Wrecking Ball Is All That Awaits Old Ballparks : Three Decades of Memories Remain as Metropolitan Stadium Is Latest to Fall

A ballpark died last week in Bloomington, Minn. Its name was Metropolitan Stadium. It was 29.

Twenty-nine is an awfully young age to bury any structure--especially one made of steel and concrete, built more for the bare-knuckles-and-beer crowd than the little surrey set. There were no atrium lobbies in “the Met,” no glass-enclosed elevators. Just a lot of cold, hard seats. The Met could have lived forever.

Yet by the late ‘70s, its epitaph was imminent. Minnesota’s baseball Twins and football Vikings vowed to leave Bloomington as soon as the doors were opened to the new domed monster in downtown Minneapolis. For the last three years, the place went unused and unnoticed. The weeds held court.

Still, when the wrecking company arrived last Wednesday and officially began the end, more than 300 people came to say goodby. Breakin’ up is hard to do, even in the weeds. Especially in the weeds.

Harmon Killebrew showed up. Yeah, the Killer: The white-haired Idahoan whose stance--slightly hunched, with the biceps bare on what seemed to be even the coldest afternoons--forever will personify the image of “slugger.” The stance, of course, and 546 career home runs.

The Killer is 48 now, happily entrenched both in the Hall of Fame and in the Twins’ radio-TV booth. To the specter of a wrecking ball swooping down upon his old summer home, he reacted the way any big-bicepsed, 48-year-old man whose nickname is Killer would react.

He cried.

What is it about a ballpark that can reduce a grown man to tears? How do these inanimate, concrete-and-steel structures manage to put such a tight and--let’s get down to it--irrational hold on our emotions?

The Met, after all, wasn’t Ebbets Field, whose improbable angles and circus of colors brought to baseball a fanfare that has not been known since. Nor was it the Polo Grounds, with its self-parodizing dimensions (478 feet to straight center, 258 down the right-field line). Nor Forbes Field, with its triple-decked grandstand and virtually open-air outfield.

Those and other “ancient” ballparks, mostly all long gone, were built as palaces. Only the hardest hearted cynic (and don’t kid yourself, the world is rife with them) could watch their destruction and swallow casually.

Not so the Met. Constructed originally for the minor-league Minneapolis Millers, it had the unsettling, half-baked look of a stadium that never quite germinated. In the beginning, there were 21,688 seats. In the end, 45,919. Nobody ever termed the Met a palace.

And yet . . .

And yet, it was. It had natural turf, real, stone-cold natural turf, and a legion of fans who themselves seemed stoned in the cold.

This is where Billy Martin finished out a stormy career as a player, and Rod Carew began an aloofly consistent one. This is where Zoilo Versalles, a 5-foot-10, 146-pound shortstop with a career batting average of .242, won the A.L.’s Most Valuable Player award.

And, too, during another season, this is where the Purple People Eaters lurked: Eller. Page. Larson. Marshall. Grant on the sideline, implacable and stoic in his gray sweatshirt.

The Vikings, staying cozily warm in their new building, have become the NFL’s weak sisters. When you could see their breath, though, when guys like Bill Brown used to bull (the word Ray Scott invariably used whenever Brown touched the ball) over right tackle, the team was as fierce as they came.

The Met: Gale Sayers scored four touchdowns in a single game there, an unremarkable (for Sayers) feat until one considers the circumstances. It was his first pro start.

Roger Staubach threw the most famous pass of his career there, a Hail Mary heave to Drew Pearson in the final seconds of the 1975 NFC playoffs. Nate Wright, the Minnesota defensive back, lost his footing. Another fantastic finish. The guy in the gray sweatshirt didn’t flinch.

So they’re tearing the Met down now, and you kind of suspect that Killebrew’s tears were duplicated by Zoilo Versalles and Bill Brown and the stoned-in-the-cold fans and, hell, maybe even Bud Grant. For the Met was, in its own way, a hallowed place that has been replaced by a hollow one.

This hallowed-to-hollow trend in sports is relentlessly pervasive. A few weeks ago, the Toronto Blue Jays revealed that they’d relocate into a $150 million domed stadium in 1988. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Indians, the Jays’ roommates in the A.L. East, are eyeing any of six stadium plans under consideration by a city-state committee. Another dome, another couple of hundred million dollars.

And in Chicago, where a “won” or a “lost” flag is hoisted atop the Wrigley Field center field scoreboard after every Cub game (to inform the passengers on the nearby elevated train), Tribune Co. officials are shuffling their fingers through the blueprints that will shut down the 70-year-old ballpark, and relocate the team in a sterile suburban dome.

There will be tears, to be sure, but not from everybody.

Says Richie Hebner, a utility infielder whose association with the club dates all the way back to 1984: “You put a new ballpark in a nice parking situation, and people will forget about the old place real quick.”

Hebner’s voice in the matter has a distinctively pertinent echo. It figures. In the offseason, he digs graves.