Spoiler alert: The home team won at the new Target Field.

I attended a Minnesota Twins baseball game in 1976. The game was held in Minneapolis at the old Metropolitan Stadium, and the Baltimore Orioles were in town as we wound down a family vacation. It was the only season that Reggie Jackson, my favorite player, was with the Orioles, and it was the only time I ever saw him play live and in person. He went 3 for 5 with two runs scored, but no homers.

Attendance was sparse, and behind us sat a leather-lunged Twins fan who cleverly heckled Earl Weaver, Baltimore's manager, without a single profane utterance for the entire nine innings. Players could hear him, and were laughing. It was an amazing performance, and I remember it better than the game itself.

For the past quarter century, the Twins have played in the notoriously kitschy Metrodome, originally the Hubert Horatio Humphrey Metrodome, later referred to as the Homerdome. Until this season, that is. Target Field has opened, and yesterday was the first home game there. The reviews are in, and they're glowing. First, from a Bay Area blog I regularly follow, which charts the future stadium prospects for the A's:

Envy Abounds: Target Field Opens

Today, for the 16th time in the last 22 seasons, at least one Major League Baseball team had a home opener in a brand new yard. This time it was the Twins turn. In the few shots I saw on TV I saw enough to see that the place is an absolute palace. (Here are a few local reviews, Finance and Commerce, Star Tribune, Pioneer Press)

And, Yahoo's story by Jeff Passan, who makes great play of the "Walleye on a stick." In Louisville, do we even get river cats at the Bats games?

Twins’ new playground a Minnesota state fair

The baseball stadium, at its finest, represents its patrons. And so like they did in the Bronx with outsized spending and in San Francisco with a festival on the water, the Minnesota Twins reached out to their fan base in the most honest fashion possible: by dipping foodstuffs in bubbling grease and/or impaling them with wooden instruments.