Or, on second thought, maybe not. Today was the home opener for the Minnesota Twins and, thankfully, I was not there.
The problems started with the weather, cold and wet, as can be expected this time of year in Minnesota. The matchup featured the 2-4 Twins taking on the 2-4 Tampa Bay Rayss.
Then came the power outage. The Twins tried to make up for the debacle by extending $2 beer sales into the 2nd inning.
The game finally got underway, with the Twins winning 10-4 to improve to 3-4.
I was never going to attend today, but the pre-game pleas from Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey were a bit too much to take.
Some backstory: for over a quarter century, I’ve been a member of a season-ticket group for the Twins, sitting about 20 rows behind home plate, for 8 to 10 games a year.
That is, except for the Covid year of 2020, when no fans were allowed to attend the short season that was played.
I’m a big fan of the game of baseball, attending contests at all levels, including college and the minor leagues. I’ve been to most of the active major league parks, adding Atlanta last year, but losing the Athletics when they abandoned Oakland.
Thanks to efforts to speed up the game, I’ve attended, in person, more baseball games in the five years since Covid, then I did in the five years prior to Covid. My first post-Covid game was a minor-league (low A) contest on the 4th of July 2021. It rekindled my love of the game with a little boost of patriotic spirit in that sold-out, small-town stadium.
For the first-time ever, my Twins group did not renew. I’m not boycotting the team, but see no need to pay in advance.
Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Jim Souhan wrote this piece yesterday, under the headline,
Souhan: Let’s fix the relationship between Twins fans and the Pohlad family.
To which I responded on Twitter (X),
I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong.
For those who don’t know, the billionaire Pohlad family has owned the Twins for more than 40 years. Early in their tenure, the Twins won two World Series.
But in recent decades, the family has been notoriously unwilling to invest in free agents or payroll to keep the team competitive. Thus we have reached this sorry state.
As with most billionaire families, the Pohlads are major Democratic-party donors. So when I attend games, park in a city-owned ramp, watch the game in a county-owned stadium, I feel like just about every dollar is going to subsidize the political party that has destroyed my state.
The Souhan piece struck a nerve (and not just with me), generating a national headline, from Sports Illustrated:
Columnist Calls For Peace With Pohlads, But Twins Fans Aren’t Buying It.
A different Star Tribune sports columnist reported on today’s attendance,
ANNOUNCED Attendance: 36,042. I’m sure some folks with tickets stayed away. Others stayed under heaters at the park. But it didn’t look like 36K in the house
For the love of the game.
