Trees as High as a Batter's Eye

It’s a good thing this trip isn’t about baseball. If it were about baseball, It would have hit its peak on its first (second?) day. On this day, I found Target Field, which must be the best baseball stadium in use right now, and on this day, I saw a 10th inning walk-off home run. It was the first walk-off hit at Target Field, and for Jim Thome, it was the shot that tied Babe Ruth’s record for the most walk-off home runs in history. It’s a good thing this isn’t about baseball.

What it is about is meeting people in different places and learning more about them, and about their city, through baseball. Spending time in Minneapolis has shown me that this city is meticulously planned. It isn’t a large city, but its streets are spacious and it is easy to get around.

In New York, we tend to think that New York has the best of everything, in particular art, architecture, beauty, money, and fashion. The people of Minneapolis aren’t going to take fashion away from New York, but a visit to the Walker Museum of Modern Art has me thinking that all of the other categories are up for grabs. It is a more modern building than the MOMA, which commissions more artwork than anywhere else in the country, and displays it in a space that is as eye-catching as the Guggenheim, but which provides a perfect setting for installations to be appreciated. It has always seemed to me that the Guggenheim has overshadowed every piece of art I’ve ever seen there. The MOMA, even in its new space, hasn’t got enough space for everything it wants to hang. The Walker is more advanced, architecturally, technologically, and conceptually. It does not presume that its visitors know and love art when they enter. It ensures that they do by the time they leave.

I am surprised that I’m as impressed by Target Field. It manages to pay respect to the team’s past without trying to recapture it. It eschews the trend of building a stadium that looks and feels like a baseball stadium of the early 20th century. It is firmly planted in the 21st, and it indeed may come to define ballparks built in this era. Steel and glass live side by side with wood and concrete, and in center field, a row of evergreen trees incorporates the timber of Twins country. While ivy grows on the wall in Wrigley Field and Citizens’ Bank Park, These trees--which now stand ten feet taller than the center field fence, will eventually grow to be as high as the second-level concourse behind it.