FENWAY FIXTURE REMAINS IN THE GAME DESPITE ALS
Security supervisor’s two loves – baseball, family – keep him going
It’s not just the holiday pomp and circumstance that makes Patriots’ Day so special to longtime Fenway Park security supervisor John Welch.
And it’s not just the traditional Red Sox game that kicks off at 11 o’clock in the morning, serving as a warmup act to the thousands of determined Boston Marathon runners soon to be last-gasping through Kenmore Square en route to that fabled right turn onto Hereford Street.
The pomp, the circumstance, the game, the marathon … that’s all part of it. But what truly sets Patriots’ Day apart for John Welch — and it’s something that touches him deep down, bringing him a sense of inner peace, focus, mission — is the annual prayer he says to himself while standing on the left field warning track at Fenway Park.
The ritual has been taking place for some 30 years. It is around 8 a.m. Each team has declined the opportunity to take batting practice, this because of the early start time, and the gates aren’t open yet. This is when John, having already punched in for the day, takes a leisurely stroll out to left field, to the warning track at the base of Green Monster.
He presses his back against the scoreboard and kicks a leg up behind him, and from this vantage point he gazes at the empty ballpark and silently applauds head groundskeeper Dave Mellor’s perfectly manicured Fenway lawn.
He takes a sip from his coffee — always a medium, always with cream, always purchased at the Dunkin’ Donuts outside Medford Square on his way to the park. And he says his prayer.
“I pray for my family, I pray for my friends,” he was saying the other day, sitting at the kitchen table of the family home in Medford as his wife, Mary, started up a conveyor belt of fruit, muffins, bagels, cream cheese and coffee. “But I also pray for guidance. That’s become even more important to me over the past couple of years.”
John Welch, who turned 60 on May 15, has been living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — ALS — since being diagnosed nearly two years ago. And predictably, cruelly, the living ain’t easy: His legs have become uncooperative, and his
speech is halting and slurred. The bathroom just off the kitchen has recently been retrofitted to make things a little easier for him. As Mary and John were sitting at the table, their daughter, Mollie, was in the living room assembling a new shower curtain.
He has retired from his day job as a Somerville middle school teacher, and the time will soon come when he’ll need to excuse himself from his duties at Fenway Park.
And yet here’s John, a man who has every right to be angry at the world and everything in it, using an anecdote about a prayer to talk about two great loves in his life: his family and baseball.
He can’t separate the two. He and Mary have three grown children — Johnny (34), Mollie (32) and Emily (23) — and all are connected with baseball in many wondrous ways. On the night the Red Sox clinched the 2013 World Series, John managed to spirit Mollie and Emily onto the field for the postgame celebration. As for Johnny, the old man got to see him play college ball at St. Anselm as well as seven seasons in the independent minor leagues.
As for Mary and baseball, John likes to tell a story from years ago, a story that takes place at a Fenway Park employees Christmas party.
He had been doing security at Fenway for only a few seasons — he started in 1978, this after responding to a bulletin board ad when he was a sophomore at the old Boston State College — and he and his wife were invited to the Sox’ annual Christmas celebration.
“You ever hear of people who say they want to, you know, have fun on an airplane in the sky?” John said. “Well, I thought we could have some fun in the Red Sox bullpen ...”
“Stop that! Stop that right now!” said Mary. “That never happened.”
ALS has done nothing to damage John’s sense of humor.
Growing up in Somerville, John attended Red Sox games with his grandfather, James “Buzza” Welch, who played some semipro ball. John’s favorite Sox player was Carl Yastrzemski, whom he admired for his grim determination and focus, but he was enough of a connoisseur of the game to admire such opposing players as Boog Powell, Frank Howard and Brooks Robinson.
On a different level, he admired Pie Traynor, the Hall of Fame third baseman who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1920s and ’30s. Pie grew up in Somerville. John keeps a framed photo of the Highlander baseball legend in his den, displayed under a photo of his grandfather, decked out in the uniform of a team sponsored by the local A&P supermarket.
But his greatest baseball moment is tinged with sadness: On that night in 2013 when the Red Sox toppled the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 6 to win the World Series, John wasn’t feeling right. It wasn’t pain, he said, but a nagging numbness in his leg.
He’ll never know if it was the aftereffects of a bike accident he’d suffered a year earlier — he was, after all, a nine-time competitor in the Pan-Mass Challenge — or if it was the first drumbeat of ALS.
What he does know is that the official diagnosis, delivered to him on Nov. 29, 2016, was devastating. As he put it, choosing words he might have spoken during his days at St. Mary’s High School in Cambridge in the 1970s, “It really blew my mind.”
He turned to family. He turned to prayer. And, yes, and he doesn’t care if it sounds a little corny, he turned to baseball.
“When I was a kid, I played for Stride Rite in the Somerville Little League,” he said. “One day we had a game at Glen Park that was almost cancelled because some older kids had started a bonfire in center field. Kids would do that in those days. The ump was going to call the game. But then someone yelled out, ‘Hey, let’s play.’ So even with a bonfire in the outfield, we played.”
The lesson here?
“You don’t quit,” he said. “You keep playing.”