If these walls could talk
At Fenway, another famous wall is the picture of success
Alex Cora had an idea before his rookie season as a big league manager: to hang a picture in his clubhouse office from each Red Sox victory. Team photographer Billie Weiss eyeballed the wall behind a couch and figured there would be room for about 100.
“We figured we’ll start with that and then go from there,” Weiss said this week, taking a break from shooting the team’s pre-World Series workout to explain how the project, like the Red Sox season, has expanded beyond anyone’s expectations. The original array, with 11 columns of nine 8-by-12-inch photos each, filled up in early September. More photos went up behind the TV as the Red Sox cruised to an AL East title and a franchise-record 108 victories. Next to Cora’s desk were seven more photos from the AL playoffs, including a matched pair of the team posing on the field after series-clinching victories in New York and Houston. They should’ve picked a bigger space.
Like maybe Fenway Park’s 37-foot-high Green Monster. “Not enough wall space for all these wins,” Weiss said. “That’s a good problem to have.” What started as a way for Cora to commemorate the biggest moments of the season has spilled out onto two side walls as the Red Sox just kept winning. A replica was added to the firstbase concourse after the season, updated with each playoff victory, and it has become a popular background for selfies. Each had 115 pictures before the Series opener, one for every regular and post-season win, from a shot of David Price pitching in the March 30 victory at Tampa Bay to Game 5 of the AL Championship Series in Houston.
“We do have room for four” more, Cora said on Monday. Make that three. Another was going up on Wednesday, the day after Boston’s 8-4 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 1 of the World Series.
“That wall, you start looking around, it’s like, ‘Wow, that game and that game and that game,”’ Cora said. “It’s powerful, to say the least.”
The first-year manager said that after the season he plans to have the prints auctioned off for The Jimmy Fund, the team’s longtime charity. A book might also be in the works.
“I have other ideas,” he said Monday. “But we’ll get to that hopefully when we win four games.”
Cora doesn’t pick the pictures - though several of the players thought he did. Instead, Weiss chooses one that seems to capture the big moment of the victory; he prints it, and clubhouse manager Tommy McLaughlin sticks it on the wall. “There’s been a couple of times where I’ve asked Alex, I gave him a couple of options, asked him what he thought,” Weiss said. “Usually it’s pretty clear who the best player was, or what the moment of the game was.” Often, that means a player being splashed with water during the postgame TV interview, or teammates bashing forearms. There are more than a few of batters circling the bases, arms raised, or in the middle of their home run swing. Pitchers are raring back to deliver, or celebrating a strikeout.