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Minnesota Twins
are an American professional baseball team based in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, and play in the Central Division of Major League
Baseball's American League. The team is named after the
Twin Cities area of Minneapolis and St. Paul. They played
in Metropolitan Stadium from 1961 to 1981, the Hubert H.
Humphrey Metrodome from 1982 to 2009, and they played their
first game at Target Field on April 12, 2010.[1]
The team was founded in Kansas City in 1894 as a Western
League team and would move to Washington, D.C. in 1901 as
one of the eight original teams of the American League,
named the Washington Senators or Washington Nationals. Although
the Washington team endured long bouts of mediocrity (immortalized
in the Broadway musical Damn Yankees), they had a period
of prolonged success in the 1920s and 1930s, led by Hall-of-Famers
Bucky Harris, Goose Goslin, Sam Rice, Joe Cronin, and above
all Walter Johnson. Manager Clark Griffith joined the team
in 1912 and became the team's owner in 1920. The franchise
remained under Griffith family ownership until 1984. |
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MINNESOTA TWINS DISCOUNT TICKETS
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Minnesota Twins Florida Spring
Training HAMMOND STADIUM
| Capacity
|
7,500 |
| Year
Opened |
1991 |
| Dimensions
|
330L,
404C, 330R |
| Surface
|
Grass |
| Local
Airport |
Ft.
Myers |
|
Tickets on Sale |
To be announced. |
| Address
|
14100
Six Miles Cypress Pkwy., Ft. Myers. |
|
Directions |
From
I-75, take the Daniels Road exit west 2 miles to
Six Miles Cypress Parkway; go south and the stadium
is on the right. |
|
 The
Lee County Sports Complex in Ft. Myers has been the spring-training
home of the Minnesota Twins since 1990. It's a facility
that's designed for the entire organization, with five full
fields and two half fields, as well as a stadium that also
serves as the home of the Ft. Myers Miracle (Class A; Florida
State League) and the Gulf Coast League Twins. It's an interesting
stadium: it features an outside facade that's supposed to
invoke the feeling of Churchill Downs. There are only two
levels of seats for spring training: box and reserved bleachers.
The Twins have trained in Florida
since their days as the Washington Senators: 1936 to the
present (except for the war years of 1943-45, when the team
trained in College Park, Maryland). Most of those years
were spent training in Orlando -- 1936 through 1990 -- while
their minor-league teams trained in Melbourne from 1964-1989.
The minor- and major-league camps were combined in Lee County
in 1990.
The Boston Red Sox also train in Fort
Myers, while the Tampa Bay Rays train in nearby Port Charlotte.
Spring Training History
The Minnesota Twins/Washington Senators
have held spring training in the following locations: Phoebus,
Va. (1901); Washington, D.C. (1902-1904); Hampton, Va. (1905);
Charlottesville, Va. (1906); Galveston, Texas (1907); Norfolk,
Va. (1910); Atlanta (1911); Charlottesville, Ga. (1912-1916);
Atlanta (1917); Augusta, Ga. (1918-1919); Tampa (1920-1929);
Biloxi, Miss. (1930-1935); Orlando (1936-1942); College
Park, Md. (1943-1945); Orlando (1946-1990); Ft. Myers (1991-present).
Ballpark History
The Lee County Sports Complex has
been the home of the Twins for its entire history.
Ft. Myers has been home to several
major-league clubs in its spring training history. Nearby
Terry Park Stadium is possibly the oldest surviving spring-training
stadium in Florida. It's just east of Ft. Myers and still
heavily used by amateur teams. Lee County Parks and Recreation
Director John Yarbrough wants to spruce up the 77-year-old
structure in a historically authentic fashion and put a
museum in the old ticket office illustrating the history
of spring training in Southwest Florida and its impact on
the area’s development and character. It hasn't been used
for major league spring training since 1987 (when the Kansas
City Royals trained in Ft. Myers); it was built originally
as the spring-training home of the Philadelphia Athletics,
owned and managed by Connie Mack.
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