One cheer for the Homerdome

Perhaps my standards are minimal to non-existent, but I’ve always kind of liked the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome for reasons that are expressed quite well here. In spite of its overwhelming and obvious deficits as a baseball venue, tickets have always been insanely inexpensive by comparison with the rest of the league; wags might point out that any price was too high to watch the team during most of the years I spent in Minneapolis (’93-’02), but $4 nosebleeder seats were just fine by me, especially when the ushers clearly didn’t mind anyone slipping behind the dugouts after a few innings. Not a bad price to pay for seeing Brad Radke win his 20th in 1997, or to see the last major league hits by Kent Hrbek, Paul Molitor, and (less happily) Kirby Puckett.

Several fans quoted in the Deadspin article mention the prevailing lethargy of Twins crowds, a condition that certainly took some getting used to. I don’t know how much of that can be chalked up to the emotional habitus of the upper Midwest and how much to the fact that the team was just rotten throughout the 1990s, but no one ever gave me shit for passing a Sunday game while reading the New York Times. Moreover, the Dome was probably the only stadium I’ve visited where the alcohol-free “Family Section” was completely unnecessary. It was just as well, I suppose. When crowds did get riled up — as they did during the closest thing we ever had to “Ten-Cent Beer Night” — it was because they were temporarily larded with mooks who inexplicably lobbed hot dogs and batteries at a guy who’d split the team four years earlier in exchange for a couple of players (Eric Milton and Christian Guzman) who’d actually helped make the team competitive again. (I paid $4 to see that game, too.)

I rarely make it back to the Twin Cities anymore, though I did manage to catch this nearly-unwatchable outing last month when I was in town for a few hours. Though it was nice to see A-Rod robbed of a grand slam, I’m a bit concerned about the bigger picture — you see, the last game I’d caught at the Dome was in 2002, when the Twins lost an afternoon game to the Angels, who of course went on to win the World Series a few months later. It’s bad enough that my final visit to the Dome was marred by a Yankee win, but if my attendance in any way presages the outcome of the postseason, any lingering affection for the place will completely evaporate…