Archive for the 'redsox' Category

Fenway Park is ancient. This is part of its appeal. It’s the oldest ballpark in major league baseball, it’s built like no other, and we Red Sox fans are so rabid and so engrossed in our traditions that we are rabidly conservative about changes to it. The pars of it that are ancient we rightly think give it its charm.

But there are aspects of its ancientness that are less than charming: just ask anyone who ever used the left-field mens bathroom up until about 1995. (Think circular firing-squad.) The plumbing and drainage are apparently ancient, but not even in a good way: at least the Roman water works worked for thousands of years. These are lucky if they make it to the all-star break. It’s also a comparatively tiny ballpark, though no longer the tiniest. And while its small size does give an intimate feeling that you might not get at, say, Olympiastadion in Berlin, the upper limit on this feeling would not be reached by adding another 15,000 seats to the place.

So how to do it?

Continue reading ‘My Master Plan for Fenway Park’

We always joke that Alan Embree looks like the poster boy for the confederacy, and this bit in the Globe makes me think that he’s got a Southern strain of Irish Alzheimers:

On the day after he gave up a scorched three-run blast to Gary Sheffield, turning a 3-3 game into a 6-3 loss, Alan Embree did the sensible thing. He threw away everything he was wearing at that moment: his hat, glove, mesh undershirt, shorts, even his jock. ‘’I’ll send it over to Sheff,” Embree joked, walking toward a barrel. Embree, a lefthander, was allowed to pitch to Sheffield because Sheffield was just 1 for 6 career against Embree, though that ‘’1” was a home run, a solo shot April 19, 2001, at San Francisco when Sheffield was a Dodger and Embree a Giant. ‘’He got it,” Embree said of Sheffield’s Friday night blast into the third deck. ‘’He smoked it. It was one of the ones I’ll remember for a while.”