MLB | Home Plate on the Floor of a Shopping Mall (Metropolitan Stadium site, Bloomington)

There is a home plate on the floor of an indoor amusement park in Minnesota, in the northwest corner, near the entrance to a rollercoaster themed after a cartoon sponge. It is a brass plate in the correct pentagonal shape and it is in the correct place. Metropolitan Stadium stood here, and the Mall of America was built on the footprint.

Bloomington put the ballpark up in 1956, on farmland roughly equidistant between Minneapolis and St Paul, for the minor-league Millers and in open hope of attracting a major-league club. The Twin Cities thought they had the New York Giants at one point. The Giants went to San Francisco instead, and the ballpark that eventually arrived in 1961 came from Washington: Calvin Griffith moved the Senators here, on the condition the stadium be expanded past 40,000 seats, and renamed them the Minnesota Twins for the region rather than either city.

They played their first game here on 21 April 1961 against a brand-new expansion club in Washington also called the Senators, which is a strange sentence and was a strange afternoon.

The Met was never finished so much as repeatedly added to: bleachers along third base, temporary stands in left, the lower decks stretched down the right-field line, a left-field pavilion in 1965. By the late 1970s it was rusting, and in 1981 broken railings on the third deck over the left-field bleachers were a genuine hazard. The Twins and the Vikings both left for the Metrodome after 1981, which made this the first modern American stadium to be abandoned rather than outgrown. The last game was on 30 September 1981. Demolition started on 28 January 1985 and the site sat empty for years.

The mall opened in 1992. Two things from the ballpark survive inside it. The home plate marker is one. The other is a single red stadium seat bolted high on a wall across the amusement park, at the exact spot and elevation where a Harmon Killebrew home run landed in the left-field upper deck on 3 June 1967, off Lew Burdette of the California Angels. It is usually given as 520 feet, sometimes 522. The road along the mall's south side, parallel to where the third-base line ran, is called Killebrew Drive.

Coordinates are the Mall of America, from OpenStreetMap. The markers are inside Nickelodeon Universe and free to walk up to.

Cover: Metropolitan Stadium during a Twins game against Baltimore, 1964, photographed by Martin J. Walsh, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the preserved home plate marker inside the Mall of America, photographed by Runner1928, 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.