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BOSTON – The left field ladder no longer serves any useful function at
Fenway Park. The roof of the Green Monster has been renovated as
premium seating, so there's no need anymore to retrieve home run balls
from a net.
The ladder remains for the sake of strange bounces, so that Manny Ramirez
can contend with the same caroms that bedeviled Ted Williams, so that the
Boston Red Sox can remain true to their past even as they plot future
prosperity.
"You better treat it like an archeological excavation," Charles Steinberg said
yesterday during an impromptu filibuster on the warning track in right-center
field. "You better build this place with brushes and spoons. It is to be
revered. It is revered. Not just in Boston. Not just in New England. There
is no doubt that this is an international mecca."
With a seating capacity of 36,298, Fenway Park is still the smallest of major
league baseball's active stadia. Yet the place John Updike once described
as a "lyric little bandbox" will probably have to expand if it is to endure.
Steinberg, one of the numerous marketing mavens who left the Padres to
tinker with Fenway's traditions, has wisely wielded a scalpel instead of a
sledgehammer.
"We come here and we're the out-of-towners," Steinberg said, "so it would
be a bit rude and presumptuous for us to say, 'Let's tear down the shrine
and build a new one.' We don't even know if we could get it done.
"You'd be foolish to prematurely claim that this doesn't have long-term
viability. Wisdom says examine what you have before you reach such a rash
decision."
The place where the Padres will start their interleague schedule this evening
is a 92-year-old, land-locked ballpark with no prospect of a replacement.
Fenway Park opened the same week the Titanic sank, so efforts to
modernize it will inevitably conflict with efforts to preserve its historical
integrity. (You don't see the Old North Church adding a bingo parlor, do
you?) What the Red Sox are trying to do is to add enough seats to keep the
cash flowing without changing the essential character of the structure.
Thus 174 permanent seats were added atop the Green Monster last season,
with an additional 100 tickets sold as standing room. This year, there's new
table seating on the right field roof. The additions, thus far, have been
relatively unobtrusive and wildly popular. Green Monster seats priced at an
experimental $50 last season are now scaled as high as $110 for high-
demand games. Finding one at face value is like finding a five-leaf clover.
Actor Ben Affleck, offered front-row seats following the renovations, asked
if he might sit on the Green Monster instead.
"A cynic would say these are simply 37-foot high bleacher seats," Steinberg
said. "A romantic would say, 'My goodness, can you imagine, you're getting
to sit where Carlton Fisk hit the home run (to win Game 6 of the 1975
World Series)?' And the romantics won."
Fenway Park is painfully short on parking and spare on creature comforts.
The bulk of its seats are too narrow for this generation of girth. Its ancient
clubhouses look like closets compared to those in some of the more
modern ballparks. Yet romance remains healthy here, as reflected by some
of the graffiti on the left field scoreboard.
"Abby, will you marry me? Love, Chad," reads one notation.
A little lower, in the same ink but with a different scrawl, stands the single
word, "Yes."
The Green Monster, originally 25 feet tall and made of wood, was later
expanded to a wall 37x231, re-covered in tin and, later, with a hard plastic.
Its massive scale was dictated by the proximity of the railroad tracks
beyond Lansdowne Street and by the desire to keep pop flies in their place.
The Monster became green in 1947, when the Red Sox painted over
advertising for the sake of ambience.
The precise length of Fenway's left-field line remains in dispute – the Red
Sox now list it at 310 feet after years of fudging at 315 – but the effect of
the park's defining feature has been indisputably profound.
For generations, the Red Sox were notorious for slow-footed, right-handed
sluggers. They typically played for the big inning because they were either
incapable of playing any other way or leery of giving away outs in search of
single runs.
Hitters whose swings were not particularly Fenway-friendly were
sometimes seduced by its left-field siren. If it worked for Bucky Dent, they
reasoned, why not me? When the Red Sox succeeded at home, it was often
with an act that did not play well on the road.
The profile of the typical Boston player has changed in recent years, but the
ballpark's quirky image is indelible. The left-field scoreboard now carries
games from both leagues, but it continues to carry the initials of former
owners Tom and Jean Yawkey (in Morse code) and it continues to be
operated by hand. Access to the cramped chamber where the numbers are
changed is obtained through what Glenn Geffner calls "the coolest key in
Boston."
Geffner, another Padres expatriate, opens the door to reveal a room
perhaps 9 feet wide, with a concrete floor and a few metal folding chairs.
Ventilation is largely limited to the narrow slits in the scoreboard that allow
operators to follow the action. Against the back wall hang the 2-and 3-
pound metal plates that carry the numbers.
Many of the visitors who reach this room leave their names on the wall.
Fisk's autograph is here, along with that of Brian Cashman, general manager
of the rival New York Yankees (aka The Evil Empire). The graffiti is
consistently G-rated, Geffner explains, because being in the Fenway
scoreboard is "like being in church."
Well, except for the beer can on the floor.
