A RECENT COLUMN on major league baseball’s plan to cut two teams before next spring brought an avalanche of letters. Half of them argued that the expansions of the last 32 years haven’t had an effect on the quality of pitching. Some of them praised Mark McGwire. These were largely unconvincing.
But the other half argued that the Twins–one of two top candidates, along with Montreal’s Expos, to get “contracted”–are the wrong team to lop. And they were very convincing indeed. I was wrong and the Twins fans are right.
If the Twins are in rickety financial shape, it’s not their fans’ fault. They were the first team to draw 3 million fans, and outdrew the Yankees every year from 1987 to 1994. Their biggest problem is their ballpark. My description of the hideous Metrodome as “state of the art” is true only in the sense that it’s modern and was expensive. In fact, the Dome harms Minnesota baseball in a way it would not harm baseball elsewhere. Astros fans were for years content to sit inside the Astrodome: July and August, after all, aren’t the most pleasant months of the year in Houston. In Minnesota, summer days are more precious than rubies–the last thing any Minnesotan would want to do in midsummer is sit indoors.
Transplanted Minnesotan Scott Rogers, of Virginia, wrote to say that “Minneapolis-St. Paul is no Montreal, whose Expos, on any given night, play before a smaller crowd than many Triple A clubs and some Double A squads.”
Boy, he got that right. Again, this article occasioned tons of correspondence from Minnesota, but nothing (rien!) from Montreal. So the Expos can go. But as for the Twins, I’m more inclined now to listen to D.J. Hogenson, who wrote me: “I know of hundreds of thousands of loyal Twins fans and they will be instrumental in keeping the Twins alive.”
He’s right. I stand corrected.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
