Green monstrosities

The Sox and the future of Fenway Park

by Tom Scocca

Short of the pyramids at Giza, it's hard to imagine a building enjoying a more respected obsolescence than Fenway Park does. The Red Sox' home, along with Detroit's Tiger Stadium and the Chicago Cubs' Wrigley Field, is a survivor from the golden age of baseball architecture, before World War I. The question of true seniority among the three is vexed by their histories of fires and renovations; the matter of which one is best may be settled only with knives and bottles. But even as Red Sox management plots the ballpark's eventual demise, fans of baseball, and of baseball architecture, are nearly unanimous in saying that Fenway's dingy corner of Kenmore Square is supremely sacred ground.

The park is not as handsome as Wrigley, by any means, and it's much less imposing than Tiger Stadium. Its fame largely rests on the strangeness of its layout: almost no foul ground, a peculiarly shaped and angled outfield, and, above all else, the Green Monster, the 37-foot-high left-field wall with a built-in, hand-operated scoreboard. The Monster, though rebuilt three times and currently topped with a trio of giant plastic Coca-Cola bottles, is considered a sort of living historic personage; fans gossip about the untruth of its advertised distance from home plate (revised in 1995 from a baldfaced 315 feet to a little white 310) and wonder at the fact that it has brooded over more or less the same ballpark since 1912 -- give or take steel grandstands (1934), electric lights (1947), or the glassy carbuncle of the 600 Club luxury section (1986).

But while the park has stayed put over the years, the business side of baseball has taken off. And as far as the Red Sox are concerned, the financial demands of the game have passed Fenway by: the park has too few seats, and especially too few luxury sections, to generate enough cash for a sport in which even mid-level players get seven-figure salaries. Sooner or later (and likely sooner) the Sox are going to build a new ballpark, and Fenway will join Philadelphia's Shibe Park and New York's Polo Grounds in the history books.

Except that where the other old parks yielded to progress, it seems that progress is going to yield to Fenway. In its old age, the Green Monster seems to have suddenly gained fecundity. The rage in ballpark design, from Baltimore to San Francisco, is for new and newly planned ballparks that have the old-time look of Fenway: irregular fences, oddly shaped foul territory, and looming (albeit scaled-down) offspring of the Green Monster. Baseball, forever obsessed with the glory of its past, is now trying to rebuild it.

And when Fenway gets replaced, the Red Sox say they aim to do the others one better. According to club spokesperson Kevin Shea, the Sox envision building a replica of Fenway -- Green Monster, hand-operated scoreboard, and all -- only with 15,000 more seats and "state-of-the-art amenities." It's the logical culmination of the postmodern ballpark-design movement: 21st century technology applied to a blueprint from 1912.

Nice as the idea of a Fenway with all the modern advantages may sound, the idea is a terrible one. For as much as Fenway is an icon, it's also a relic, designed for a bygone time and bygone circumstances. From a pure baseball standpoint, Fenway's weird features have been more a liability for the team than an asset: year in and year out, the unbalanced park has encouraged unbalanced teams. Re-creating the quirky playing field in a modern ballpark promises only to clinch the Sox's also-ran status, even as it brings Boston baseball fans, willing or not, into the brave new world of high-revenue, entertainment-driven sports.

Like the other ballparks of its era, Fenway owes its distinctive design not to the inspired whimsy of an architect, but to the shape of a city lot. Back in the golden age of baseball architecture, the sport wasn't important enough to justify knocking down acres of buildings, and there was no need to moat the fields with parking lots. So the parks had to be bent to fit their surroundings, and most of the bending took place in the outfield. At Fenway, as at many other parks, one corner of the outfield was truncated where it met the street, and a big wall made up the difference. (At the Brooklyn Dodgers' fabled Ebbetts Field, right field was even shorter than Fenway's left field, and the wall was 38feet high.)

