Take me out to the ball game

The other day, in passing, I mentioned Fenway Park – the home to the Boston Red Sox baseball team. Since I plan on going back to Boston at some point in the future, I think it's probably wise not to leave it at that. My entire American family are baseball-mad (or, at least, Red Sox mad) so it's more than my life's worth not to post a couple more pictures.

Fenway, built in 1912, is the oldest stadium in the US used for Major League Baseball. In fact, it's the oldest venue of any kind used for professional sports in the US. I took a guided tour with a guide who looked as if he might have been at the ground since it opened, but who was as sharp as a nail and had a wicked sense of humour. Many of his jokes, it must be said, were directed at the New York Yankees, the arch-rivals of the Red Sox. We got stories and facts thrown out at lightning speed, most of which, I'm afraid I've forgotten, but here are a few:

In 1928, a fire behind the third base (on the right of the picture above, next to the little truck that's parked just off the tarpaulin) destroyed a whole section of seating, but there wasn't enough money in the club to do anything about it beyond clearing away the debris. The seating wasn't replaced until 1934, one year after a chap from South Carolina called Tom Yawkey had bought the stadium and club. Yawkey was also responsible for building one of the most distinctive features of Fenway Park, the Green Monster:

When it was installed, the idea of using lights to indicate the number of balls and strikes was leading-edge, but things have stalled a little since then and the score for the game is still manually updated from inside the scoreboard. The far away section showing the current state of play in games in the National League has to be updated from the park and every so often, between innings, a little door will open and a man with a stepladder and a pile of numbers will run along and update things.

In 2003, seating was installed atop the green monster:

This is amongst the most popular seating in the park. Fans can enter a lottery every season for the right to buy up to 4 seats at $168 each!

If you look very closely at this picture, about 15 rows in front of the Ford sign, following the lines of seats down from the “d” you can just make out a red seat. In 1946, Ted Williams, one of the greatest hitters in the history of the game, hit a home run which landed on the head of the occupant of this seat. Appropriately enough, the man in question was a Yankees fan who had fallen asleep and so didn't notice the ball coming towards him. Ironically, he didn't even get to keep the ball as it bounced off his head and someone else grabbed it. Balls that end up in the seating are never retrieved and fans take them home as souvenirs. Sometimes the struggle over who grabbed it first can get quite lively. Anyway, Williams home run was, at 502' (153m), the longest ever scored inside Fenway. For the non-cognoscenti, a home run is a ball which is hit between the lines leading to first and third base and which doesn't touch the ground before clearing the field.

The longest home run ever was, according to our guide, hit by Babe Ruth, another legend of the game. In 1915, Ruth hit the ball right over the Green Monster where it landed on a train. It was found the following day in Grand Central Station, New York!

The press boxes are behind home plate:

Below the press areas and stretching out to the left and right is a row of private boxes. To rent one to watch a game could cost up to $11,000 (for a single game). That said, you'd get some seriously good treatment while you were there and a great view of the game, but that's pretty serious money whichever way you look at it. Another option, cheaper in a way, is to rent it for the season – say 80 games. That option only costs $250,000 per season, but the minimum rental is 10 seasons. However, if you have $2½ million burning a hole in your pocket, you can have a lot of fun over the next ten years and I can guarantee that you'll have lots of very good friends...

In 1919, the then owner, Harry Frazee, sold Babe Ruth and 15 other players to fund a production of “No, no, Nanette” on Broadway. Ruth was sold to the Yankees – simply rubbing salt into the wound from the point of view of the Red Sox fans. Well, the show was a failure and the Sox didn't win a single World Series from then until 2004, giving rise to the Legend of the Bambino. The fact that the Sox beat the Yankees for the American League title only made the victory all the sweeter.

Fenway Park has sold out every home game since 2003 - a record in Major League Baseball. Now, the games may be sold out, but there are always some tickets available – some are kept for sale on game day and others are returned by fans unable to use them. Which is how two of my cousins and I ended up watching the Sox playing the Los Angeles Angels.

One of the first things we noticed was the great view of downtown:

But we weren't there to look at the cityscape. The ground comes alive when it's full of people:

And the atmosphere changes as night falls

The title of the post comes from a song which is traditionally sung during the seventh innings stretch. A game of baseball normally lasts for 9 innings (an innings being a cycle where each team has a turn at fielding and batting). Between the two halves of the seventh innings, there is a pause to allow the fans to stand up and stretch their legs. The words of the song are shown on the message board.

A specifically Fenway tradition is that during the eighth innings, they sing Sweet Caroline.
Well, the evening ended well from a Boston point of view:

Here you can see the final 0 being put in place for Los Angeles. Since they had already won, the Red Sox didn't need to play any further, so this is the final score – 6-0 to the home team Yay! Go Red Sox!

If you look closely you can see that the Sox scored 4 runs in the fourth innings. All of those came from a single ball – when a batter hits a home run, not only does he get to run round the bases unopposed, thereby scoring a run, but any of his team-mates who are on a base already also get to complete their run. In this case, we had players on all three bases (the bases were “loaded”) and so we scored 4 runs. This is called a grand slam and it's quite rare – I was lucky to witness it. There was much rejoicing in the ground when it happened.

Well, all good things must come to an end, and now it was time to wend my weary way home. Of course, several tens of thousands of other fans were also wending their ways home. And many of those ways seemed to involved Kenmore Square T station (the “T” is the Boston metro system). It was, shall we say, a little crowded, but everyone was in a good mood and the police made sure everything was safe – holding people above ground until the platforms were clear – and the MBTA, who run the T, made sure there were plenty of trains.