Former ballpark · 1961 – 1981
Metropolitan Stadium
Bloomington, MN
- Opened
- 1961
- Closed
- 1981
- League
- AL
The lore
Metropolitan Stadium: The Clean View and the Awkward Layout
A cantilevered grandstand on Bloomington farmland gave every seat a view — and gave the Twins a home for twenty years.
The Cantilever
Thorshov & Cerny, Inc. designed Metropolitan Stadium with a cantilevered grandstand — no pillars, no obstructed sightlines, a revolutionary approach for a park built on farmland in Bloomington, Minnesota. It opened April 24, 1956, for the minor-league Minneapolis Millers; the majors arrived five years later. The cantilever gave every seat a clean view. The layout did not match the design: the left-field bleachers, built later for the NFL's Vikings, sat on a different scale than the rest of the park, and fans had no clear path between those bleachers and the main grandstand.
The Arrival
The Washington Senators moved to Minnesota for the 1961 season on the condition that the stadium be expanded to at least 40,000 seats — new bleachers along third base, temporary stands in left. On April 21, 1961, 24,606 fans watched the Twins lose 5-3 to the new Washington Senators in the first American League game at the Met.
1965
In 1965, the Met held its largest stage. The All-Star Game came on July 13, with six Twins on the American League roster — Earl Battey, Jim Grant, Jimmie Hall, Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, and Zoilo Versalles. That fall the Twins won the American League pennant and played their first World Series, losing Game 7 at home, 2-0, to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Three years earlier, on July 18, 1962, Killebrew and Bob Allison had become the first teammates ever to hit grand slams in the same inning during a 14-3 win over Cleveland.
Coming Down
By the final season, the third deck was a safety hazard — broken railings, the left-field bleachers cordoned off. The Twins played their last game at the Met on September 30, 1981, losing to Kansas City, and left for the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. After the Vikings' final game on December 20, fans stripped the building, taking seats and pieces of the goal posts. The Met then sat empty and decaying for three years before wrecking crews arrived in January 1985.
Reporting: MNopedia, BR Bullpen, Ballpark Digest. Park data: MLB StatsAPI and Retrosheet, via the Fever engine.
By the Desk · filed 2026-07-24 — the piece reads as of its filing; the park record around it is live · every fact in this piece comes from a filed, sourced research pack and clears an independent fact-check, and nothing is edited after filing.
Where it stood
Bloomington, MN. We don’t have exact coordinates for this park in the historical record — we’d rather say so than pin the wrong spot.
Sources
- Retrosheet · as of 2026-07-23
The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.