August 3, 2005
Saints

“Play Ball!”  Last Thursday was a return to yesteryear in a tiny bandbox of a ball field named Midway Stadium just off Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota.  We were visiting my sister who insisted, “You have to go see the Saints!  They’re absolutely indescribable.” 

So we joined over 7,500 other ball fans in a park smaller than Stocker Stadium and watched a team no one outside the Twin Cities knows, the St. Paul Saints, play the Gary, Indiana Railcats.  The who?  Unknown teams, yes, but I haven’t had that much fun at a ballpark in twenty years.  

The Saints play in the Northern League.  The teams have no Major League affiliation.  It’s not official minor league but it is baseball.  The players are paid, reportedly between $1,500 and $4,000 a month, for a three-month season.  Most are in their mid-twenties and found wanting by big league organizations.  Rather than enter “real life”, they spend one or two summers playing against the likes of the Sioux Falls Canaries, the Joliet Jackhammers and the Winnipeg Goldeyes. 

Is it bad baseball?  Hardly.  Last week we watched the Saints lose 5-2 in a game featuring four double plays, two home runs, one error and pitchers throwing in the low 90’s.  Compared to a typical Rockies performance, it’s the Saints who looked major league. 

But baseball is only part of the three-ring circus known as a Saints game.  Starting with the pig.  When the home plate umpire needs a re-load on new baseballs, they’re brought to the plate by a trained porker with baseballs in bags strapped his back.  The pig works for a bottle of milk and won’t return to his pen until rewarded.  Only in St. Paul do you see a pig being fed a baby bottle of milk by an umpire.  Since each year requires a new pig, (ball players may retire but pigs become an entrée), each season begins with a pig naming contest.  This year’s winner, shades of Star Wars, was Ham Solo.  Piggies of the past have been monikered Hamlet, Squeal Diamond, Kevin Bacon, The Notorious P.I.G. and my personal favorite Hammy Davis Jr. 

Filling the park are signs proclaiming, “Fun is Good.”  Indeed fun is the operative word. The P.A. announcer works from atop the 3^rd base dugout. There’s a hot tub in left field and two barber chairs behind home plate where one can watch the ball game while getting the ears lowered.  A lucky? fan is Velcro-ed to the right field fence where $10,000 can be earned catching an in-game fly ball. Since the Saints can’t afford to give away ten grand with any regularity, the fan is attached to a wheel and whenever a fly ball heads toward right, a high school kid hired for the occasion, jumps up and spins the wheel making a successful catch pretty much impossible.  In ten years, one person captured the ten grand and even he hasn’t a clue how it happened. 

Owned in part by Mike Veeck, son of the famous Bill “Veeck, as in Wreck”, and movie funny guy Bill Murray, tickets to a Saints game are priced at a miserly four bucks for general admission with a buck off that for kids and geezers.  Saints cheap seats are down the left and right field lines where you can see what a player looks like, as opposed to major league “value sections” usually found in a neighboring county.  

But the big difference at a Saints game is family fun.  Between batting practice and the game, kids can pitch from the mound in the bullpen.  Just how cool is that?  Plus a hot dog is a buck and a half, beer three dollars and a soda sets Dad back a buck and we haven’t even covered the Minnesota gourmet treat, cheese curds.