Added back in , there have been few changes made to the scoreboard. Everything is updated by attendants behind the wall, and National League scores posted on the scoreboard are actually updated by those same attendants outside the wall between innings. Many of the greatest players in MLB history have gone behind the wall to add their signatures inside, becoming a permanent part of its history. When the construction of Fenway Park commenced back in , they had little space within the Fenway-Kenmore Square area of Boston in which to build.
Because of its condensed area, the foul play region of the park is one of the smallest of any park in the majors. As such, fans purchasing front-row seats throughout the park are up close to all of the action. Its tight surroundings add to the lure—and while the modern amenities in other parks are big-time draws for today's generation of fans, nowhere else in baseball can a fan feel like they're on top of the action quite like at Fenway Park.
For one, the steel beams that abound along the right field section and other areas create obstructed-view seats. In addition, many seats along the right field line actually face the outfield rather than home plate, requiring fans to crane their necks to take in all of the action. While the park itself has obstructed-view seats and other flaws, fans still flocked through the turnstiles to take in the experience.
As a youngster growing up in the Boston area, I attended close to games at Fenway over the years, including the seventh game of the World Series between the Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds. Its rich history, quaint surroundings, quirky dimensions and unique landmarks are what makes Fenway Park one of the best stadiums in the majors.
Doug Mead is a featured columnist with Bleacher Report. Enjoy our content? Join our newsletter to get the latest in sports news delivered straight to your inbox! Houses, jobs, clothes, and hairstyles come and go. Fenway is always there. Sure, there have been significant tweaks and upgrades at the old ballyard.
When you flip on your TV and see all the green, the Wall, the Citgo sign, and Jeremy Kapstein and Dennis Drinkwater in their standard seats behind the plate. It still has the ladder on the Wall, Canvas Alley, and the bathroom in the bullpen in right. It has the goofy railing that juts out toward left field from the third-base dugout, turning certain doubles into bad-luck singles as the ball down the line bounces back toward the shortstop.
It has the black hole in the left-field corner where visiting outfielders disappear and never return. I probably went to two dozen games that year, plus a few more after the ushers abandoned the gates to the bleachers after the third or fourth inning and I walked in with the panhandlers and drunks who collected empty beer cups for a teaspoon of swill. I was poor, but I had baseball. Walking up that runway into the bleachers that summer changed my life.
It was my grad school. I fell in love. I saw, watched, learned, got curious, did research, read, stopped dreaming about writing and started doing it. I went to work at the Boston Public Library and discovered that Red Sox history lives in thousands of reels of Boston newspapers on microfilm.
My universe stretched from Kenmore Square to Copley, with Mass. Avenue as the axis. The City paid me to go to library school. I got lucky, stumbled on a story, sold it to Boston Magazine and have never been without an assignment since, doing the work I still do today, writing.
None of this would have happened without Fenway Park, none of it at all. And that is what makes a ballpark different, and what makes Fenway Park different, because it is a place that can change your life, and sometimes does. Almost a hundred years ago it changed the lives of almost every baseball fan in Boston, and each season, as another generation of fans discovers it, Fenway Park changes their lives as well.
Fenway Park was a far different place in , when I attended my first game, than it is today, or when it first opened in , but that is part of the reason it is here today.
If a contemporary Red Sox fan were somehow sent back in time and deposited in Fenway Park on April 9, , it is unlikely all but the most knowledgeable would recognize Fenway Park at all.
For while Fenway Park still occupies the same basic footprint today as it did in , virtually every other notable structure and feature of the ballpark has either been removed, recast, renovated or otherwise changed. More than any other major league ballpark, since opening in Fenway Park has changed and evolved and adapted to changing expectations and needs.
It is not the same shape, nor does it retain the same outfield dimensions as it did when it first opened. Neither the pitcher's mound, the bases nor home plate are in the same precise place as they were on Opening Day Today Fenway Park is nearly as changed from the original as Yankee Stadium was changed after the renovation of that classic facility.
In fact, one can make the case that the other concrete and steel parks built within a few years of Fenway Park -- Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, Tiger Stadium, Redlands Field, Shibe Park, Forbes Field in Pittsburgh -- no longer exist precisely because they did not change and or evolve either quickly enough or dramatically enough.
Fenway has survived not because it has been preserved in the original, but because it has not been preserved, because until quite recently it was never treated as special enough to preserve, and because the ballclub has rarely hesitated to make practical changes to extend its useful life.
Even in recent years, which have seen the greatest changes to the park since the renovation, in a formal sense few of these visible changes have been about preservation. Virtually every change has been about adaptation, providing modern day amenities and maximizing profit within the original footprint of the park or else expanding that footprint to include property and provide services that have not previously been part of the original plant. Fenway has never been static, locked away in some cabinet like an antique.
Even its most distinctive features, like the left-field wall, have changed so much over the past years as to be virtually unrecognizable from the original.
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