Friday Night Lights

A Cold Day in Minnesota


Ahhh, birds chirping, sun shining, days getting longer, young love in the air, local bookmakers avoiding the IRS and its April 15th henchmen. Springtime is here, which means that baseball season is upon us. By us, of course, I mean residents of the West Coast, the Sun Belt, and south Florida. While baseball season may have arrived in the Midwest and Northeast, baseball weather is a couple weeks away.

Teams like Milwaukee and Toronto with the foresight to put roofs on their modern-day cold-weather cathedrals should be commended. The Cubs can be forgiven – retractable roofs weren’t exactly en vogue at the turn of the century. Less sympathy should be extended to the Indians, who were outplayed in their chilly, and fairly new, outdoor venue by a scrappy Marlins squad of mercenaries who took the World Series title home to Miami about a decade ago.

But what advice do you give to a team in a colder climate than all of the above, a team that plays under a Teflon roof and is currently constructing a new open-air stadium sans cover?

Well, you address the Minnesota Twins with, “typical.” Or “standard,” depending on your choice of vocabulary.

The 2009 season is the last campaign of domed goodness in Minnesota. In 2010, the club will relocate a mile down 5th Avenue in downtown Minneapolis to Target Field, a new stadium built almost adjacent to Target Center, and yes, right down the street from Target’s headquarters. In an ironic twist of fate, both the baseball team and the mega-corporation have encouraged their customers to “Expect More” while “Pay(ing) Less”.

Fans “expect more” of a game-day atmosphere in June, July and August with the new palace, an edifice which is at least fifteen years in the making. Unfortunately, former owner (and formerly alive) Carl Pohlad decided to “pay less” and let taxpayers shoulder the majority of the bill for construction of his ballpark. Excesses were removed and sacrifices were made in constructing this downtown diamond, which will have no roof, retractable or otherwise. The stadium is being erected on the smallest site in Major League Baseball (smaller than Fenway or Wrigley) – there simply isn’t enough space for the roof to be added.

At this point, it’s probably time to start examining the tradeoffs we make in order to have baseball in the heart of the city. Minnesota is a cold, cold place – I’ve seen snow in May – but climate trends make for dreary, cool Aprils. When the weather warms up, massive thunderstorms come along for the ride, and threaten the Heartland until August. September can be the perfect month, until October approaches and Canada gifts us cold air masses.

Basically, we live in a year-long weather nightmare. The short-sightedness of the urban planners and the team in accepting a stadium without a roof will have short-term and long-term repercussions. Games will be rescheduled, then rescheduled, and rescheduled again. Fans will turn out in droves from May 15 to September 15, but two months of home dates will have far fewer fans than would attend competition in a stadium with a roof. The “hearty Midwesterners” the team is banking on are fewer and further between, replaced by transplants from places like Texas and Georgia that will find better things to do in our cosmopolitan metropolis than freeze in a downtown stadium conveniently located next to a regional trash incinerator.

So what do you say to the team? Well, maybe it’s a good thing they haven’t torn down the Metrodome already.