects of the Metrodome are the Baggie-the blue plas¬tic material that covers the right-field wall-and the incredible noise level attained when the stadium is full and the fans are screaming.

The problem with a non retractable domed stadium in Minneapolis is, ironically, the weather. It's frigid here for much of the year, so when the temper¬ature finally rises above freezing, people don't want to spend their time indoors watching baseball. On gorgeous Sundays, fans gather slowly, lingering in the warm sunlight before entering the gloom of the Dome. In most other cities, fans seem eager to enter the ballpark, to be entertained. Not so in the Twin Cities. Although the Metrodome is smaller and not as monolithic as other domes, with its translucent cloth-covered roof, it is still an unlikely place to spend an all-too¬r are beautiful day in the Land of a Thousand Lakes.

TONY CLARK "I remember the first year I came up. Everybody had talked about how they could lose a fly ball in the roof. The very first BP I had in the ballpark, the ball went up, I went running after it, and I realized very early on how quickly you can lose the ball in the roof, and how silly you can look when it bounces a hundred feet from you."

DAVE BERGMAN "The Metrodome when fully seated is probably one of the loudest places you've ever been in your life. It's also kind of an unusual sta¬dium, especially when you're playing the outfield. They've got these orange lights at the top of the sta¬dium, and when a ball goes up, not only do you lose it in the roof, but you have a tough time getting it out of those orange lights."

MIKE KRUKOW "We came out of spring training in 1982 with the Phillies, and we were going to go up to Minnesota for a two-game exhibition prior to the season starting. It was a brand-new field, so we were all excited to get up there. We leave Clearwater where the Phillies trained and we get up there in Min¬nesota, we were freezing our ass off. We go to this place and we couldn't believe how cheap the turf was; it was terrible. They had this big Baggie over the fence. I'm thinking: This is a brand-new place? This thing is a dog.

Anyway, I was the first guy to pitch there. I didn't know anybody on the Twins team. They had a bunch of kids coming up, and they just kicked my ass. Kent Hrbek hit the longest home run; he hit it about eight hundred feet. It was a cold place; they had the fans going. And you couldn't hear. The acoustics were terrible. You'd yell to your second baseman, it felt like you were playing in a vacuum. The good fans of Minnesota-they are great fans up there; I don't know how they've put up with that place for as long as they have. I think they'd rather have the park they had before the Metrodome."