THING OF THE PAST

B OSTON — It’s too small. Half the seats face away from the action they’re supposed to face toward. Almost every seat is ridiculously micro-sized, as if they were designed for a smaller form of human being — which makes sense, because it was built in 1912, when on average most human beings were smaller than they are now.

Everything about Fenway Park should scream: Dump!

And yet being here for a couple of days only conjures a different kind of emotion, a different feeling. This is what we had. This is what we miss. Look, it probably comes off like the worst kind of spoiled-brat lament, because the two new baseball stadiums that will be celebrating their 10th anniversary next year are, in a word, beautiful.

That isn’t to say that they’re perfect. They are not. Citi Field still lacks much identity with Mets’ history. It still seems weird that the ushers are wearing Phillies colors.

Yankee Stadium comes across, fairly or no, as a rich man’s playpen, and the dimensions make a lot of what occurs there hard to take seriously sometimes (after all, it isn’t just the Yankees who hit cheap home runs there).

Still, they really are striking, both of them. There isn’t a bad seat in the house at Citi (and even those that have some obstruction, there are easily accessible video boards to fill in the blanks). Yankee Stadium has every bell and whistle you could ask for. And it is so clean you could eat your fried Oreos off the floor. They’re just … well, too new. And replaced ballparks that contained so much … stuff. Walking around old Yankee Stadium — even the refurbished version, which stood from 1976-2008 — meant walking in the same footsteps, on the same footprint, as most of the bold-faced baseball names of the 20th Century. Years ago, I was able to take my father to the Stadium early, before a game, and there was only one thing he wanted to do.

“This is where the Clipper worked,” he said, awe in his voice, as we stood in the great lawn of center field. It was the same voice he might have used in the Sistine Chapel as he observed the old working space of another Italian artist named Michelangelo. I didn’t think he’d ever leave there. He smiled for two weeks after.

Shea Stadium? Look, it was younger, it aged more rapidly, it had no institutional memory prior to 1964. But it was still the place where the Beatles played, twice, reinventing the limits of where rock-and-roll could be played. It was where the young Joe Namath’s spirals seemed oblivious to swirling wind. For a younger generation, it was where the Police had what to a man they call their greatest concert (on a bill alongside R.E.M. and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, August 1983). And, of course, it was where the Mets became the Mets, for all the remarkable highs and unseemly lows that represents.

That was why that autumn 10 years ago was so melancholy, more than 8 million folks visiting the two doomed stadiums in 2008. So many of them had been praying to be delivered from these old city dumps to new palaces, so it was only as they took their last tours around the places that they realized: Damn, we’re going to miss this.

And when you visit a place like Fenway Park, those old feelings are hard to shake. The Wall, which has been there since the beginning of time, and the patch of grass in front, patrolled for years by Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski. Center field? Tris Speaker roamed there. The pitcher’s mound? Yes, on that same patch of dirt an old hurler named Babe Ruth threw the last innings of his legendary pitching career before changing jobs and becoming the greatest hitter who ever lived.

Right there. Right here. You can see them still. This is the part we miss the most.