The irregularity was acceptable because the parks were built in what's now known as the "dead-ball era," when baseballs had little bounce to them and so didn't travel very far when struck. Hitting one out of the park was so rare that in the 1911 World Series, Frank "Home Run" Baker won his nickname by slugging an awe-inspiring total of two home runs; he solidified his legend by hitting a career-high 12 in the 1913 season. Under those conditions, it didn't make much difference whether the left-field corner was just over 300 feet away, as it was at Fenway, or 375, as it was at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

But by the time Fenway was 10 years old, the game had changed. Though Sox fans remember 1919 as Babe Ruth's last year in Boston, it marks another turning point in baseball history: in 1920, as Ruth arrived in New York, the live ball arrived in the American League. And despite longstanding Boston superstition, the live ball -- given the design of Fenway -- has probably had a lot more to do with the Sox' inability to win a World Series than Ruth's departure has.

As players caught on to the change, the home run was transformed from an anomaly to a regular feature of the game. Ballparks were divided into pitchers' parks and hitters' parks -- and Fenway, where batters discovered that even a moderately vigorous pop fly to left could clear the Green Monster, was the latter (as was Wrigley Field, where, it should be noted, the Cubs have yet to win a title).

Cause and effect are endlessly disputed in baseball, but since 1934, when the present steel grandstands were built (and accurate statistics began), Fenway has seen 13 percent more runs scored than has the average ballpark, and 11 percent more home runs. These figures come from Pete Palmer, of the Society for Advanced Baseball Research (SABR), a group dedicated to pinning such slippery matters down. Palmer says this is close to the maximum amount of variation a ballpark can see, not counting Denver's Coors Field, where thin mountain air allows what the SABR folks regard as appalling prodigies of hitting.

Down through the years, says Robert Bluthardt, who chairs SABR's ballparks committee, the increase in offense has given the Red Sox more than their fair share of batting champions. Unfortunately, though, the temptation of the Monster has led the team consistently to favor players with hitting ability over those with fielding ability. From Dick "Dr. Strangeglove" Stuart in the early '60s to Jose Canseco and Wil Cordero in the '90s, the Sox are notorious for hiring position players with the athletic range of oxen. They knock in runs, but as Sox fans know too well, their defensive liabilities have a way of showing up in big games.

At the same time, Fenway has been brutal on pitchers, particularly left-handed ones (according to Bluthardt, Lefty Gomez of the Yankees compared pitching there to "pitching in a phone booth"). In a study Palmer made of how famous pitchers fared in various ballparks, he says he found that the Cleveland Indians' Bob Feller's earned-run average rose from his lifetime 3.25 to 5.46 when he pitched at Fenway, while the Yanks' Whitey Ford was hit so hard -- a 6.16 ERA at Fenway, versus 2.75 overall -- that he quit trying to pitch in Boston at all.

But it hasn't hurt just the Sox' opponents. Palmer's data are short on Red Sox lefthanders because, save for such rare exceptions as Lefty Grove and Bill "Spaceman" Lee, great lefties haven't pitched for Boston. This leaves the Sox with a constant disadvantage against left-handed hitters. And it's not as if the park is kind to righty pitchers, either: Palmer says that by his estimation, Fenway added a quarter of a run to Roger Clemens's ERA through the 1995 season.

So at Fenway, the baseball gospel that good pitching beats good hitting doesn't apply. The Sox end up trying to succeed at two games: high-scoring, slugging Fenway ball, and the game played everywhere else. And because half their games are played at home, they build teams that are better at the former. They win the home-run contests and they pile up runs as the ball bounces around the strange corners of the outfield -- but in the postseason, they find themselves facing teams that can pitch better than them and match them hit for hit. Fenway can make things interesting, but the Sox inevitably come up short.

To some observers, 70-plus years of this is enough. "They shouldn't be playing major-league baseball in it," says veteran Baltimore sportswriter John Steadman. "Fenway Park is just a bad memory, and they ought to get over it."

BUT TO the people who design new ballparks, the peculiarities of the action at Fenway are charming and exciting. Introducing an element of chance -- or "nonstandard game action" -- was an essential part of the idea behind the model for the new breed of parks, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, says John Pastier, a ballpark historian and consultant who advised the Baltimore Orioles on the project. The park, which opened in 1992 to overwhelming critical acclaim and perpetual sellout crowds, introduced the essential motifs of the neo-retro building craze. It revived the old city-lot pattern of architecture by being built flush against a gigantic old brick railroad warehouse, cramping the right-field wall. The rest of the outfield was laid out with straight lines and peculiar angles, emphasizing the resemblance to Fenway and its peers, while generous application of brickwork and ivy evoke the atmosphere of Wrigley Field.

