The Twins were blessed with excellent weather and a fine ballclub in 2010, their first season playing back outside at Target Field. There has been no detailed weather analysis undertaken. I'm just offering this as a life-long Minnesotan:
It's a shame to see this weather and ballclub wasted on cardboard cutouts
Twins should have been playing home game No. 64 in front of over 30,000 on a glorious Tuesday night. Instead, the pandemic still rules.
August 19, 2020 at 6:25AM
The spring and summer weather that we've experienced in 2020 has been even better than a decade earlier.
This has been a stretch of weather for playing ballgames that has no chance to be equaled in my remaining lifetime … and maybe not in my grandkids'.
A touch hot and humid for a stretch earlier this month, maybe a rain delay or two, but the home schedule would have been played with few interruptions and on handfuls of glorious evenings.
There was another of those on Tuesday, when the Milwaukee Brewers were in town for the start of the three-game series. High 70s, no humidity, no clouds as sunset approached … and a team coming off an 101-win season that was back in first place again.
Too bad you couldn't have been there. Too bad you haven't been able to be there from April 2, the scheduled home opener, to Tuesday night, which should have been home game 64 vs. the White Sox.
Instead, it was Game 13 at Target Field, the opener of a three-game series with the Brewers. Originally, the Brewers were supposed to be here for two games in the middle of June, followed by a four-game series vs. the Yankees. That six-game homestand would have drawn 210,000, at a minimum.
The pandemic has changed the world – sports included – and Minneapolis also found itself as the epicenter for social upheaval with the death of civilian George Floyd under the knee of a cop on May 25.
The topic here is what this baseball season could have been for the Twins and their fans in Target Field. In that context, it's impossible to determine what would have occurred with the schedule after Floyd's death, and the protests and riots that followed.
The Twins were on a road trip to New York and Chicago from May 26 to May 31. They might have returned to start a three-game series with Tampa Bay on June 1, a week after Floyd's death. There's also a possibility that series would have been moved to St. Petersburg, Fla., with the Rays then coming here at the end of the August.
What we're getting at is there's considerable melancholy when you go through security, register, have your temperature taken, receive the individual pass required for each game, and head upstairs to a spaced out press box -- and realize that there should have been 32,000 spectators there to enjoy this gorgeous evening, enjoy this highly competitive ballclub and, on Tuesday, enjoy some grand pitching from Kenta Maeda.
Assuming this had been the 64th home game, the Twins would have have been over 2 million in attendance by now, and headed back to the high 2s.
Baseball weather like this, folks … us lifetime Minnesotans with a fondness for the Grand Old Game can state emphatically that it is miserable to have seen it wasted on a few hundred cardboard cutouts in the stands.
After an incredible 25-year career that saw him become MLB's all-time stolen bases leader and the greatest leadoff hitter ever, Rickey Henderson died Friday at age 65.
