Thoughts From The Stands: A Night At Target Field

Credit: Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports

Living outside the metro area, yes there is something beyond Eden Prairie, I don’t get to as many Twins games as I’d really like to. It’s only about an hour and a half to get to Target Field, but with our Minnesotan way of gawking and anything on the side of the road that is abnormal and the fact that 78.7% of people can’t figure out how to drive, you have to give yourself more time to actually get to downtown Minneapolis and enjoy the game. You can’t just go to the game after work, you have to take off work.

With that sense of rarity, I tend to pay attention to everything around me at Target Field. Not just because it’s beautiful and one of my favorite places in the world, but because when a group of thousands of people are in one place there is going to be some interesting folk.

The following is a notebook of thoughts from my trip to Target Field that have little to do with baseball, but with the people at the game and the stadium experience.

• Hrbek’s is awesome. They have a new item called the brat-dog which is a brought wrapped in a burger wrapped in a piece of bacon on a bun. There are probably more calories in it than I can run off in a week, but, lordy, was it scrumptious.
• The vendors were very talkative on Friday night. They’re probably happy that people are finally showing up to the games. First cool vendor was standing right next to my seat when Aaron Hicks nearly robbed a home run and instantly rips Gardy for playing shortstops in the outfield thinking that Santana was out there instead of Hicks. He then says, “(Carlos) Gomez would’ve had it.” And then he walked away. It was beautiful.
• One beer vendor was sitting at the bottom of his section talking to some potential customers. The young lady wanted a water, she’d had partaken a little too much in the alcohol already, but this vendor didn’t have water though. So he yells over two sections to another vendor asking if he has water. The other vendor said, “No. Sell them the Michelob; they’ll never know the difference.”
• This same young lady that wanted water had stopped right next to me on the other side of the aisle earlier in the night while her and her friend were struggling to climb the steps and one of them said, ‘It’s eight o’clock and we’re already drunk,” multiple times like it was an accomplishment.
• There was a successful proposal at Target Field on Friday. I’m all for love, but I really hope that I’m never in a relationship that is so tangled in baseball that I feel like the right move is to propose on the jumbotron. I’m thinking a beautiful park bench in the moonlight after a picnic, not in uncomfortable seats while you’re neighbor farts and spills beer on you.
• Section 114 is scout central. It is right behind home plate and perfect for seeing the whole ball diamond. There was at least a half-dozen around me at the game. A scout behind me had on a St. Louis Cardinals World Series ring and it was huge. Like, uncomfortably huge.
• A lady behind us didn’t know the difference between a foul ball and a home run. I am not kidding, I wish I was. But she questioned that Jason Kubel was in right and not Chris Parmelee. She is only person in the universe that doesn’t know the basic rules of baseball, but is aware of Chris Parmelee.
• Someone had on a Jon Rauch authentic game jersey, one of those really expensive ones that are about $200 or so. Why? What made you think that Rauch was a solid investment? The Twins didn’t even really think he was a solid investment.
• One of the fun facts on the screens for Brian Dozier is that he would be an accountant if he wasn’t playing baseball. It would be so sad if that beautiful hair was stuck dealing with numbers that had nothing to do with batting averages and dingers.
• Go to Target Field on one of the fireworks nights because you won’t be disappointed. They shut off most of the lights and the Minnie and Paul neon sign pops beautifully in the dark, the fireworks are shot off just to the right and it’s quite a good show. Three times the crowd thought it was over when it really wasn’t. False endings are the key to a good fireworks show.