Skip to footer

Baseball fans: Take a quick tour of all 30 major league ballparks

Authors Josh Pahigian and Kevin O’Connell explore America's major league ballparks in "The Ultimate Baseball Road."

22. Minnesota Twins/Target Field

Eric Miller/Reuters

  • By Ross Atkin Staff Writer

Opened: 2010

Capacity: 39,504

What the authors say: “There are three decks of seats, but none extends too far back or rises too sharply to leave fans feeling removed from the game.”

Learned from the book:

• Realizing that there could be a chill in the air for early- and late-season games, the Twins have nearly 400 space heaters in the concourses and have a bonfire burning in the outfield party area on cold nights.

• In the authors’ view, Target Field probably offers the best standing-room passes in the majors, which allows those who choose these passes several options, including to stand right behind the big spenders who sit near home plate.

• Besides 40-foot baseball bat topiaries outside the park, the stadium plaza features a huge kinetic wind wall made with 51,000 reflective metallic panels

• Target Field has a center-field Gaming Zone where fans can try out a variety of baseball video games.

• A signature local delicacy offered at the park is Walleye on a Spike, a local fish on a stick first popularized at the Minnesota State Fair.

• Picking up on the popularity of fishing in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, fishing lures are among the ballpark giveaways the Twins occasionally offer.

• The Twins allow fans to bring their own food into the ballpark, so long as it conforms to certain rules, such as it be carried in soft-sided containers that fit under the seats.

22 of 30
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.