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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
The baseball commissioner wants to shut down the Minnesota Twins, and fans fought back with a sold-out home opener. But will the city have to build a stadium it can't easily afford to keep the team?
Apr 15, 2002 | There have been beautiful spring days in the Twin Cities before, but it's safe to say none has ever been more beautiful than this one. The sun is soft but warming. The sky is postcard blue. Eyes are bright and birds are singing and women are pretty. Spring is in full bloom after a winter that was a mild one, but still a Minnesota one.
And on this Friday night, the Minnesota Twins are playing their home opener, a game that wouldn't have happened if baseball commissioner Bud Selig had gotten his way over the offseason and the Twins had ceased to exist. A court order in February forced the Twins to honor their lease and play out the 2002 season, foiling Selig's plans to eliminate two teams, which everyone knew, without his spelling it out, were the Twins and the Montreal Expos.
"What a great day for outdoor baseball!" booms sportscaster Dick Bremer to about 200 fans and lunchtimers who have gathered at a downtown plaza for a noontime rally to celebrate the opening of the season that wasn't supposed to be. The fans roar. They're roaring for their Twins, celebrating the very survival of the plucky club -- a surprise second-place finisher last year.
But it's more complicated than that. The Twins don't play outdoor baseball. They play inside, in the Metrodome, the usual description of which is that it has all the charm of an airplane hangar, a vicious slander on the atmosphere of airplane hangars. By talking about outdoor baseball, Bremer is making the point that wouldn't it be swell if the Twins had a brand-new stadium, which would ensure the team's future. That new stadium would be a "roof-ready" park, because there isn't enough money, anywhere, to build a park with a retractable roof.
So, whatever the weather: outdoor baseball -- even though the outdoors aren't always so friendly here in April. Twins legend Harmon Killebrew, the Bunyanesque slugger who was the franchise's star when it moved here from Washington in 1961 and who must be the nicest famous person ever to be nicknamed "The Killer," recalls that first Opening Day at Metropolitan Stadium: "They actually had to shovel snow off the field to play the game."
The roof-ready stadium hasn't been built yet because, as is usually the case with these things, nobody's figured out who's going to pay for it. The Twins' owner, an 86-year-old billionaire banker named Carl Pohlad, wanted the state to pay for it, something the governor, Jesse Ventura, said the state is not in the business of doing. Ventura's idea is that the Twins should build their own stadium. The state, after all, is facing a $440 million budget deficit.
Funny thing, though. Since Selig made the announcement about contraction, the term for eliminating teams, there's been a lot of progress on the ballpark front. There's still no deal, but people are talking. Ventura's softened a bit. Legislators have come up with a proposal that would have Pohlad putting $165 million, half of the park's price tag, into a fund, the interest from which would pay off the park debt over the years. Pohlad, who says he wants to sell the team, wants a lower up-front figure, so as not to discourage potential buyers with crippling debt. It's one of those things that will probably work itself out. As Paul Molitor, a St. Paul native and likely Hall of Famer who ended his career with the Twins and is now a part-time coach, puts it: "Maybe it just needs to come down to the 11th hour, like a lot of things in negotiations do, before we get a solution."
And if that happens Twins fans will cheer for outdoor baseball, in their new stadium, which probably wouldn't have been built without Bud Selig calling for the team's elimination. Maybe they'll wear, just for nostalgic fun, some of the homemade T-shirts they wore at the Metrodome for Friday's opener, shirts that said things like "Selig beats his wife" and "Contract THIS." And those were among the more delicate ones.
Bud Selig is this town's Simon Legree. He came to the commissioner's job from his position as owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, a team he turned over to his daughter upon taking his current job. Twins fans note that the Brewers, the closest team to the Twin Cities geographically, would benefit from the Twins' elimination, as they've benefited more than any other team from Selig's revenue sharing plan. They also note that Selig and Pohlad are pals. Pohlad made Selig a loan, in violation of baseball's conflict of interest rules, several years ago, and Selig's contraction proposal called for the other owners to pay Pohlad a cool $120 million to liquidate the team.
"I wonder if you invited Bud Selig to throw out the first pitch tonight," a fan asks Ron Gardenhire, the Twins' rookie manager, at the noontime rally.
"I'll throw it," the manager says with a sort of evil grin, "if he'll catch it."
Whether you believe Selig is a villain or a commissioner honestly doing what he feels is in the best interests of baseball, the Twins, a 1901 charter member of the American League, seem an odd choice for contraction. After 60 years as the Washington Senators, famously "first in war, first in peace, last in the American League," though they did manage to win a World Series in 1924 and the A.L. pennant in '25 and '33, they moved to the Twin Cities in 1961 and became the Twins, playing in Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, where the Mall of America now stands. They won the pennant in 1965 and Western Division titles in '69 and '70, and drew well, leading the league in attendance twice in the first 10 years in Minnesota, and never finishing lower than fourth out of 10 or, starting in '69, 12 A.L. teams in attendance.
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