AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Buried in the middle of the Mall of America's indoor theme park is a small bronze-and-stone tribute that stops baseball pilgrims in their tracks: the Metropolitan Stadium Home Plate. This floor marker pinpoints the exact spot where home plate sat at the Met, the ballpark that was home to the Minnesota Twins from 1961 to 1981, long before the nation's largest shopping-and-entertainment complex was ever built on the land.↗↗↗
For Minnesotans who grew up watching the Twins and the Vikings at the Met, the plaque is a tangible piece of lost baseball history, and visitors can stand at the very spot where Harmon Killebrew launched the longest home run ever hit in the stadium. It is a free, low-key hidden gem—more about nostalgia and storytelling than grand monuments—but for sports fans and curious shoppers it is one of the most quietly meaningful sights in the Mall.↗↗
A Ballpark Beneath the Mall
Metropolitan Stadium opened on April 24, 1956 as the home of the minor-league Minneapolis Millers, but it was built with a bigger ambition: to lure major-league baseball to the Twin Cities suburbs. That gamble paid off when Calvin Griffith moved the Washington Senators to the Met for the 1961 season, and the franchise became the Minnesota Twins. Over the next two decades the ballpark hosted thrilling teams built around sluggers like Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew and Tony Oliva, reaching the 1965 World Series and winning division titles in 1969 and 1970. By the early 1980s the concrete was literally crumbling, and the Twins played their final game there on September 30, 1981 before moving to the Metrodome.
