Shower The People

On Tuesday night, James Taylor was showering 18,000 people with love at the Excel Center in St. Paul, while across the Mississippi, at brand new Target Field in Minneapolis, Mother Nature was showering 30,000 or so Minnesota Twins fans and 40 or 50 Yankees fans, I suppose, with rain. Lillian and I were at the Excel Center (you'll notice from the photo we had good seats up front). Our friends Jeff and Linda were at Target Field. James Taylor’s concert with Carole King lasted more than 2½ hours. The Twins game was called because of rain after five innings.

It’s the first Twins rainout, of course, in many years, since they just moved from the Metrodome to the spectacular new outdoor field this spring. Here’s the rule on rainouts at Target Field: If the teams play at least five full innings, the fans are considered to have gotten their money’s worth, and no refunds are issued, and no tickets are issued for the last four innings, which are generally played the next day. That’s a pretty standard policy among outdoor venues. At the Medora Musical, for example, if the show lasts an hour before the rain comes, you are considered to have seen the show. Still, it left a lot of Twins fans unhappy. They haven’t had an outdoor venue for a long time, so they forget what the rules are.

The good news, of course, is that the people who have tickets to see the next day’s game also get to see the final four innings of the previous night’s washout. We were among those people. So Wednesday, we got 13 innings for the price of 9. Not that it mattered. The Twins lost both ends in a lackluster performance. Jeff and Linda and Lillian, all cheering for the Yankees, liked it though.

For the record, Target Field is a great baseball facility. I had not been to an outdoor Twins game since 1961—49 years ago. To digress, that year, I sold the most subscriptions to the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune in some sort of geographic area surrounding Hettinger, North Dakota, and won a free trip to see the Twins in their inaugural season at old (but brand new then) Metropolitan Stadium. I got on the train at Hettinger, joining those who had gotten on, I think, at Miles City, Glendive and Bowman, and we picked up fellow teenaged salesmen/deliverers (yes they were all paperBOYS) all the way along the Milwaukee Road to Minneapolis—probably 40 or 50 of us in all by the time we got to the Twin Cities, where we spent a night at the Normandy Hotel and went to a Twins game. I don’t remember who they played or if they won. It did not matter. It was the biggest night of a 12-year-old’s life, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I never saw them again until after they moved indoors in 1982.

Here’s the difference. In 1961, and for many years after, major league baseball players were All-American Men, with cleanly shaved faces, short hair (even in the 60’s and into the 70’s), and their uniforms fit like a glove. Today, most Twins (and other teams’ players, I think—I am not a big fan and don’t watch a lot of baseball except for the World Series) have facial hair of some kind, and a lot have visible tattoos, and they wear these baggy goddam pants that look like they were borrowed from Shaun White. Time was, the pants came just below the knee and they wore high stockings (ever wonder where the Boston Red Sox or the Chicago White Sox got their names?), and they looked like real baseball players. Wednesday, I think there were only four or five of the 50 players on the two teams who dressed like baseball players. The rest had long baggy pants that drooped over their shoes. I hated it. Other than the American League’s designated hitter rule, I think baggy pants are the only change in baseball in 110 years. Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I liked it better before.

One tradition that hasn’t changed: The manager and coaches, no matter how old and fat they are, wear the same uniforms as the players. It’s the only sport that does it, and it’s kind of goofy. I mean, imagine Bud Grant on the sidelines in full pads (although at least football players don’t wear baggy pants) or Phil Jackson sitting on the bench, with those long skinny 60-something-year-old legs of his sticking out from basketball shorts (and those pro basketball uniforms have gotten baggy over the years too). Still, it’s hard to picture Ron Gardenhire in a three piece suit trotting out to the mound to tell Francisco Liriano he’s given up one too many hits and has to call it a night.

All in all, it was a grand little four-day getaway, and just the right combination of entertainment. Next week I head west with my best male friends for our 35th annual canoe trip. We’ll be on the Little Missouri River, which for the second year in a row has stayed navigable into June. There’ll be no report here, other than survival. We agreed long ago not to write about it.