CHS Field, St. Paul (AAA #25 - We went to a carnival, and a baseball game broke out)
We went to a carnival last night, and a baseball game broke out.
Yes, that’s shamelessly borrowing Rodney Dangerfield’s classic one-liner, “I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.” But it’s also an apt description of an evening of St. Paul Saints baseball that was full of between-inning entertainment and snarky comments by the P.A. announcers, and ended with a walk-off win by the home team. And while there’s a lot of cynicism in the Dangerfield quote, I don’t mean to be cynical about the Saints. It was a good vibe all night.
Let’s start with the carnival aspect.
When we walked in, 30 minutes before gametime, the seats were almost empty, but the concourse was full. What was everyone doing on the concourse? It helped that it was two-for-one beer night, and the lines for beer were long (above), but I never heard anyone in the crowd who sounded drunk, unlike many a major and minor league game I’ve been to (we’ll find out how much that contributed to the atmosphere when we go back tonight). A lot of the kids were at the playground on the back side of the "batter’s eye" in center field (appropriately, sponsored by an eyeware company), which included a bounce castle, a slide or two, and a climbing wall – the back side of the batter’s eye. Besides the beer stand, the other concessions stands were doing well, too, including a coffee place that sold coffee caffeinated or decaffeinated, iced or hot, straight or latte.
The P.A. announcers were just starting their shtick when we got there. There are two of them, and they do the things that normal P.A. announcers do, like announcing who is coming to bat, who just came in to pitch, and that sort of thing. But it sometimes comes with a twist. While announcing the names of the umpires, “… and behind the plate is Joe McCarthy, who will be calling balls and strikes and prosecuting anyone he thinks might be a Communist.” I didn’t hear any crowd reaction (the crowd was already pretty loud), but a play on an infamous name from the 1950s gets a thumbs-up from me. Later on, at an inning break, one said, “Section 111. Section 111. If you’ll stand up and look at the bottom of your seat …” and paused while everyone in section 111 looked to see if there was a gift certificate on the bottom of their seat. “I dropped my glasses, so if you find them, and would bring them to our desk, I’d appreciate it.” Maybe it was a mean trick – he did apologize to section 111 – but it was hilarious.
There was some wacky promotion at every break between half-innings, at least until very late in the game. Most were sponsored by some local company, and there was some (sometimes strained) tie-in to the company’s product. A hotel sponsored the “pillow” (sack) race for kids. A tire company sponsored the race where adults ran while rolling a tire. The eyewear company sponsored a race where people wore costumes that were giant eyeballs of different colors. There was one where people threw toilet paper from atop the outfield wall and tried to hit a basket (that one ended with lots of toilet paper in right field, which the staff managed to get cleaned up within seconds). A golf course sponsored a contest where the contestant tried to chip a golf ball into a horizontal tube. A car dealer sponsored a race for kids with small, not-very-fast, electric cars that the kids couldn’t control very well (Kerry wanted to see that for adults, but with higher speeds, helmets and bumpers).
There were the “ushertainers” who went through the crowd doing various routines. Our favorite was the young woman who walked along and “high-fived” everyone who had their feet up on the railing (which was a little above her waist level) by tapping shoes with them. There was the guy who brought around the giant (six feet tall?) bat and asked everyone to touch it for luck when the home team came to bat in the ninth inning behind by a run.
But the crowd was also paying as much attention to the game as any crowd does on a Thursday night in July. And the crowd was big, 7757 (our previous high for this season for a minor league game was a little over 5000).
Although Toledo carries memories that we’ll cherish, if you ask me the best place in the country to go to a Triple-A game, I’m going to say St. Paul in an instant. This is everything that every minor league team aspires to.
What makes the St. Paul Saints special? I’m pretty sure it’s the legacy of Mike Veeck.
Mike Veeck
Going into the game, I associated the St. Paul Saints with Mike Veeck, and the Netflix documentary about him (and the team), The Saint of Second Chances. I’ve never seen it show up in any list of the best baseball movies, but it deserves to. Suffice it to say that on Rotten Tomatoes, the website that aggregates movie reviews. 100% of the professional reviews are positive, as are 97% of the audience reviews. If you’re an aficionado of Rotten Tomatoes, you know those are astonishingly good reviews.
It’s a true story with twists and turns that you wouldn’t believe if someone had written it as a script. The movie basically starts with the infamous “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Field in Chicago. In 1979, Mike dreamed up “Anti-Disco Night” as a promotion for the Chicago White Sox, which were owned by his father, legendary baseball promoter Bill Veeck. The promotion turned into a riot that had to be quelled by police, the White Sox forfeited a game, and Mike was out of organized baseball, and lived a troubled life, for the next decade before being hired to run a low-level minor league team and quickly working his way to running the St. Paul Saints, an “independent” minor league team. Being an independent team meant that they didn’t have a contract with any major league team, and most of their players never got a sniff at the majors. But the promotions they came up with came from a brain better than anyone marketing for the majors, and they also gave players chances (the first woman to pitch in a professional baseball game in decades) and, most importantly, second chances.
