Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States
We drove back to St. Paul from St. Elmo (about 10 miles) in time to return the rental car at 10:00 a.m. to avoid paying for another day. (As we found out last week, you just don't want to be driving in St. Paul! We didn't want to anyway, but our experience with the interminable stoplights hammered that home.) We stopped at the hotel first to drop our bags to store them for the day, but our room was ready and they checked us in, which was nice.
Our plan was to walk down to the Science Museum of Minnesota, which also houses the NPS visitor center for the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area for Minnesota. Time for one last stamp in the passport. Then we would tour the science museum and, after some lunch, we'd go tour the state capitol. This plan was all shot to h-bar when we discovered that a) the science museum wanted 20 bucks apiece for entry (didn't seem worth it to us) and b) the Capitol is not open on Saturday.
Time for Plan B: we decided to go ahead and walk up to the Capitol Building to at least view it from the outside, then get some lunch, and then maybe just head back to the hotel for a nap before the ballgame.
We were out late last night and would be out late again tonight, and we have to be up at 6 to get on the train to head home tomorrow.
Plan B worked out pretty well, actually. We spent a few hours walking around the city (see photos with comments), found a place for lunch based on the recommendation of a local, and then went back to the hotel for an hour or so before catching the tram to Target Field (everything is for sale) for the game between the Minnesota Twins and the Toronto Blue Jays, two teams languishing in the nether portions of their respective divisions.
We waited until last night to buy tickets, as, when we left home, rain was predicted for game day, but that forecast has changed and now we're looking at clear skies. We figured the crowd would be small--late season game between a last-place team (Twins--71 and 87) and a second-to-last place team (Blue Jays--88 and 70), but, surprisingly, the stadium was pretty heavily sold. I didn't really understand that, but figured maybe a lot of people have season tickets or something.
...
They mystery was explained when we got to the park and they were setting up a bunch of chairs on the field. Uh oh. What is this all about? Turned out that, in the spirit of the "visiting Minnesota Sports Heroes" theme that has arisen for this trip, the Twins were inducting Justin Morneau into their Hall of Fame. The ceremony started at about the time the game had been advertised to start. It was interesting for about 10 minutes somewhere in the middle, but it went on for more than an hour. Think graduation on steroids. Speeches and back-patting and congratulatory you name it, they offered it, and the whole thing got to be incredibly tiresome. If you're just dying to see some of it because you are a lifelong Justin Morneau fan (I, of course, had never heard of him), you can watch seven minutes of it at the link above. Go crazy.
One reason we had decided on a baseball game for our last night was that this one started at 6:10 (we thought!), and, since you can count on a baseball game going somewhere between 3 and 4 hours for 9 innings any more, we thought we'd be out by 9:30.
An hour back to the hotel, and it wouldn't be a very late night. Plan B foisted upon us.
The game itself was fairly uneventful. The Blue Jays won 6-1, four runs of which came on three homeruns. There were only 17 strikeouts, fewer than we've been seeing of late, and we did see some excellent defensive plays. Nothing spectacular happened, though, and nothing to make me think about what makes baseball a great game. We've kind of come to the conclusion that sabermetrics has ruined the game by fundamentally altering the entire approach. (Read or see Moneyball if you don't know what I'm talking about. Both are quite excellent.) The approach to the game with the intention of maximizing runs based on statistical data was stunning when only one team was using it, but now that the whole of both leagues have bought in, the effect is boring in the extreme. I truly cannot imagine why people shell out what must be at least a couple hundred dollars to bring a family to the game on a regular basis. Many people arrive late and leave early (because the five-year-old just cannot sit through a four-hour game, or even a three-hour one).
It's nutty, and I don't think it's fixable. No one is going to go back to playing interesting baseball when it's statistically likely to lose them more games.
This game ultimately went "only" three hours and eighteen minutes. We bailed in the middle of the 8th inning at 10:00, but things went a little downhill from there. We had trouble finding our way back to the metro station, and when we finally got there, the trains were not running to schedule--not even close. We just missed two which went right together, and then there wasn't another one for nearly 25 minutes. The 10:25 train finally arrived at something like 10:42. At the first or second stop, a whole pack of roving college students got on--not one wearing a mask, though masks are "mandatory." They rode along for half an hour, spreading who knows how many Covid germs in the process, and then they all got off in a pack in the area of the university. I never went around in a huge mob like that (keeping in mind that our 30 was just one car of the train), but maybe it has always been a Saturday night thing. They were all talking about various bars and what the cover charges were and why it wasn't worth it to pay that on top of what they spent on drinks, and on an on. Not my scene even when I was that age!
We finally got back to the hotel about 11:40 (the train having lost some time on the run), and settled in for our six hours before we had to get up and take ourselves off toward home.
2025-05-22