After (another) rain-wrecked game yesterday in Chicago, where I was supposed to see the White Sox host the Guardians with my friend Jim, I wasn’t super excited to see that THIS game was under a weather delay as well. But luckily, this one was only about 20 minutes before they got rolling.

I took a short flight from Midway to Minneapolis, where I caught the train; an easy $2 ticket gets you all the way to Target Field. As always, definite bonus points for how easy it is to get from plane to game.

A few stops before the field exit, I jumped off to meet up with my friend Scott; we had played a fun game of “ok where are you now?” texting for the past hour. “Actually, get out there if you’re just about to stop and walk forward!” Scott said. I jumped off the train and found him a block over.

Minneapolis is, in my opinion, a pretty underrated city. It feels vibrant and cool without being overwhelmingly gigantic. The downtown area was hoppin, and I was able to get a nice tour from Scott and his two friends, Joel and Dave. We settled at Mackenzie, a quaint little pub a few blocks from the ballpark, where we had a few beverages on the back deck and I searched the menu for vegan options. They’re…limited, we’ll say. Scott had already pointed out that their waitress was lovably gruff (“Just make sure you’re ready to order when she asks,” I was told), so I’m sure she was delightfully thrilled to hear me ask if I could get the Thai peanut flatbread without the cheese. And without the chicken. It still tasted pretty good, and I ordered what appeared to be a 750-count basket of tater tots as well.

The weather was beautiful and then became ominous pretty quickly; I explained to my new friends that I brought rain with me everywhere I went, even when the skies were clear five minutes before I got there.

This was the most expensive ticket I purchased on my trip; the cheapest tickets were $40 despite the Twins’ struggles, and there were a couple of reasons why. I’m still not quite sure which of these had the most impact, but a ridiculous number of major factors were colliding: for one, it was a lovely Friday evening in July. For another, the pitching matchup promised to be one of the best all season: Paul Skenes and the Pirates were visiting, and fellow all-star Joe Ryan was on the mound for the home team.

But perhaps the biggest reason for excitement was Nelly. That’s right: the one-and-only Nelly (not Furtado, just the regular one) was slated to perform a post-game concert behind shortstop. This was turning out to be quite a night!

I did a quick bit of research and realized that Nelly, who is here tonight, and Jack White, who was at Comerica Park with me (well…basically) on Wednesday, and ME are all currently exactly 50 years old. I mean, it’s not quite life-changing trivia or anything, but it’s at least marginally interesting. They say 50 is the new 30, and that’s especially true for us musical legends.

After some pleasant dinner-and-beer conversations with Scott and Joel and Dave, the four of us headed a few blocks to Target Field. It’s a cool walk in, highlighted by some great musical murals along the way. Even with 40,000 attendees, getting into the ballpark was a breeze. Target Field is a nice walk-around stadium although the concourses are tighter than you’d expect for a modern park. It’s built on the smallest footprint of any MLB stadium, about nine acres, which is cool in that everything feels cozy and all of the seats seem close to the action. But it does get a little claustrophobic underneath. The ‘footprint’ thing comes up a lot if you follow the nauseating exploits of Athletics ownership in trying to get their ballpark going in Las Vegas, where space is also limited. Note that Target Field was build for about half-a-billion dollars, whereas the Vegas park is projected to cost north of $2 billion. But I digress…

The park is beautiful and everyone is so happy to be in it. Not that people are ever really sad at a ballpark, but at Target Field they seemed especially ecstatic to be out at a game. The distinguishing feature on TV broadcasts is the light-colored limestone walls; they seem to stand out because they’re so much brighter than the walls anywhere else.

It’s a perfect local touch; I love this 2010 quote from Ron Vetter, whose Vetter Stone in Mankato provided the limestone for the stadium: “A ballpark is an emotional place for people. And this is a Minnesota-owned ballpark. There’s so much Minnesota in it.” Cool, right?

I never did make it to my actual seat for this one; we stood near the rightfield foul pole for the first couple of innings, and then made our way down to what we hoped were open seats along the third base line. They were…mostly open seats. We may have had to move once or twice.

Before the game I took my obligatory lap around the stadium. Because the game was in a delay, Paul Skenes was warming up in front of quite the crowd in centerfield, which was cool to see. Somewhere, his equally-or-probably-even-more-famous girlfriend Olivia Dunne was getting ready to enjoy the Minneapolis dusk as well. The Target Field media team did a fun “celebrity look-alike” game with fans at the ballpark, where the celebrity was revealed first and then a random person in the crowd who ostensibly looked like them: some guy who looked like Thanos, for instance. It culminated with a glamour shot of Livvy, followed by a live shot of her smiling in an infield reserved seat. Fun, for sure.

The game itself was a good one; all of the scoring in an eventual 2-1 Twins victory took place in the fourth inning, when Isaiah Kiner-Falefa knocked in a run for the Pirates with a two-out double, and then Trevor Larnich followed in the bottom half of the inning with a two-run homer to delight the home crowd. We had been randomly chatting earlier in the game about how the Twins always seem to have a guy named Trevor on their team, and this one came through. The other big play happened in the 7th, when Carlos Correa was taken out by a Tommy Pham slide and was force to leave the game (although it looks like this won’t be a long-term injury). But overall it was the pitching duel fans were hoping for, albeit a short one, with Ryan besting Skenes over five innings for each. If you get fantasy points for holds and happen to own a bunch of Twins relievers, this was a good one for you: FOUR different relievers ended up with holds before Jhoan Duran finished things off with two strikeouts in the ninth. He’s got a fun entrance show too!

And then…Nelly. We were only planning to catch a song or two because we had made plans earlier in the evening to meet up with a former student of mine, Liz, who is a reporter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and works with my friend Scott’s wife. So we watched them set up and watched Nelly himself come in from the bullpen on a golf cart like some early-80s closer, and then caught a few songs that we mostly didn’t recognize. It was awesome to see Liz, who was one of my newspaper editors from about 15 years ago (I think?) when I taught in Michigan, and has since gone on to be part of not one but TWO Pulitzer Prize winning reporting teams. She just had a baby a couple of months ago and it couldn’t have been nicer, catching up with her and reminiscing about her time as a cub reporter for The Murmur, our student newspaper back in good-ol Waterford, MI.

Around 12:30 we headed back to the car, and Scott dropped me off at my AirBnB across town. The next morning I ubered back to the airport to pick up a car for the six-hour-plus drive to Kansas City to check out the Royals. All-in-all, a fantastic trip to the Twin Cities!