It is sunny and 60 here in Western Montana! A perfect baseball day and I can’t wait to take my laptop out and set it up by the hammock as my daughter runs around and gets dirty playing with the dogs this evening.

I know I will the first time I fly half way across the country to see the Twins at home and have a game canceled due to rain. That will piss me off to no end.

I only lived in MN during the Dome years so rain delays and games canceled just seem wrong for the Twins.

Is one afternoon in sunny and 75 with a light breeze blowing out towards right and I will forget all about the dump called metrodome. Think +

Why do people fret so much about playing outdoors again? Seriously, the weather isn’t as bad as most people think. Sure, it can be ugly, but today is a beautiful day to play outside and it is the first week of the year. I’m just not sold that we needed a roof as much as most people thought. It would have been nice, but probably not worth the price tag.

Two games into this season and they would have played both outdoors.

The myth is that our climate is much different than the rest of the Midwest in April. I drove through the south for spring break and got stranded in Oklahoma by a snowstorm on March 28. Yesterday it was warmer in Minneapolis than it was in Austin TX. Two years ago, Cleveland was snowed in for the opening weekend. April weather across the Midwest is volatile. The only other team out of the 10 teams from Colorado to western Pennsylvania that has a dome is Milwaukee. Somehow they manage to play baseball in eight outdoor ballparks in April.

It’s a myth that baseball fans packed the stands at good ol’ Met Stadium on awful days. People are confusing that with Minnesota Vikings’ fans, who got likkered up in the parking lot, pulled on snowmobile suits and drank their way through games at the Met – but they only had to do that 7 games a season.

But that does not describe Twins’ fans. People from outstate didn’t buy tickets to early-season games. The Twins counted on the local audience for April. And if it was cold, people just did not go.

And season-ticket holders gave away tickets when it was too uncomfortable for those cake-eaters.

The reverse was that in June, July and August, people bought tickets by the bullpen golf-cart load through walkup, knowing it would be nice. Currently, the reverse is true: who wants to walk up and buy a ticket to a KC-Twins’ game on an 81-degree Sunday in late June?

It’s also true that one reason rainchecks are issued is so people who live a few hours away can exchange those tickets for another game. And, with better highways and better cars that we had in the ‘60s and 70s, in addition to better weather reports, it’s far less of a pain for someone in Alexandria, Minn., to either determine that a game is likely to be called before they even leave home, or if they do leave home they don’t have to travel on five different county roads and state highways through a a dozen small towns to reach Minneapolis.

So you get rained out. Go do something else in the Cities, because unlike the 60s and 70s, there is now far more to do in the Cities. You can even take the wife to the Mall of America.

For a state that talks about “the great outdoors” and ice fishing and jumping into Lake Minnetonka on Jan. 1 and holding pond hockey tourneys and “snowball open” golf tournaments using tennis balls on frozen lakes and putting tax dollars toward snowmobile trails, we sure do have a lot of wussies out there. Minnesota is really “the great indoors,” with a domed stadium, skyways, underground walkways in St. Cloud and Rochester and cafes that refuse to keep their patios open and use gas heaters after September 15. Most of the hockey players in the state never skated on an outdoor sheet of ice – mommy hauled them to the ice arena, where there is no windchill.

So resolve the identity crisis. If Minnesotans are so damned hearty, then they shouldn’t bitch about watching baseball in the same types of weather that people in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Colorado and San Francisco watch baseball in.

…“when I was a boy” might be factual, or it might be the way the old man recalls it yet not factual, but it is a fact that people didn’t appear at the Met to watch games in bad weather and it is a fact that there are plenty of cities where baseball isn’t played in the ideal weather of LA and it is a fact that Minnesotans – for all the tough-guy crap – like to have a choice when it comes to being in the elements, which is why they built things like an indoor stadium in 1981, indoor walkways and heated bus shelters.

Interestingly, that’s the difference among bloggers: some present facts, and some present recollections without facts, and others filter the facts through their own prism and then think what they present are the facts.

I present recollections as facts for me. Your millage may vary. But I’m not disagreeing with you. Just trying to amplify your facts with my recollections.