Grand opening for park, team and city

Statues of Twins Hall of Famers will greet visitors to the inaugural game at Target Field on Monday afternoon. The Hall of Famers themselves, as well as more recent Twins stars, will welcome fans at various gates.

Minnesotans will not only see the sun for the first time since 1981 while attending a Twins game in Minnesota, they will encounter homages to franchise history everywhere from Harmon Killebrew's statue on Target Plaza to the old Met Stadium flagpole on the right field plaza.

Target Field powerfully evokes Twins history, and the pomp and circumstance surrounding the opener might make those of a nostalgic bent weep.

Once the game begins, there should be nothing but dry eyes -- and weather permitting, dry seats -- in the house.

For while Target Field pays homage to Twins past, it stands as a reminder that the Twins as a ballclub never have been more relentlessly competitive than they've proven to be in the last decade, and that the Twins as a franchise have never been healthier or more promising than they are today.

Target Field, this horizontally challenged ballpark wedged into downtown Minneapolis like a BMW in a bike rack, ranks among the best of the new ballparks, in an era when most every city that wants one owns a beautiful new ballpark. Target Field lacks a body of water to add atmospherics and a sense of place for those sweeping cityscape camera shots you see on national broadcasts.

But in terms of architecture, integration into its city and the kind of artful touches that make fans bump into each other while rubbernecking through the concourses, Target Field possesses more than could be expected to fit into its ballerina-sized footprint.

The Met Stadium Twins featured a succession of wonderful characters and a handful of great ballplayers. We know now, though, that Met Stadium was a decrepit, mosquito-infested erector set on the Bloomington prairie, and that Calvin Griffith disdained funding a quality team.

The Metrodome was a bad idea poorly executed. If not for two shocking World Series titles fueled by the gumption and brilliance of the Puckett-Hrbek-Kelly-MacPhail cabal, near the end of an era when a low-budget team could reasonably be expected to hold victory parades, we would remember the Dome mostly for the two well-fed rats that lived behind home plate. Our favorite malapropster, Bob Casey, nicknamed them Sid and Charley.

Today's Twins are intelligently managed, as they were in the late '80s and early '90s. Today's Twins are also well-funded, well-marketed, deep in talent and intent on winning a World Series.

To emerge from the dankness of the Dome into the light of Target Field is to experience the awakening so many baseball fans across the country have enjoyed over the past 18 years. No, actually, our awakening is more dramatic, because of the dramatic difference between the Teflon sky and the real thing; the difference between battered plastic and pristine sod.

Before HOK built Camden Yards in Baltimore, baseball was played mostly in glorified minor league ballparks and football stadiums. Today, almost all major league games are played in new, architecturally striking ballparks, or in shrines such as Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, and the Game of the Week on NBC has been replaced by comprehensive television packages featuring the wonders of HD technology.

Cities are architecture. Rome doesn't attract millions of tourists because it once featured publicly funded chariot trails. Rome attracts because of the grandeur of its buildings.

With the Red Sox in town, the Twins fielding a dynamic roster, and the best players in Twins history surrounding the ballpark, there will be more baseball talent assembled in Minneapolis today than at any time since the 1985 All-Star Game.

Today, though, the star will be Target Field, this beautiful symbol of Minnesota baseball's health and promise.