Mourning Roundup: April 13, 2010
APRIL 13, 2010 TAGS:
Monumental History
The Minnesota Twins opened their new outdoor ballpark, Target Field, yesterday with a 5-2 win over the Boston Red Sox. After almost three decades of playing at the indoor Metrodome, a marshmallow-like structure that was as charming as a parking garage, the Twins finally get to play beneath the Midwest sun.
Like many major league parks, Target Field historicizes its home team, exhibiting, like an interactactive museum, the teams past heroes and triumphs . After all, baseball peddles in nostalgia: father-son catches and flannel-uniformed heroics framed in the budding sunshine of spring or in the fading light of early autumn.
There’s a statue of Twins great Kirby Puckett, a turtle like hitter, who was instrumental in the Twins’ 1986 and 1991 World Series championships outside Gate 34. Puckett died in 2006 of a massive stroke, but he lives on in fans’ hearts as a personification of the Twins’ baseball ethos: do the small things right, play gritty, down-to-earth baseball, and you’ll compete with the richest and flashiest of clubs. The Twins have won five division titles over the last eight years, despite having the 24th highest payroll in the big leagues.
Puckett might have been the player that embodied the Twins spirit the strongest, but it was Carl Pohlad, the late owner of the team, who instilled it into the fabric of the organization, to the consternation of many.
The new stadium could be seen as one big memorial to Pohlad’s controversial leadership. He tried to sell the team twice, once to a North Carolina-based consortium that would have moved the team there and once to Major League Baseball as part of a proposed league contraction plan. Both of those plans fell through, but the very real prospect of the team leaving spurred Minnesota’s state legislature to secure public funding for the stadium.
It’s not as if Pohlad needed state money to build the $537 million dollar ballbark. But Pohlad, a shrewd businessman who rose from rural Iowan poverty to become the 107th richest person in the United States, put a premium on value.
Had the team been led by a looser-walleted owner, the Twins’ minor league system might not be the class of the Majors, and homegrown talent like Joe Mauer, the reigning American League most valuable player, might have been lured elsewhere.
For all the heartache that Pohlad’s premium on value caused the Twins faithful, his hard-nosed Depression-era business philosophy brought them two World Series Championships, a perennially contending team and long evenings and bright Sundays spent in the great Minnesotan outdoors.
Target Field might be named for the mega-retailer, but it should be named, like it or not, for Carl Pohlad.
Monumental Blunders
Last year, David Wallis wrote a piece for us about some of the country’s most heinous monuments. Whether it is New Mexico’s monument to Juan de Oñate, a mass murdering colonial or the Maryland Statehouse’s statue of Roger B. Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who penned the decision in the Dred Scott case, ruling that slaves were property, there are monuments and statues littered across the U.S. for people who’s contributions to society was questionable.
Foreign Policy magazine features a slideshow of some the world’s worst monuments.
The Minnesota Twins opened their new outdoor ballpark, Target Field, yesterday with a 5-2 win over the Boston Red Sox. After almost three decades of playing at the indoor Metrodome, a marshmallow-like structure that was as charming as a parking garage, the Twins finally get to play beneath the Midwest sun.
Like many major league parks, Target Field historicizes its home team, exhibiting, like an interactactive museum, the teams past heroes and triumphs . After all, baseball peddles in nostalgia: father-son catches and flannel-uniformed heroics framed in the budding sunshine of spring or in the fading light of early autumn. There’s a statue of Twins great Kirby Puckett, a turtle like hitter, who was instrumental in the Twins’ 1986 and 1991 World Series championships outside Gate 34. Puckett died in 2006 of a massive stroke, but he lives on in fans’ hearts as a personification of the Twins’ baseball ethos: do the small things right, play gritty, down-to-earth baseball, and you’ll compete with the richest and flashiest of clubs. The Twins have won five division titles over the last eight years, despite having the 24th highest payroll in the big leagues.
Puckett might have been the player that embodied the Twins spirit the strongest, but it was Carl Pohlad, the late owner of the team, who instilled it into the fabric of the organization, to the consternation of many.
The new stadium could be seen as one big memorial to Pohlad’s controversial leadership. He tried to sell the team twice, once to a North Carolina-based consortium that would have moved the team there and once to Major League Baseball as part of a proposed league contraction plan. Both of those plans fell through, but the very real prospect of the team leaving spurred Minnesota’s state legislature to secure public funding for the stadium.
It’s not as if Pohlad needed state money to build the $537 million dollar ballbark. But Pohlad, a shrewd businessman who rose from rural Iowan poverty to become the 107th richest person in the United States, put a premium on value. Had the team been led by a looser-walleted owner, the Twins’ minor league system might not be the class of the Majors, and homegrown talent like Joe Mauer, the reigning American League most valuable player, might have been lured elsewhere.
For all the heartache that Pohlad’s premium on value caused the Twins faithful, his hard-nosed Depression-era business philosophy brought them two World Series Championships, a perennially contending team and long evenings and bright Sundays spent in the great Minnesotan outdoors.
Target Field might be named for the mega-retailer, but it should be named, like it or not, for Carl Pohlad.
Monumental Blunders
Last year, David Wallis wrote a piece for us about some of the country’s most heinous monuments. Whether it is New Mexico’s monument to Juan de Oñate, a mass murdering colonial or the Maryland Statehouse’s statue of Roger B. Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who penned the decision in the Dred Scott case, ruling that slaves were property, there are monuments and statues littered across the U.S. for people who’s contributions to society was questionable.
Foreign Policy magazine features a slideshow of some the world’s worst monuments.
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