BELOVED LEGEND
Fenway brags charm, history, quirks
To walk into Fenway Park is to step into history. The chiseled brick facades, the ornate, decorative stone work and the shorterthan-they-should-be brick archways that lead from one concourse to the next all harken back to a time that the modern fan — and the modern game — has forgotten.
Opened in 1912, Fenway has undergone more facelifts than a middle-aged actor in Hollywood. But history lives here.
And while Dodger Stadium is old, it doesn’t have that historic charm, unless you call hours of traffic and parking nightmares “charming.”
You might have beef with some of Fenway’s quirks: The seats themselves are smaller. Some of the angles are bizarre, and some of the chairs are behind beams — beams that in a modern stadium wouldn’t exist, but without which Fenway would crumble. Fair enough.
But on the field, the dimensions add to the charm. There’s the wall, of course. And the triangle — a cavernous void in center field. And the Pesky Pole — the foul pole in right field that sits just 302 feet from home plate (but the wall is such that hitting a 302-foot home run is really, really tough).
And few images scream “Boston!” louder than the sight of the Citgo sign beyond the left field Green Monster.
It’s legendary, like the park itself. Generations of fans in the Boston area (and we really mean all of New England since the states are tiny) have made the pilgrimage to Fenway to watch players from Babe Ruth to Ted Williams, to Johnny Pesky, to Jim Rice, to Mo Vaughn, to Big Papi, and now Mookie and company. And they’ve done it all in Boston, without transplanting from another coast.
Dwight Clark once said of the late, great Candlestick Park, “It was a dump, but it was our dump.”
Shudder to think what a member of the Fenway Faithful might do to you if you called the park a “dump” to their face, but the sentiment among them is the same. Fenway Park may not be the best ballpark on many levels.
But it’s ours.