The most notable of the latter was Darryl Strawberry, a fantastically talented player who had been among the best in the National League for the New York Mets for nearly a decade, before the drug-heavy lifestyle he was leading eventually caught up with him. It looked like he was done with baseball (or the other way around, it was hard to tell), but he got a second chance with the Saints in 1996. He played phenomenally well for about a month, then was signed by the Yankees in time to help them win the World Series that year. Strawberry’s story (watch the movie or read a great interview with him) goes beyond hitting a baseball, and is just a piece of Mike Veeck’s legacy.
The promotions were also legendary, if sometimes in questionable taste, referencing everything from political elections to sex scandals. They had a game without umpires (there was a “judge” behind the pitcher’s mound who called balls and strikes, and a “jury” of 12 Little League players who voted on safe/out calls on the bases). And it goes on.
In 2021, the Saints joined organized baseball, becoming the Triple-A affiliate of the team across the river, the Twins, and in 2023, Veeck and his ownership group sold the team, so the Saints are now very much a part of the establishment that Mike and Bill Veeck tweaked and outcompeted through much of their lives. But the Saints have retired Strawberry’s number, and they still don’t feel like an establishment team.
The game (St. Paul Saints 4, Columbus Clippers 3)
The game was tight throughout. Each team scored twice in the 3rd inning, but no other runs scored until the 9th. The Clippers scored a run with two outs in the top of the 9th, aided by the Saints’ right-fielder booting a bouncing ball, allowing the runner to take second base, from where he scored on a single by the next batter.
The Saints’ first two hitters in the bottom of the ninth both got singles, and after both moved up on a ground-out, Gabriel Gonzalez came in as a pinch-hitter. With a count of three balls and no strikes, the umpire called a pitch ball four, but the Clippers challenged it on the Automatic Ball-Strike system and won, so instead of going to first with a walk, Gonzalez was still batting. It was a pyrrhic victory – on the next pitch, Gonzalez lined it between the right fielder and center fielder, it rolled to the wall, and the two runners both scored, giving St. Paul the “walk-off” win.
Random notes:
We saw a rare (though becoming more common) “platinum sombrero.” The phrase ultimately derives from the hockey phrase of a “hat trick,” when a player scores three goals in a game (and it was traditional to throw hats on the ice after the third). A player striking out three times in a game became known as a hat trick, as well, and four strikeouts in a game, being more illustrious than three, became known as a “golden sombrero.” But what do you call four? A “platinum sombrero,” apparently. There’s an entire Wikipedia article, complete with etymology and examples. Anyway, Columbus’ Khalil Watson got a platinum sombrero. He batted five times, and struck out swinging every time. Ouch! I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a game before.
The popularity of the Saints:
The Saints finished 15th out of the 30 AAA teams in attendance last season. In one sense, that sounds mediocre. In another sense, that’s really impressive, because their stadium is only about 10 miles away from that of the major league Minnesota Twins, across the river in Minneapolis. There are three other places where a major league team has its highest-level minor league affiliate in the same metropolitan area, and none of them are as close as the Twins and Saints. And of those four, Tacoma (Seattle) finished slightly ahead of the Saints, while Sugar Land (Houston) and Gwinnett County (Atlanta) were well behind. Given that the Twin Cities area is the smallest population of the four (albeit only slightly smaller than Seattle-Tacoma), that’s pretty good. Remember that the Saints started as an independent team. Veeck developed a following for the team that few minor league teams have. I saw two or three Saints caps in town between arriving at the airport at 2 and joining the crowd walking to the game. Sometimes, I don’t think I see that many caps at the game itself for a minor league team. And at the stadium, it was abundantly clear who the home team was.
What’s in a name:
The “St. Paul Saints” name didn’t start with this team. There were minor league baseball and hockey teams named that off and on from the 1880s through the middle of the 20th Century. I associate the name with a major league ice hockey team that competed for several years in the World Hockey Association. Although the team was actually named the “Minnesota Fighting Saints,” they played in St. Paul and, according to Wikipedia, used the “St. Paul Fighting Saints” name . The WHA competed with the NHL throughout the 1970s before “merging” with the NHL. Four WHA teams were accepted into the NHL, the Edmonton Oilers, the Winnipeg Jets (now Utah Mammoths), the Hartford Whalers (now Carolina Hurricane) and the Quebec Nordiques (now Colorado Avalanche).
Next up:
We’re going back to the Saints tonight. We don’t usually go to back-to-back games at minor league stadiums, but a) if we’re ever going to make an exception, this is the place to do it, and b) high school friend Randy Saliares, with whom I spent many a day playing or talking baseball as a middle-schooler and high-schooler, who lives in Minnesota, wasn’t available last night, but wanted to go to the game, rather than just going to dinner. I think I understand why.
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