Trying to write about a baseball game I went to two years ago is, admittedly, a bit tricky. A lot has changed for me in two years. Since this game, I went through my senior year of college, graduated, wrote my thesis, and moved from Minnesota to South Carolina to Chicago. A lot of growth to be had--except, oddly enough, my hair, which I cut during my graduation ceremony. This game was the first baseball game I'm counting as me attending for the purposes of ballpark chasing. I attended plenty of Sox games at U.S. Cellular Field when I was a kid, but I wasn't old enough to fully appreciate the stadium or the game and focused more on spending time with my family (which is great! But not what I'm up to these days).
I've generally been a Minnesota sports fan since my senior year of high school, 2017. This is when I really started watching football as an individual fan instead of a way to spend Sundays with my family, who are Bears fans. Even in my adolescence, I realized that the Bears are a franchise that need a lot of work and wanted to take my fandom somewhere else. In this search, I found the Vikings and took a shine to the receiving duo of Stefon Diggs and Adam Thielen. From there, the Minneapolis Miracle happened and I was hooked on the Vikes. This, combined with going to school in semi-rural Minnesota, made it pretty easy to root for the Twins when I first started heavily watching baseball during the 2020 season. As a result, even though the Cardinals are my favorite team, the Twins hold a spot in my heart as well.
Unlike most of my ballpark visits to come, I went with a few of my housemates at the time leading to a party of six instead of it being an isolated visit (one of them even wrote an article for Carleton's admission blog about it--granted, it was focused more on Carleton than the game itself, but still cool to see). Like most of my ballpark visits to come, though, we scrounged for nosebleeds and wound up at the top row of the stadium. Attendance was decent at around 50% capacity and we had a somewhat decent view of the park and the city, so I didn't suggest moving down. My housemates at the time were also Carleton students, and as stewards of Minnesota, we decked ourselves out in Twins gear bought from Target a few hours prior to the game and headed out.
Target Field itself is a rather average ballpark, which is to say that the experience is great but there's nothing particularly exciting about it that makes it capital-T, capital-F, Target Field. It's rather well integrated into Minneapolis, with a nice plaza by left field and plenty to explore directly next to the stadium, which is always a plus. In going during a night game, we got to see the sunset hit the stadium and the general tans and browns that line the walls turned to a nice goldish-red color. From what I remember, parking here is no more painful than parking at most other ballparks and we were able to get in and out within a half-hour. We just headed back to our house afterwards, but I'm certain that we could have quickly gotten into the twin cities and explored a bit if we had wanted to. I never went down for concessions, but there were apparently free hot dogs and nachos towards the end of the game, which helped the thin college student wallet.
The game itself was quite memorable beyond it being the first baseball game I had attended in a near-decade, as it was a high-scoring affair that started out as a pitcher's game for the first five innings. Dylan Cease for the White Sox and Bailey Ober for the Twins pitched at a level between decent and well and the Twins were up 3-0 at the end of the fifth. After the fifth inning ended, however, Ober came out for Caleb Thielbar, who proceeded to give up a home run to José Abreu. The Twins got out of that inning up 3-1, and then immediately benefitted from Cease throwing a HBP and a wild pitch, followed up by a two-run triple. Cease was pulled out and replaced by Jace Fry, who immediately threw another wild pitch. The Sox left the inning three runs further down than they started, but almost mounted a comeback with a four-run seventh led by a 2-RBI Leury Garcia single and a Yoan Moncada triple. However, the Twins extended their lead to what would eventually be the final score, 8-5, and secured a win. There were three home runs this game, with two supplied by the Twins' Max Kepler setting off fireworks above the field.
I'm a pitching guy, so I enjoyed the first half of the game a bit more than the second, but it was fun explaining what was going on to my housemates and seeing how a home team celebrates home runs is always neat to see (unless they're the Cubs). Overall, quite a fun experience in a summer full of them!