It's the many amenities that beckon now, not the game

We were Baby Boomers and our game was baseball. The anticipation was overwhelming from Oct. 26, 1960, when Calvin Griffith made the announcement he was moving his team from Washington to Minnesota, to April 11, 1961, when the Twins played their first American League game against the Yankees in New York.

Ten days later, the Twins played for the first time at Metropolitan Stadium against the expansion Washington Senators.

This was the ballpark that introduced us to major league baseball. It served that purpose fully, since we didn't need more than hot dogs, peanuts, frosted malts and, later, a cup of Grain Belt or Hamm's to make it through a game.

A scoreboard with the lineups by numbers, perpetual score updates on other games and a message board spitting out characters one at a time were all we required.

We didn't gather on the Bloomington prairie for concessions or to be dazzled by a scoreboard. We were satisfied with the basics, because we were there for the ballgame.

For a decade, the Twins averaged the most tickets sold -- 1.4 million per season -- among American League teams. The 1969 and 1970 teams were powerful and won the first two West Division titles, yet this was a period when the Vikings took over the sports market.

It stayed that way through the '70s, as the Vikings went to Super Bowls and the Twins went into decline, but the first strong hint there was a transformation taking place with sports audiences came in 1976. That was the summer when a soccer team called the Kicks arrived. The youthful generation that followed us Boomers came flocking to the Met, not because of a rabid interest in soccer but in the party in the parking lot.

In those few hectic summers, these raucous youth had showed us the future: that watching the game would be less the motive for attendance than being there because it was the place to be.

The degree to which America's sports fans have made this transformation was never more evident than last month. A crowd announced at 102,000 was alleged to have attended the NBA All-Star Game in Dallas, even though the only hint for most as to what was happening was on a giant scoreboard or a television screen.

A few years back, the Twins were starting the design process for Target Field. I made a habit of telling stadium guru Jerry Bell and team president Dave St. Peter that the walls of the new ballpark should carry the multicolored bricks that were a main feature at Met Stadium. This suggestion invariably drew a laugh from Bell or St. Peter, even though it wasn't meant to be funny. I envisioned those bricks as a dramatic method in which to connect those 21 summers the Twins spent playing at Met Stadium with the return to the outdoors in their 50th season.

Extra naïve on my part, wouldn't you say? There is little connection between Met Stadium and Target Field other than the absence of a Teflon sky. There is no connection between the audience to be served -- the Met generation that was there to see if Harmon Killebrew could hang tough against Jim Bunning, and the Target Field generation there to hang with their buddies.

There was nothing to be taken from the Met, other than sun and grass and rain delays, for today's fans that demand food choices, plazas, wide corridors and party locations, enormous scoreboards for replays and other entertainment.