Big Day Out #3: TCDroogsma at The City Classic

I prayed more in The Dome than I ever did in church...

Well hello again, everybody!  Welcome to the third edition of Big Day Out!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Big Day Out column, here's the scoop:  In our quest to become your favorite blog in the Twin Cities we decided we needed a column in which our contributors could go out on to the beautiful streets of the cities and take in various events.  So far we've sent MinneSarah to the State Fair & TCDroogsma to the signing of the gay marriage bill.

This time around we put TCDroogsma to work and sent him to the Metrodome last Tuesday to take in the City Classic, an annual baseball game between the best team in St. Paul & the best team in Minneapolis.  This year's game featured Minneapolis Southwest against St. Paul Highland Park.

So, Droogsy... thoughts?

I can't remember the last time I was at a high school baseball game.  Maybe 16 or 17 years ago?  That was about the last time I accompanied my father (a high school umpire) to a game that he was working before puberty hit and I decided I was too cool to hang out with my dad (but not too cool to spend every waking hour sitting alone in my room playing Mortal Kombat II.  I wasn't a bright kid.).  To be completely honest, the prospect of covering a high school game for this blog sounded like a task more tedious than reviewing Ben Gibbard songs (the most tedious thing I've done for this blog yet).

However, my opinion was swayed by two things.  First, my father was umping the game and seemed genuinely excited about it.  Why was he so excited?  Well, the game was being played at the Metrodome and his excitement at the opportunity to ump on a major league field was contagious.  It's been years since I was in The Dome for any reason and this seemed like as good an opportunity as any to check in on the old eyesore.

That's him, second from the right.


So, Tuesday rolled around and I made the trek from my neighborhood over to The Dome.  As I strolled past HCMC and that big white pillow came into view I was surprised at how quickly I became flooded with nostalgia.  It's entirely possible that I'm the last person who's ever going to think, "Damn! I'm going to The Metrodome!," but that's exactly the thought that crossed my mind.

My love for The Metrodome is a difficult thing to explain.  Any clear-headed person will tell you that, yes, in fact, The Dome is a dump.  It's a football stadium that happened to hold a baseball team for 27 years.  Its concourse is too small, the seats are uncomfortable and poorly aligned, the sound system is terrible, and building itself is brutally stale and impersonal.

You know who didn't care about any of these things?  Young TCDroogsma.

Growing up with a father whose first love was baseball, The Metrodome was, to me, a baseball stadium first and everything else second.  Even today I tend to think of The Dome as the building where "the Twins used to play" rather than the building where "the Vikings actually play."

To me, the Metrodome was a place to see real life superheroes.  On any of 81 given days during the summer, I could be watching Kirby Puckett IN PERSON!  I could watch Kent Hrbek do his "No Smoking/Yes Drinking" bit over at first base IN PERSON!  Trivial as it seems now, I could watch Scott Erickson & Kevin Tapani pitch LIVE!  To a young baseball junkie, the realization that these people who were essentially characters on television could be watched up close and personal was a revelation.  That excitement was inextricably linked to my beloved Metrodome and all those things other people complained about.

To my young eyes, everything about those first days at the Metrodome was so big and shiny and new.  From the outside the structure seemed impossibly large, it's light blue pillars seemingly stretching all the way to the sky.  The tinny speakers outside of the stadium playing "We're Going To Win Twins!" on repeat were like sirens, enticing me with a song that had previously only existed in my house, yet was now here calling all like-minded fans to the stadium.  Once inside, Bob Casey's voice rolled throughout the stadium like a voice from heaven.  "Batting third, the center fielder, #34, KIIIRRRBBYYY PUCKETTT."  To a young man who grew up loving the Twins, it was hard to imagine there was a happier place on Earth than the Metrodome.

In many ways, I grew up with the Metrodome.  Yes, there was something vaguely scary about going to The Dome as child (being in the big city of Minneapolis itself was terrifying in and of itself). But the thrill of being there was overwhelming.  Everything that happened in the stadium had an air of excitement.  The music was loud, the fans were louder, the lights were bright, the flaws seemed barely perceptible.  Sure, if I could go back and relive those early days it would probably be a very underwhelming experience, but that's a concept.  Through the lens of nostalgia, everything back then was perfect.

It's possible that I only feel this way through a stroke of good timing.  You see, I was 9 years old in 1991, just old enough to create life-long memories, yet still young enough to believe in the magic of rally caps, 7th inning stretches, and grown men as superheroes.  And, more than anything, I was fortunate enough to spend Game 6 and Game 7 of the 1991 World Series in the seats in the upper deck behind home plate with my dad.

