99 - Visit Fenway Park

So I am currently in Massachusetts for work. Originally I was scheduled to be there a couple weeks ago. This schedule was pretty firm so I went on-line and purchased a ticket to the July 22nd game between the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox in historic Fenway Park.

Of course nothing ever goes as planned and the trip was pushed back a week and a half, the day before I was scheduled to fly. So now I am the proud owner of an unused ticket that I paid $105 dollars for and of course my rescheduled trip ended up during a long road trip for the Red Sox.

Well yesterday I did the next best thing to seeing a game at Fenway Park by taking a tour of Fenway Park.

The picture below is from the same general location as my ticket would have been, except on the first base side instead of the third.

This one shows the seats that I would have been in. According to our guide they are not the original seats but were a part of the renovations in the late 1930s. They are also the smallest seats in baseball.

The condition of the seats bring to mind my overall feelings of the park. It is a rundown poorly maintained and poorly planned facility. While I can forgive the planning because I can tell they are constantly trying to squeeze more seats in to a very small space. But I can't really forgive the walls that do not appear to have been painted in over 20 years or the brick walls that are crumbling or the seats that are falling apart. To get to many parts of the stadium you actually have to walk on the roof. In some places they have put a haphazard array of mats, but there are quite a few places where you are actually walking on just the roofing paper. I really would not have been surprised if I had found places that were just held together by duct tape.

So in conclusion I am sure I would have been more impressed had I actually seen a game, but without thirty thousand others the flaws of the stadium really stand out.

Well anyway here are more pictures.