By Way Of Sorrows

Today Denton asks:

Other than the Trop, is there a park in all of baseball as miserable as the Metrodome?

My answer is, yes and no.

Yes, and the place was called Veteran's Stadium.

No, because the Vet has now gone the way of the Dodo and free baseball on TV and exists no more.

For the record I have been to the Metrodome, and it has the distinct honor of being the only ballpark I've ever visited that was spooky. As in the place gave me the creeps. Allow me to explain.

I flew out to Minneapolis in 1998 (or maybe 1999 - my recall is not 100% on this) to attend a wedding. While there we - my then girlfriend and I - decided to catch a game. Tickets were easy to come by, because the Twins were playing, er, not so well at the time. Now here's were we start to get to the creepy parts.

We caught a cab from the hotel to the Metrodome and the first thing I noticed was how empty the streets were. No crowds, hell, no people. This shook me - I was used to the crowds of vendors and fans the fill the streets around Fenway and Camden Yards on gameday - there was none of that. The streets around the Metrodome were flat out empty. Ever seen one of those post-apocalptic movies where the hero awakes from a coma or suspended animation or some shit like that, and everyone is dead, and the hero wanders the deserted streets looking for other humans? Yeah, I'm talking that empty. So empty that there was a brief moment when I wondered if the cab driver was lost and had driven us in an entirely different direction from the Metrodome.

So, we arrived at the ballpark and needless to say, the lack of crowds in the street was due to the entire lack of fans at the game. I forget how many were in attendance that night, but I'm sure they wouldn't have filled McCoy Stadium, let alone a major league ball park. And this is where we get to the part that creeped me out.

Since this was a ball game I had some beers, and where beers are had, trips to the restroom follow. So I left my seat, went up the stairs to the concourse, and stopped. I looked to my left. Nobody in sight. I looked to the right. Same thing. I felt like the Omega Man. Even better - or weirder or creepier - was the fact that as I tromped off to the men's room I noticed I could hear my footsteps. Think about it - you can expect to hear a whole lot of things during a visit to the ballpark, but your own footsteps in an empty concourse is generally not one of them.

The men's room was the ookiest part of this trip. For those of you have never been in one, let me tell you what a men's room in a major league ball park is normally like. They are big, crowded, dirty, sweaty, all for the reasons you might guess. What a men's room in a major league ball park is usually not is sparkly clean (because no one had used it) and completely empty. It was entirely too easy to stand at the sink washing your hands and imagine that not only were you the only one in the men's room, but you were also the only one in the giant building that surrounded the men's room.

Now, I won't say that as I washed my hands I used the mirror above the sink to watch the stalls behind me, in case a zombie nipped out of one to jump me from behind.

But I won't say I didn't either.