(Writing that header reminds me of the rally held in City Hall Square in the rain. The news articles on it said that the fans sang "Take Me Out To the Ballgame." Well... that was sort of my fault. We were waiting for things to start happening, and someone asked if we (we in this case being the little knot of young fans I was wedged into a corner with) knew the words to it. I rarely pass up a chance to sing, if I can manage to get one, because my voice is my major point of vanity; I know I'm good. So we passed the time with a round of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," which, unlike most renditions, was mostly on pitch - the Fenway Faithful can sing. Then the fuzz moved the railings and two little old ladies swiped the space we were occupying, so instead of my nice place wedged against a pillar with a good view of the proceedings, I got to stand behind the pillar. It was very like seeing a game in Fenway, really. I did climb the pillar to wave at the Sox when they came out, though.)
Which nearly segues neatly into my actual topic.
I was running errands this evening that brought me into Cleveland Circle, and decided that since I was out anyway, I would do something I'd been intending to do for a while - I grabbed the T up to Kenmore and took a walk down Landsdowne Street. For all that I've been a Sox fan as long as I was aware of the existence of baseball, I actually haven't seen many games in Fenway; I haven't seen any big league games at all in the park.
Part of this is, of course, that I grew up in the state of Maryland, rather than the commonwealth of Massachusetts; the local team was the Orioles, and I persistently annoyed every one of my high school friends by refusing to root for the O's. I didn't go to many games in Camden Yards, though; Baltimore was a good hour's drive away, and it didn't seem worth it.
Most of my game attendance actually falls into the A Minors; I was for several years semi-irregularly present at Keys Stadium in Frederick, Maryland, home of the A team, the Frederick Keys - it was one of the irregular family expeditions that my father, my brother and I would take. So most of my real baseball memories live there, and I have nothing but fond memories of Keys Stadium.
We always sat over first. This is one of my important baseball traditions - I always want to be as close to the first-second base line as possible. I get all nervous about the game when I'm not; as I mentioned elsewhere, I'm superstitious. Even so, I didn't spend all that much time there; the right field foul territory had no benches set up on it, which meant it was free territory for people to sit, and, more importantly, for us kids to prowl about waiting for foul balls. I nearly got one once; it hit high and near the fence and rolled down the hill behind the dumpster. I should have gone the other way around the dumpster, is all.
The scoreboard was over the right field wall - it was an impressive wall all the way around, and on those occasions when someone hit a ball over it and into the rutted field outside, where the parking was, I would ponder going out and looking for them sometime. Never managed to get around to it, though, and I expect there were plenty of other people who thought more enthusiastically (and practically) than I. The scoreboard had all sorts of little patterns that played across it for various game events, and I knew them all, including the Buckneresque ball-between-the-legs graphic used for appropriate errors.
Keys Stadium is the stadium of my childhood - or, at the very least, my adolescence. When I got to Fenway Park in my freshman year of college at Wellesley, it was almost like a homecoming. This is what a ballpark should feel like - certainly, there were actual seats in the foul territory, which was different, and the upper deck of seats was a major change, but it still felt right - this is the way baseball should be. This is the way the game should feel. Even if I wasn't sitting over first (nervous twitch).
It was very different from the games at Camden Yards, where part of our supplies to go to the game included binoculars. It's impossible to watch a ballgame through binoculars, I'd note; the ball moves too damned fast when it moves to be tracked properly, even from the nosebleed upper deck. And it's even more difficult to pick up the nuances of pitching than in a normal ballpark - even if parks like Camden Yards are in some ways more 'normal' than Fenway, it just fails to feel right to me.
I like seeing the infield looking larger than a nickel, I guess.
So I went up to Fenway Park today to peer up at the back of the Monster and grin at the lights, dark now, dark until the spring. it was dark, and the Citgo sign was playing its Morse neon over Kenmore. I had a peek at the parking lot and once again reconfirmed my suspicion that anyone who drives in Boston is deranged (a philosophical belief only strengthened by observation of actual Boston drivers). I spotted a few places I could put my bicycle if I wanted to bike up to Fenway come April (though I'm still thinking of putting the cycle in one of the racks on BU's campus and walking to the park as preferable to locking the thing to one of the parking meters).
I wandered the length of the street, picked up the T again at Hynes, and went home. I love Boston.
It's a long time until April.