You win this one, Beantown

Here’s to Fenway Park, one of the last standing cathedrals in sports. The green-shrouded monument that bravely shirks modernity in favor of preserving the taste of baseball’s leather-stained roots. The ballpark that stands above the vast majority in its tribute to the past and does so with dignity and passion. The ballpark that is everything the sport wanted it to be.

(I know that’s an overly gushing description but cut me a break, I was raised at The Vet.)

I got to experience Fenway firsthand this summer on an impromptu pilgrimage to follow the Phils to Beantown. Aside from the surprise win (Hamels managed to salvage the dismal series), the real memory from the trip will resonate deep in my baseball archives long after the paint has chipped and the iron rusted.

After navigating the sea of Ortiz and Beckett down a street that surely would have been closed to traffic in most other towns, we found ourselves parked some thirty feet from the gate (an amazing feat in itself). We soon joined the cloud of red and white and shuffled wide-eyed through the turnstyles, unable to focus on the beep of the ticket reader as we scanned the hand-painted signs.

And as I looked down at my ticket I noticed my hand was in sepia tone. This whole freaking ballpark was stuck in 1924 and it was like these fans barely noticed. They carried beers as if prohibition had been repealed, watched the TV as if it had been invented already, and nothing seemed out of place. The convenience of Now sat comfortably in the wrinkled palm of Then and I couldn’t discern where one ended and the other began.

We found our old wooden seats in right field and invented new sequences of bent limbs and limp muscles that allowed us to fit into that tiny space. Leaning forward and backward to find the batter somewhere on the other side of a girder-beam, we sat with all the fans for the past 90-some years and enjoyed the game with a side of “fresh hat chowdah.”

That’s what was so amazing about this park, it was like your favorite shirt from middle school that seems like it grows with you as you get older. It was as if the unstoppable flood of Progress somehow left this tiny section of the city—of baseball—bone dry. And they’d have it no other way. The seats were still losing paint the way they had been for eighty years and the overhang hid most of the sky. And these people loved it that way. They had their Green Monstah, and their manual scoreboard – but mostly, they had their history. It was right there, in that living museum, each and every day through the rain and extra innings. It had been there with America, wedged in between each page of history with the fresh scent of infield dirt. When the country couldn’t afford a bus fare, when the bombs fell and families crowded around the static of the radio to hear the news, baseball always lived on in this park.

When you watch a game in that park you’re not just sharing it with some 37,000 other fans, you’re sharing it with every single hard-nosed, jeffcap-wearin’, knickerbockin’, poodle skirtin’, hair gel combin’, leather-jacketed, bell-bottomed, leg-warming, Reebok Pumpin’, Walkman totin’ fan there is. You share that experience with millions of people who sat in those very same seats and complained about the very same calls. They may not have been playing Neil Diamond forever, but that seventh inning stretch? You share that with everyone. So go on, Boston fans, root root root for your team, because there may be no better place to do it than somewhere that has changed as little as this old ball game itself.