Target Field from the cheap seats

Young219 thought he was seeing his first major-league game outdoors on Friday. He's 20. And he doesn't remember when I took him to a game in Fort Myers when he was a toddler. I remember mostly because Tom Kelly's mother came over to make sure I had sunscreen for the little guy. I did. He had on a hat and sleeves too.

The youngster likes baseball, which is one of the best gifts he could give me. He likes baseball enough that he and a friend are making a 1,400-mile round trip this weekend to sit in the upper reaches of Target Field.

I promise this will not be a blow-by-blow account of our visit.

We entered Target Field on the Warehouse District side -- by the light-rail station and the left-field corner, which means we missed the street scene of the area around the plaza. That put us in the left-field corner. His job dropped and he moved toward the seats to get a look at the playing field, acting like someone half his age. That was as much fun to watch as anything else that happened on a pretty great day.

We wandered around the ballpark for about a half-hour, taking things in from various points between the foul poles. A lot of other people were doing the same and yet there was more than enough room to navigate. We stopped at the Section 219 seats to check out the view with more than just grass on the field, and it was very good.

Then, because we are men of the people, we went to our seats halfway up in the corner of the third deck.

Much if the excited cooing about Target Field has come so far from people who will rarely, if ever, experience the place from beyond the ballpark's sheltered comforts or on guided tours. (I had been fortunate enough to tour the park several times before it opened, and I give credit to my colleague Joe Christensen for breaking away a few times on one of the tours and checking things out from less-than-prime views.)

I needed to see the place from Section 327. That's the last fair-territory section in the third deck, next to (and higher than) the Budweiser Party deck. Tickets are $13-$18 depending on the game -- the cheapest in the park except for the area from Sections 301 to 307.

I was looking at the pitcher's mound instead of center field... I didn't feel 10 miles from the action... It wasn't a long hike to the second-level concessions... The legroom is good, mostly because of the elevation between rows of seats. (Hey, that's why movie theaters call it "Stadium Seating," right?)... The wind was blowing right at us but we weren't too cold... We could see the entire field except for the left-field corner where Pavano gave up his first home run.

It's just fine up there.

The only issues I saw were weird ones: The steps are small, especially for us big-footed guys, and the combination of not having much room to walk past people combined with the steep pitch between rows can make you feel like you're walking on a ledge to get to middle-of-the-row seats. I've got to think some middle-inning beers will be spilled.

We stayed away from most of the "designer" food. (The Murray's Steak Sandwich should wait for the regular season, I think.) The low-end bratwurst was fine and Young219 OK'd the pizza. The food disappointment was the skimpy serving of cheese curds barely covered the bottom of the paper tray it was served in. And several were hollow -- all coating, no cheese.

We stayed the whole game and liked the people who didn't know each other were sharing their observations of the park. We liked the showpiece scoreboard a lot and thought the MLB scoreboard on the right-field wall was a bit hard to follow. We weren't overpowered by the audio, which was good, but TC Bear must have some new singalong songs.

My stuck-in-the-last-millennium suggestions: Jungle Love by Morris Day and the Time, Brown-Eyed Girl by Van Morrison and a fire-throwing, smoke-spewing, face-painted, guitar-smashing TC Bear showing us everything he's got by doing this...

Then, it will be almost perfect.