I'm not a good enough writer to express the thrill, terror, and unbridled joy contained in those two nights.  The sheer volume of 60,000 delirious Twins fans made it impossible for my dad and I to have any semblance of conversation (and we were right next to each other).  To this day, I've never experienced any moment in life as simultaneously scary & exhilarating as Kirby's home run to win Game 6.  The noise was just overwhelming, the thousands of homer hankies making it difficult for pre-growth-spurt Droogsy to see Kirby pump his fist, but within that swirl of sight & sound was such jubilation that fear gave way to revelry quickly.  Only once in my life have I experienced anything comparable, and it happened to be the next night when Gene Larkin slapped a single to right field, scoring Dan Gladden to win the series.  To this day, when I see those clips on television, I can't even believe that I was there.  Sometimes I can't help texting my dad just to say, "Can you believe it?"  All he ever says back is, "That was something special."

Of course, like a gambler who's dealt a blackjack his first time at the table, the thrill of going to the Metrodome never completely dissipated.  There were many games over the years with my entire family coming up.  We went just to see Sammy Sosa's Cubs back when interleague play still held intrigue (Slammin' Sammy did not disappoint, launching a bomb into the left field seats to the delight of pretty much everybody) and a random win against the Yankees that led to "Yankees Suck!" chants in the parking ramp stand out. I even remember one time specifically going up with my friends once we'd turned 16 just as an excuse to use his new driver's license for a trip to The Dome.  If memory serves the Twins beat the Indians in something like 15 innings, but that was beside the point.  The last Twins game I remember attending at The Metrodome was a home opener on a second or third date with a girl.  The Twins lost to the Angels, but it hardly mattered as we ended up standing in the snow at the lightrail station afterward, holding each other closely in an attempt to stay warm as the night quickly morphed from "mine" to "ours" for the first time.

I bring up those last two games just to illustrate just how much of a constant the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome was in my life.  It was there when I was just impressionable enough to appreciate its magic, was there when my parents needed something myself & my three younger siblings could agree on, there again when my friends and I needed an excuse to take those crucial first flights away from the nest, and there one last time when I needed something big & stupid to try to win over a woman.

So, why do I bring all of this up?  Because, as a 31 year old who bleeds skepticism, returning to the Metrodome on Tuesday brought all of those feelings rushing back.  All the things that shaped me from a 9 year old boy to a 31 year old man washed away as I walked back through the gates.  My eyes still got wide with disbelief at that first sight of the base paths and outfield glimpsed through the stairwells.

These days the Dome isn't what it used to be.  Nearly all signs of the Twins tenure at the Metrodome have been removed, save an imprint of the "TC" logo that can't be removed from the wall and that beautiful light blue seat in left field, painted a different hue from its thousands of brothers to symbolize where Kirby's home run landed.

This day, the baseball field was crisscrossed with lines from a soccer pitch, the bases didn't have any dirt surrounding the bag, hell, even the "baggie" in right field is nothing but a distant memory.  Perhaps, most jarringly of all, was the total saturation of the Minnesota Vikings.  Those pillars I mentioned above are now purple.  The signs in the concourses no longer feature any reminders of the Twins' past glories, only Adrian Peterson rushing records and Alan Page profiles as far as the eye can see.  Hell, the stadium isn't even called The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome anymore.  You know what it's called now and I'll be damned if I'm going to type it out.

All of these changes gave my last visit to The Dome the feel of a funeral.  Not just any funeral, but the funeral of someone loved but not seen for years.  The haircut is new, the makeup is different, the age lines more prominent than I recalled.  And yet, it was still the same old girl.  The same one that caused my heart to race with excitement as a child still had the ability to transport me back to a time when things were more pure and simple.  A time when athletes weren't merely talented men, when teams meant more than different colored laundry, and when sometimes just believing as hard as you could was enough to make something magical happen.

Of course, with the demolition of the Metrodome now merely a matter of time, I'm sure many writers will take their turn eulogizing the stadium.  Many of those writers were closer to my present age when the Dome opened, and given my feelings toward Target Field (a wonderful facility and a worthy recipient of civic pride, but certainly not "magical"), I'm inclined to believe that most of those eulogies will not do the stadium justice.  It doesn't take much to write it off as an ugly, sterile barn whose greatest attribute was its versatility (in the sense that it sucked to see any event there) and I'm sure most of the columnists will do just that.  For some of us, however, The Metrodome stands as one of the last buildings in town that houses perpetual youth.  Underneath that ugly white roof lies a place that, even after 31 years, is still capable of turning back time, turning off the pressures of the real world, and reminding a man that life isn't nearly as complicated as he may think.  I may be alone on this one, but I'm going to miss the old ball park.  I'm glad I got a chance to say goodbye.

(Editor's Note: Droogsy!  What about the game?!?)

Oh, right.  Highland Park ended up ten-running Southview in a game whose main excitement was the sheer terror created every time one of those piercing, aluminum-bat aided "PING!" sounds jolted me from dozing gripped by the fear that a foul ball was about to shatter my jaw.

That's better.

Well, there you have it folks!  TCDroogsma may not have covered the baseball game very well, but a special day was had none the less!

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