...helplessly and permanently a Red Sox fan

It's opening day. Yeah, they're in Texas and won't be at Fenway until the 11th but whatever. It's opening day! Play ball!





"As I grew up, I knew that as a building (Fenway Park) was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid at Giza, the nation's capitol, the czar's Winter Palace, and the Louvre — except, of course, that is better than all those inconsequential places." - Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti


"Fenway is the essence of baseball." - Tom Seaver in the Christian Science Monitor (July 1999)


"I'm helplessly and permanently a Red Sox fan. It was like first love...You never forget. It's special. It's the first time I saw a ballpark. I'd thought nothing would ever replace cricket. Wow! Fenway Park at 7 o'clock in the evening. Oh, just, magic beyond magic: never got over that." - Art Historian Simon Schama in History in Brilliant Brushstrokes (1999)


"That's the magic of Fenway Park. That’s why people love it so. Come to think of it, at Fenway almost every year is a wonder year." - Red Sox Announcer Ned Martin (1977)





"The ballpark is the star. In the age of Tris Speaker and Babe Ruth, the era of Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams, through the empty-seats epoch of Don Buddin and Willie Tasby and unto the decades of Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice, the ballpark is the star. A crazy-quilt violation of city planning principles, an irregular pile of architecture, a menace to marketing consultants, Fenway Park works. It works as a symbol of New England's pride, as a repository of evergreen hopes, as a tabernacle of lost innocence. It works as a place to watch baseball." - Martin F. Nolan in A Ballpark, Not A Stadium (1999)


"We love Fenway Park because we love antiques, be they rocking chairs or ballparks. But we love it even more because the eccentricities of the place mirror our own. It is, like us, difficult and cranky. And this makes it a mighty hard place for a player to play in. Too bad. Players come and go, but Fenway Park may become an American Pyramid." - Boston Red Sox Sportscaster Clark Booth in Fenway by Dan Shaughnessy


"You can say, 'Well, if they tore down Fenway Park, we can build a new one.' But you wouldn’t build it right. It’s better to make the accommodations, to save the old ballparks. If Fenway Park needs sky boxes to bring in the poverty-stricken owners enough money to save the stadium before they tear it down and move it someplace else, then build the damn sky boxes. ...Make the damn structural improvements, but save the ballpark because when you try to rebuild a cathedral five hundred years too late, it doesn’t come out the same." - Sportswriter Tom Boswell in The Story of America's Ballparks (1991)