Fenway Park. The roof of the Green Monster has been renovated as
premium seating, so there's no need anymore to retrieve home run balls
from a net.
The ladder remains for the sake of strange bounces, so that Manny Ramirez
can contend with the same caroms that bedeviled Ted Williams, so that the
Boston Red Sox can remain true to their past even as they plot future
prosperity.
"You better treat it like an archeological excavation," Charles Steinberg said
yesterday during an impromptu filibuster on the warning track in right-center
field. "You better build this place with brushes and spoons. It is to be
revered. It is revered. Not just in Boston. Not just in New England. There
is no doubt that this is an international mecca."
With a seating capacity of 36,298, Fenway Park is still the smallest of major
league baseball's active stadia. Yet the place John Updike once described
as a "lyric little bandbox" will probably have to expand if it is to endure.
Steinberg, one of the numerous marketing mavens who left the Padres to
tinker with Fenway's traditions, has wisely wielded a scalpel instead of a
sledgehammer.
"We come here and we're the out-of-towners," Steinberg said, "so it would
be a bit rude and presumptuous for us to say, 'Let's tear down the shrine
and build a new one.' We don't even know if we could get it done.
"You'd be foolish to prematurely claim that this doesn't have long-term
viability. Wisdom says examine what you have before you reach such a rash
decision."
The place where the Padres will start their interleague schedule this evening
is a 92-year-old, land-locked ballpark with no prospect of a replacement.
Fenway Park opened the same week the Titanic sank, so efforts to
modernize it will inevitably conflict with efforts to preserve its historical
integrity. (You don't see the Old North Church adding a bingo parlor, do
you?) What the Red Sox are trying to do is to add enough seats to keep the
cash flowing without changing the essential character of the structure.
Thus 174 permanent seats were added atop the Green Monster last season,
with an additional 100 tickets sold as standing room. This year, there's new
table seating on the right field roof. The additions, thus far, have been
relatively unobtrusive and wildly popular. Green Monster seats priced at an
experimental $50 last season are now scaled as high as $110 for high-
demand games. Finding one at face value is like finding a five-leaf clover.
Actor Ben Affleck, offered front-row seats following the renovations, asked
if he might sit on the Green Monster instead.
"A cynic would say these are simply 37-foot high bleacher seats," Steinberg
said. "A romantic would say, 'My goodness, can you imagine, you're getting
to sit where Carlton Fisk hit the home run (to win Game 6 of the 1975
World Series)?' And the romantics won."
Fenway Park is painfully short on parking and spare on creature comforts.
The bulk of its seats are too narrow for this generation of girth. Its ancient
clubhouses look like closets compared to those in some of the more
modern ballparks. Yet romance remains healthy here, as reflected by some
of the graffiti on the left field scoreboard.
"Abby, will you marry me? Love, Chad," reads one notation.
A little lower, in the same ink but with a different scrawl, stands the single
word, "Yes."
The Green Monster, originally 25 feet tall and made of wood, was later
expanded to a wall 37x231, re-covered in tin and, later, with a hard plastic.
Its massive scale was dictated by the proximity of the railroad tracks
beyond Lansdowne Street and by the desire to keep pop flies in their place.
The Monster became green in 1947, when the Red Sox painted over
advertising for the sake of ambience.
The precise length of Fenway's left-field line remains in dispute – the Red
Sox now list it at 310 feet after years of fudging at 315 – but the effect of
the park's defining feature has been indisputably profound.
For generations, the Red Sox were notorious for slow-footed, right-handed
sluggers. They typically played for the big inning because they were either
incapable of playing any other way or leery of giving away outs in search of
single runs.
Hitters whose swings were not particularly Fenway-friendly were
sometimes seduced by its left-field siren. If it worked for Bucky Dent, they
reasoned, why not me? When the Red Sox succeeded at home, it was often
with an act that did not play well on the road.
The profile of the typical Boston player has changed in recent years, but the
ballpark's quirky image is indelible. The left-field scoreboard now carries
games from both leagues, but it continues to carry the initials of former
owners Tom and Jean Yawkey (in Morse code) and it continues to be
operated by hand. Access to the cramped chamber where the numbers are
changed is obtained through what Glenn Geffner calls "the coolest key in
Boston."
Geffner, another Padres expatriate, opens the door to reveal a room
perhaps 9 feet wide, with a concrete floor and a few metal folding chairs.
Ventilation is largely limited to the narrow slits in the scoreboard that allow
operators to follow the action. Against the back wall hang the 2-and 3-
pound metal plates that carry the numbers.
Many of the visitors who reach this room leave their names on the wall.
Fisk's autograph is here, along with that of Brian Cashman, general manager
of the rival New York Yankees (aka The Evil Empire). The graffiti is
consistently G-rated, Geffner explains, because being in the Fenway
scoreboard is "like being in church."
Well, except for the beer can on the floor.
| As baseball traditions go, Boston has a wall up UNION-TRIBUNE, June 8, 2004 by Tim Sullivan |
