I'm sitting in the back seats in Fenway Park last Saturday. These wooden chairs are smaller (people were thinner) and do not have cup trays (people could hold their own drinks or place them on the floor) attached to the seat in the front of them. They watched the baseball game on this field:
This is Futures at Fenway Day last Saturday. The Red Sox were away playing in Baltimore and the field is turned over to the minor league Boys of Summer from Portland, Maine and the visiting team from Harrisburg, PA. The field was bathed in sunshine and this was our view at the opening pitch:
Second row near what is known at Fenway as "Canvas Alley", where the ground crew stands to clean the bases and smooth the infield dirt, or, in case of deluge, get the tarp on the infield. A great view of the game and we had our hot dogs and beverages, hanging around for seven innings before we retreated from the sun into the cool of Yawkey Way and the back area. Wally the Green Monster even found his own prints in cement.
Near the end of the game we came back to the seats I wrote of earlier, out of the sun and watched the last few innings. Normally I keep track of the plays, keeping a score book, but didn't feel the need. The day before we had had lunch at McGreevy's Tavern, the nation's first sports bar (or the version of it down the street from the actual sight). Mike (Nuf Ced) McGreevy looks down from his sainted portrait atop the bar to Royal Rooters of all ages.
The bar is located "1200 Steps" from Fenway.
Walking around Boston was limited to about anything in an eight block radius of our hotel, and I could handle that fairly well, with occassional stops for coffee. This being Boston there's a Dunkin Donuts or Stahbucks or an independent coffee house within reach, plus bookstores, and Commonwealth Avenue, filed with trees and benches. We didn't go in 2012 as I was not sure I could handle the walking, but with the NYC strolls of a few weeks back and now Boston, I seem to know my limits and I can just enjoy things that I can do.
Like sitting and looking out at the field where Ted Williams and Yaz and the DiMaggio brothers and Pedro and Nomah and the Babe and Lou all played. And all the players in between. The nicest part is that at an "normal" game, you are hustled off out of the stadium so that the cleaning crew can do its part. This day we just sat and looked at the grass, the foul (Pesky and Fisk) poles, the Monstah. People still made the trip out to the red seat to sit in the spot where Teddy Ballgame planted a homer, the longest in Fenway history, a mere 502 feet from home plate in 1946.
Nuf Ced. Thanks for reading. More soon.
