On An Epic Win, a Goofy Dome & the Beauty of Baseball

The Minnesota Twins beat the Detroit Tigers 6-5 in the bottom of the 12th inning. “This is the most unbelievable game I’ve ever played or seen,” Twins shortstop Cabrera was quoted as saying. It was a game to be remembered. A one game tiebreaker playoff, only the ninth in baseball history. Underdog versus season dominator. Tie game. Extra Innings (the first American League tiebreaker to ever go extra innings). And all this under a soon to be abandoned stadium roof. But not abandoned yet.

I know there are plenty of people in this country who don’t like baseball. I always tell them “That’s because you think it’s about the game. That’s only half of it.”

Baseball is fifty percent about the game. The stats, the trades, the pitches, the hits, the outs, the fouls, and so on. But the other fifty percent of baseball is what makes it the American pastime.

It’s about nights like this with extra innings, underdogs, comebacks and 54,088 fans.

It’s about homer hankies and hotdogs with all the fixings.

It’s about peanut vendors hollering in the stands.

It’s about sitting next to a young couple with their six month old daughter who is at her first baseball game because “we wanted her first to be in the Metrodome”.

Or it’s about the young couple, he a Cubs fan and she a Sox fan, arguing through the game about what team their two year old will grow up to root for.

It’s about potlucking with four other families every night during a playoff week because your neighbor has a big screen TV.

It’s about the seventh inning stretch and singing with thousands of people you don’t know.

It’s about hating the Yankees (or the Twins, if you’re from Detroit tonight)
and rooting for the Red Sox in 2004 just to see if the curse of the Bambino could be broken.

It’s about seeing your tenth birthday acknowledged on the big screen over a stadium full of people.

It’s about convincing your little brother that there are hundreds of people under the stadium who all flip little light switches in synchronization to make the pictures on that same screen.

It’s about bitter rivalries. It’s about legends.

It’s about having a radio on at the front desk at work and running back to the cubicles to report the score. It’s about the people in the lobby crowded around to listen along.

It’s about that old sound of leather on leather, bat against ball, the rising pitch of the announcers voice as the hit goes into the stands.

And it’s about old stadiums that deserve a last hurrah before a new generation of baseball lovers crowds into the stands for a new season of hot dogs, cracker jacks, and extra innings.

Hang in there, Metrodome, it’s not over yet.

Kristina Bjorkman - GooseRadio