Archives: Tear the roof off!….Wait, what?!

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Baseball at the Metrodome sucks.

Personally, I think it’s an acquired taste akin to ramen noodles. If you don’t know any better, it’s terrific, but once you take those same noodles, add an Alfredo sauce and throw some bits of chicken into the mix, you can’t look at Maruchan Chicken Ramen quite the same. In this metaphor, Miller Park is the bowl of chicken Alfredo. (And yes, bowl. Not plate. That is not a typo.)

Today, Major League Baseball announced that the Cleveland Indians will play a three-game series at Miller Park because of inclement weather. (Read: It’s snowing like fucking crazy, no one predicted this would happen and several games have been canceled, losing several millions of dollars in the process. Here’s our stopgap solution: Cleveland fans, not only will you be required to scrape off your cars, your team will be playing home games seven hours away. Baseball fever - catch it!)

This relates to Twins fans not only in the Twin Cities, but also the Dakotas, Iowa and across the Midwest because the Twins will be in the same position if things progress as planned. Without reading barometers, Doppler radar or asking KARE 11’s Sven Sundgaard (SCSU stand up!) to forecast the weather in April 2010, we can reasonably say that we will not want to pay admission to sit outside for three hours at that time.

What good is an outdoor stadium if weather causes you to cancel games in April and October?
Now Miller Park - by no means the best ballpark in the majors, the national league, or even the NL central division - has open concourses, several restaurant/bars with great views of the game, the world-famous sausage race and of course, excellent tailgating. The bars even host radio interviews players after the game, allowing fans another level of (what feels like) one-on-one interaction.

But yet, none of those amenities really matter.

(Story that interrupts the flow of the column but needs to be told: Last year I traveled with my friend Ryan, a native Milwaukee-ian, to the Twins-Brewers series. After doing everything in our power to see how much High Life you can drink before getting cutoff at Miller Park, we wonder over to Front Row Friday’s restaurant in left field for the post-game interviews. After listening to Jeff Cirillo bash former manager Lou Pinella for no apparent reason - even the interviewer was somewhat taken aback by it - part-time closer and full-time hotel employee (he delivers room service fastballs like no other) Derrick “Rock Star” Turnbow took the interview chair. (Yes, that’s his nickname.) Midway through the questioning about how great it is to be in the Major Leagues or some other baseball cliche, my heavily inebriated friend yells out, “I WANT TO PARTY WITH YOU!!”

The crowd laughs, Turnbow, surprised, interrupts his interview and replies, “I..uh.. want to party with you!” Everyone laughs, good times all around. At the end of the interview Ryan gets his ticket stub signed by Turnbow and they drunkenly - keep in mind we were absolutely trashed - says, “I don’t want this to sound weird, but I really like you.”

Turnbow laughs, says, “That’s cool,” and they give each other dap. But the next day, Guild left his ticket stub in his cargo shorts and the signature was erased. Two months later, Turnbow couldn’t locate any pitches, lost his closer’s job and almost got demoted to AAA. Oh well. Anyways….)

I can watch a baseball game and have an entertaining time without going into a restaurant, without watching the sausage race or even without tailgating*. (Although the sausage race is so fucking crucial. They once issued a press release to introduce a new meat product into the race and it was the biggest Brewers news of the year. This is why I’m a closet Milwaukee Brewers fan.)

The best things about Miller Park are the sightlines and the (retractable) roof. Conversely, those are the absolute worst provisions with the Inflatable Baggy.

If you want to see what I mean, take a Minnesota Twins ticket map (http://minnesota.twins.mlb.com/min/ballpark/seating_pricing.jsp). Draw lines from the aisles extending into the field. Most lines leave you in the outfield. Because the stadium is set up for football in a square, the seats cannot be tilted toward the field. Now look at a more modern stadium, like the new Busch Stadium (http://stlouis.cardinals.mlb.com/stl/ballpark/seating_pricing.jsp) Immediately you see the sightlines pointing toward the infield. Also, where the aisles don’t direct to the infield, the seats are slanted toward the action, in a diamond shape rather than the square Metrodome.

This simple act shows why a new stadium is needed. The Dome roof isn’t the problem, the seating is.

Yet fairweather Twinks fans - the ones who pack the stadium for the opener and then proceed to forget about the team until the playoffs - will babble aimlessly about how “baseball needs to be outdoors in Minnesota.” These are the same people who say they “love to see baseball the way it’s meant to be played” and “prefer watching St. Paul Saints games,” where ironically ownership’s every waking effort is put toward keeping the fan’s focus away from the game. Again, it’s not about the belly dancers, backrubs, pillow fights and drunks spinning around a baseball bat between innings. It’s about being able to watch a game with the best possible angles for the 40,000 in attendance.

But in Minnesota, it’s also about dealing with 35-degree weather (the official temperature at 9 p.m. April 9). It’s about dealing with the 20 days of rain in May (2005). God forbid the Twinks win the AL Central and advance to the playoffs in the coming future. October’s average low temperature, measured at night when the games would be played, is 39 degrees, according to numbers provided by The Weather Channel.

The absence of a roof screws thousands of people who drive from miles around to watch the Twins, as well as the legions who travel from 10 minutes away. Basically, without a roof, every Twins fan is figuratively locked in the gimp room on this one.

Yet Carl Pohlad can protect your anal virginity. Listen Carl, (he’s a frequent reader) write a check and pay for a retractable roof.

Pohlad could become a martyr with one simple signature -allowing legions of fans to overlook years of penny-pinching that will almost surely cost the team Johan Santana. Grim death isn’t far off Pohlad and last time I heard, Swiss Banc accounts aren’t transferable to the other side.

We aren’t putting together rockets. I’m not Doc Brown here predicting the future. I’m simply using common sense that anyone who has lived here for a sustainable amount of time can easily cite. Why spend $390 in construction costs and $522 million total only to leave out one of the most useful features of the new stadium, one thing that can guarantee future instability?

What good is outdoor baseball if it’s too cold to actually play the game?

P.S. - In other baseball news that we’ll whine and rant about but really has no impact on the big picture of life, Direct TV and cable providers solved the Extra Innings package quandary. Now everyone can go to sleep unfulfilled staring at a baseball with a cursive “Good Night!” scrawled across it.

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