Another exercise in nostalgia – Fenway Park then and now
On a Sunday afternoon in April 1962, my grandfather took me to my first baseball game at Fenway Park in Boston. I was in the third grade at the time and was completely in awe as we emerged from the concourse to the stands and saw the huge expanse of grass, the green fences (including the famous Green Monster left field wall) and the gorgeous blue sky.
The action on the field was mesmerizing but so was the action in the stands. Perfect strangers would smile at me and ask “what did you think of that, kid?” People shouted encouragement at their favorites (Carl Yastrzemski and Chuck Schilling) and imprecations at their enemies (Jim Bunning and Rocky Colavito).
But even better, people brought food to you. Older boys and a few men dressed in striped shirts were walking around selling hot dogs, coke, popcorn, cotton candy, and peanuts. I kept pestering my grandfather for more and more food while the Detroit Tigers got off to a quick lead that they never relinquished. I was particularly fascinated with the popcorn, packed into a megaphone so that when I was done, I could should my own encouragement to my favorite, Frank Malzone.
For those of us who love baseball, it’s the entire package that is the attraction. The “natural” beauty of the field, the community in the stands, the concessions, and the game on the field all create an atmosphere that is enveloping. It’s also an exercise in nostalgia, evoking a long history in ways that make us feel connected to the past. Fenway Park was built in 1912 and has housed the Red Sox ever since and seeing a game there can’t help but connect you to everyone else who’s sat in those seats since.
A few years later, when I was in the seventh grade, my mother gave me $10 and a friend and I took a train from our suburban neighborhood, got off at Fenway Park, bought a $1 bleacher ticket and chowed down on a couple of hot dogs and cokes during a game where the Sox lost to the Angels. I brought some change back to my mother.
The Red Sox have remained a part of my life, even after I moved to Philadelphia. I thoroughly enjoy seeing the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park, but I watch the Red Sox religiously on MLB.TV. There’s a sense of timelessness, a straight line that connects that Sunday afternoon in 1962 with my life now that I find so delightful.
And I don’t think for a minute that this sense of timelessness or nostalgia isn’t a central part of the contemporary baseball experience. I had occasion to visit Boston last spring and decided to visit Fenway Park for the first time since the mid-1990s. The juxtaposition of permanence and change starts before you even get inside the park. The exterior of the building has hardly changed at all over the years and Jersey St. to the west is still lined with souvenir shops on one side of the street. Now, though, the street is closed to traffic and food concessions selling Cuban sandwiches and artisanal beer have replaced street-hawkers with peanuts and hotdogs.
Inside, explicit references to glories from the ancient and recent past compete with contemporary touches like an urban vegetable garden (really!).
On this particular damp May evening, the Red Sox were playing the Astros. I arrived early to have something to eat, which even thirty years ago would have been something like a slice or two of bad pizza with a nondescript beer.
In 2019, though, I ate in a real restaurant overlooking the first base side of the field and had a gyro that was very good, some of the best french fries I’ve had in some time, and a nice Pilsner selected from a list of imported and craft breweries. The tab, with tax and tip was a little over $60, a far cry from the $1 that bought a hotdog and a Coke 65 years ago. Despite the price discrepancy, I’ll take the gyro and the beer, thank you very much.
It wasn’t just the restaurant, though. All during the game, what we used to call hawkers but I guess now you’d have to call them waiters milled about to take orders and deliver from the restaurant’s kitchen. Granted, I was in expensive seats, but there was nobody in a fluorescent shirt screaming “ice cold beer here.” Instead, a uniformed usher would hand me a menu and I could select a beer from a number of options and, if I had wanted, added an appetizer or two.
The purpose of all this, the game itself, unraveled on the field in a way that also connected more than 100 years of baseball and urban life. Look at the photo at the beginning of this post – no skyline to speak of, no advertising inside the park, just the delightfully green walls that reflect the perfectly green grass of the playing field.
Now look at 2019. The walls are in the (roughly) same place and the field looks the same, but the skyline has grown and there is advertising everywhere, both on the walls and signs within the park and on billboards outside the park looking in. The essence of the earlier picture is a quiet simplicity that makes baseball what it is. However many years on it is from the earlier picture, though, is an electricity that capitalizes on that simplicity.
The experiences are both the same and very different. There’s a black and white photo and color one. The early picture was taken when Boston was a depressing city in decline and the area around the park reflected that. Today, Boston is a vibrant, exciting city and the area around the park reflects that. There’s the experiences of a seven-year old seeing baseball for the first time with his grandfather, a twelve-year old taking the train into the city by themselves, and a 60-something man making a pilgrimage. There’s a boy eating popcorn as quickly as possible so he could use the megaphone to call encouragement to Jim Pagliaroni (who hit a home run in a losing cause) and $10 craft beers. There’s the measured cadences of the public address system announcers of early ’60s and the electronic scoreboards with advanced statistics and replays from multiple angles.
In the end though, it’s still the same. A classic game played on a beautiful field in a beautiful park to the culinary accompaniment of street food and beer (or coke or whatever).
And if you’re fortunate enough to have been blessed to be a fan of the Red Sox, it also means that game is played in Fenway Park, an extraordinary stadium in the heart of the city.
And if you’re me, it means watching the Red Sox lose, as they did last spring and as they do every time I see them in Fenway Park instead of on television or streaming.