The usual description of such features is "traditional." But the Orioles have no such tradition. Their glory years, from the mid '60s to the mid '80s, were spent on the symmetrical home field of Memorial Stadium, where they were known for playing clean, well-pitched ball, with scrupulous defense. Crazy bounces would have only detracted from it all.

When Oriole Park was being built, Pastier recounts, one of its biggest doubters was Hall of Fame outfielder Frank Robinson, then manager of the team. As Pastier tells it, Robinson objected to the uneven outfield measurements and expressed concern about his players' having to field the ball amid irregular contours. "You'd think he'd be responding to the possibility of excitement," Pastier says, adding that he felt that Robinson was "wearing his management hat." But Robinson starred on the old Orioles teams, for whom the ballpark was background, not part of the action. When the fans wanted excitement, he provided it with his bat.

The problem with letting the field dictate what happens is that it's hard to predict what the field will do. At Oriole Park, balls were expected to fly on out of the short right field and head for the warehouse, or else bounce excitingly off the oversized wall there. But the warehouse blocks the wind, so balls don't carry that way nearly as well as expected.

Instead, the soft spot turned out to be in the left-center-field power alley, where the wind blows out and the straight fence line shortens the distance; for a left-handed fly-ball pitcher, it may be as bad as Boston -- annual home-run totals for the park exceed Fenway's. The Sox shouldn't be surprised if their replica of Fenway's field, surrounded by different grandstands and possibly facing a new direction, plays completely differently.

And because the new school of design begins by seeking out features of the site that will constrain the shape of the field, it will be hard for teams to do anything about the unforeseen results. The old ballparks developed their shapes over time, moving fences in and out to reflect changing conditions, adding wind-blocking scoreboards or new grandstands. In 1940, for instance, the Red Sox decided to make home runs easier for a young Ted Williams by building new bullpens in what had been the deepest part of right-center field, reducing that dimension by a good 20 feet.

Oriole Park, built tight all around, has no such flexibility--indeed, Steadman, one of the park's few naysayers, claims that the field came out smaller than expected, and in a sort of secret homage to Fenway, the official distance measurements were exaggerated by six to eight feet. If the Orioles want to move the fences back to cut down on home runs (or on the park's other signature hit, the double that bounds off the rubberized warning track and into the stands), they'll have to jackhammer out a few rows of seats.

Maybe it would be worth all the difficulty to have a truly distinctive ballpark. But slavish devotion to making parks one-of-a-kind can have exactly the opposite effect. Pastier tells of preparing a brief for the Seattle Mariners, in which he was going to show team officials cut-out shapes of various new ballparks' outfields, to demonstrate an array of design options. Reviewing the cutouts, he says, he thought he'd made a mistake and copied Camden Yards twice -- "then it dawned on me that I had Camden and Jacobs [Field], in Cleveland." Though the two parks were designed with completely different arrangements of grandstands, bleachers, and scoreboards, Pastier says, the "irregular" playing fields came out almost identical to each other.

Nevertheless, the gimmicks continue to multiply, and to outdo one another in goofiness. The Texas Rangers' new Ballpark in Arlington was built on prairie, with no surrounding buildings to cramp its layout, yet an oddly placed bullpen makes the outfield wall jut inward (and an unnecessary, jumbo-size distance sign ensures that people notice the quirk). Pastier says he's seen one minor-league park where, for no apparent reason, the center-field fence bellies in. And the San Francisco Giants' proposed Pacific Bell Park will be only 306 feet up the right-field line, so that home runs can land in the bay.

THE MOST disturbing product of the postmodern spirit promises to be the Milwaukee Brewers' planned Miller Park, conceived as an outsized replica of the Brooklyn Dodgers' old Ebbetts Field -- only with a high-tech retractable dome on top. The idea, Pastier says, is as ungainly architecturally as it is logically; the engineering requirements of the dome, he says, mean that this re-creation of a legendarily cozy park will be "an immense building," covering more ground than any other ballpark in history.

Miller Park's sprawl may be extreme, but it points up the oldfangled new parks' most striking departure from the ballparks they're supposed to be modeled on: the buildings, despite architects' talk about the coziness and "intimacy" of their designs, are in fact behemoths. They are being built according to new principles that effectively do away with the traditional ballpark experience. Monster or no Monster, the Sox' next ballpark will be nothing like Fenway.

For starters, if Oriole Park is any guide, it will be a lousy place to sit and watch a ball game. Or rather, it will be a wonderful place to sit -- at Oriole Park and the others, comfort is the fans' undoing. Today's seats are roomy and widely spaced, so there aren't as many of them per row as there are at older ballparks. This is one of the chief reasons Fenway can't be modernized. With up-to-date seat spacing, the current structure wouldn't hold anywhere near as many people as it holds now.

In other words, fewer and fewer people are taking up more and more space. At the same time, the slope of the grandstands has grown more gentle, and stadium designers have taken to putting the upper decks behind the lower ones, so no support pillars obtrude on the lower-deck fans' view. (Instead, thanks to the gentle slope, the heads of the people in the next row block the view, as in a movie theater.)

Once you add in extra room for luxury club-level seating and skybox suites, Pastier says, a fan in the last row of a new park is 50 percent farther away from the action than he would be in an old park (at the Chicago White Sox' new Comiskey Park, he adds, the front row of the upper deck is farther away than the back row was at the old Comiskey). Even old Cleveland Stadium, always described as "cavernous," put the average upper-deck spectator 47 feet closer to home plate than Jacobs Field does.

So what do the new parks deliver, if not a good look at the game? Certainly not spirit. Oriole Park, despite (or perhaps because of) its baseball-intensive décor, has the atmosphere of a prosperous shopping mall. Passions run low (so that fistfights, a constant at Fenway, are unheard of). This may be due to the fastidiousness of the place, or to the physical distance from the action, the subduing effect of the spread-out grandstands. Though the park is usually sold out, the crowd numbers don't translate into noise and energy the way they did in the tight concrete bowl of Memorial Stadium.

Whatever the cause, it's clear that the excitement that was supposed to be sparked by the irregular field layout is in short supply. To make up for the apathy, management has opted to engineer the ballpark experience a little more: the scoreboard gives the fans applause cues, and ubiquitous clusters of loudspeakers pump in loud music and sound effects during the game -- even while runners are circling the bases. Even the rare spontaneous ovations, as for a game-tying home run, are likely to be backed up by the strains of the theme from Rocky.

Boston baseball purists can tell themselves such stunts wouldn't go over here. But new parks aren't aimed at purists; arguably, they're not aimed at baseball fans at all. The biggest problem for fans at Fenway is the lack of affordable bleacher seats, but Pastier notes that newer parks are devoting less and less space to bleachers. And the sort of people who want bleachers are the 34,000 people who already go to Fenway. The Sox already have their money; what they want is to get more from the next 15,000 people.

In baseball's current big-money economy, Pastier explains, the goal is to maximize per capita spending at the ballpark, not crowd noise. The difference between old and new ballparks, he says, is like the difference between motels and hotels: one provides a basic service -- a bed for a night, a seat at a sporting event -- while the other offers customers a chance to spend money on a wide range of amusements and services. New parks are not athletic venues, they're entertainment destinations.

Of course, the Sox could fend off the worst of this by sticking with Fenway, warts and all, for a while longer. Pastier says that if team ownership had more modest financial goals, they simply could add a small upper deck -- the seats there, he says, would likely have the best view in the house, and could be sold as premium, club-level seating. Such an addition, he adds, could offset the hulking 600 Club, improving the park's looks. It wouldn't do much to alleviate the shortage of cheap seats, though, and the park would remain murder on left-handed pitchers and a haven for oafish sluggers. But at least Sox fans would be used to those problems.

Should management be set on a new ballpark, though -- and they certainly seem to be -- they still have a chance to break away from the herd, and away from Fenway's history of sloppy baseball. If they insist on delving into the past for inspiration, they should remember that Boston has another baseball tradition: "I think it ought to look like old Braves Field," says Steadman. Now BU's Nickerson football stadium, the former home of the Boston Braves was 402 feet up the lines when it opened in 1915, and 550 feet to the deepest part of center. "It was immense, it was tremendous," Steadman says. "Bring back old Braves Field. Then you'd have a ballpark."

Tom Scocca can be reached at tscocca[a]phx.com.