Batter's Box Interactive Magazine Batter's Box Interactive Magazine Batter's Box Interactive Magazine

I was in Boston for the Ontario long weekend and I attended two games at Fenway Park, both Red Sox walk-off wins.  Both wins came at the expense of the Detroit Tigers whose bullpen was exposed in these games after Jose Valverde had to throw over fifty pitches on Friday to nail down a win for the Tigers.

Obviously Fenway Park is a busy place, they have had over 600 sell-outs in a row.  The aisles are narrow and the seats are small as you would expect with an old park.  There are obstructed seats back in the grandstand so you have to be careful in ordering tickets.  I went with tickets from stubhub and they are not cheap, you have to pay around $120-$150 for a decent seat.



Here is the famous view of the main stand behind the plate at Fenway.  The picture is taken from on top of the Green Monster.  You need a ticket to get onto the green monster and I didn't feel like paying $800 for a seat there (scalper prices).  But I got lucky, a combination of two female security guards having an indepth chat and the camera in my hand which made me look somewhat official allowed me to sneak into the monster area.  You might not know that there are three rows of seating atop the monster and two rows of standing room.  The standing room extends a bit longer than the seats so there are probably as many standing room seats for sale as there are seats.

 

The grren monster includes a scoreboard and before the game the attendant updates the pitchers from the outside while making sure he doesn't get hit by a batting practice line drive.

 

On Saturday Miguel Cabrera in one round of batting practice hit four home runs in five swings.  As he stepped out of the cage the crowd gave him an ovation which Miguel acknowledged.  In his first at-bat on Saturday Cabrera hit one over the monster and out of the stadium off Dice-K.

 

Here is the game view from the monster seats.

 

The Red Sox trailed heading to the ninth on Saturday.  David Ortiz came to bat with the bases loaded and the Sox down by two, he doubled off the wall scoring three runs for the win.  Once he got to second he started his celebration, yelling to the skies.

 

It wasn't long before his teammates joined him.

 

On Sunday the Tigers trailed 3-0 heading to the ninth.  With two runners on Jonathon Papelbon came on to face Cabrera.  First pitch, mano-a-mano, Cabrera doubled off the centre field wall to make it a one run game.  Don Kelly ran for Cabrera and when Jhonny Peralta singled Kelly scored the tying run much to the delight of third base coach Gene Lamont.

 

The Tigers bullpen put the first two runners on in the bottom of the ninth.  Marco Scutaro was called on to bunt.

 

The pitcher, Robbie Weinhardt, and third baseman Peralta, got in each others way fielding the bunt.  Weinhardt made the throw, and threw it down the line, ending the game.

 

Marco Scutaro was mobbed .... until he escaped. 

 

POTD - Weekend at Fenway | 9 comments | Create New Account
The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
snider - Wednesday, August 04 2010 @ 10:47 PM EDT (#219861) #
Nice pics. You can get decent tickets for less than $100 though. I was able to get 4th row in right field for about $50-60 per ticket from Stub Hub last September and those seats were great.
StephenT - Wednesday, August 04 2010 @ 10:48 PM EDT (#219862) #
Thanks Gerry.  This brings back memories of my little vacation last year, if I may reminisce:

A cheaper way to sit in the monster seats is to take the guided tour of Fenway.  (Admittedly, there's no game on then.)

It cost $12 to go on the 11am tour Saturday, July 18, 2009. (The Red Sox were out of town.)  There were hundreds of people doing the tour; they split us in groups (probably based on how many would fit in the press box behind home plate, which was one of the tour stops).

My group started in the "refurbished" seats on the 1st-base side (section 17).  They told us they were 75-year old seats, and they had recently "refurbished" them instead of replacing them because, if they had replaced them, they would have felt obliged to put in larger seats, which would reduce capacity.

Then we went up to the right-field roof seats, which I think might be even newer than the monster seats, though much further away from home plate.

Then we we walked over to the windowed press box behind home plate.  There were lots of pictures on the walls, some historical, and some from the World Series years.  They told us not to pick up the phones; one in front of me said "To ESPN".  They joked that Yankees reporters had to sit in the back row.

What surprised me is that we then walked *down* to the monster seats.  Lots of seats in the park are actually higher up than those seats.

There were lots of recent dated signatures where people had signed that they had been in the monster seats.  Apparently everyone thinks that graffiti is okay there.  I presume there were only recent dates because the older ones had already been scrubbed off.

The tour was advertised to be 50 minutes, but I didn't walk out until around 12:10pm. 

I've heard some tours let fans walk on the field, though not this time unfortunately.

Anyway, it was certainly worth the $12; even though there was no game on, you got to see things (like the press box) that you wouldn't normally be allowed to see.

Ron - Wednesday, August 04 2010 @ 11:14 PM EDT (#219863) #
Out of all the ballparks in MLB, Fenway Park is at the top of my list. Is it easy to drive to Fenway or is taking the Subway a better option? How far is it from the airport?
Smithers - Thursday, August 05 2010 @ 01:07 AM EDT (#219865) #
One trick for getting tickets at Fenway for those in the know is the legalized ticket reselling zone they have at the Ted Williams statue entrance.  Basically they have people with seasons tickets that they can't use but don't want to go to waste.  Red Sox employees act as liaisons between the sellers and prospective buyers who basically have their pick of how much they want to spend with options in all different price ranges, with the tickets sold at face value.  Some series such as the Yankees would undoubtedly have a very limited supply, but by showing up an hour and a half before a Blue Jays game a couple years ago we were able to get some pretty sweet seats just off to the side of the backstop screen 17 rows back.  My parents also found a nice pair of box seats on the first base line this way to a game last fall.

Nice pictures to boot Gerry!
robertdudek - Thursday, August 05 2010 @ 08:49 AM EDT (#219869) #
My wife and I traveled to Boston for the weekend too!

I got decent seats at face value plus handling charges in the section 127 (about 30 rows up from the backstop) from Red Sox.com. I bought them in May, though.




Gerry - Thursday, August 05 2010 @ 09:01 AM EDT (#219871) #

The price varies a lot from game to game.  The prices for Saturday's game were a lot higher than Sunday's.  The Sox had been on the road for a while before coming home, that might have something to do with it.  There also seemed to be a lot of people from smaller Massachusetts towns there with families (guessing from the TV shirts I saw with town names on them).  I would guess the numbers of those people might be less when school is in session, and therefore cheaper tickets.

It is easy to subway to the games, it is very close to Boston.  We stayed in an area of Boston called Back Bay and we walked to and from the games, it was about a 20-30 minute walk.  There are restaurants in between so you walk for 20 minutes, have dinner, then walk the last ten minutes, easy.  There are no major parking lots at Fenway that I saw, remember Fenway is an old stadium right in town.  It is probably easy to drive somewhat close to the park but decising where to park is probably a tricky decision.  Perople who parked close to Fenway seemed to get trapped by the fans leaving the game.

Mike Green - Thursday, August 05 2010 @ 09:24 AM EDT (#219873) #
Nice pictures, Gerry. 

Fenway is in a better location than the Rogers Centre for walking, as it is more in the center of the action rather than on the waterfront.  You can get there from Cambridge, Brookline or downtown Boston on foot if you don't mind walking a mile or two.. The subway is a great alternative, and will get you in and out of Fenway in a hurry. 

China fan - Thursday, August 05 2010 @ 11:50 AM EDT (#219891) #
Speaking of baseball's iconic stadiums, yesterday I was in Chicago and made my first pilgrimage to Wrigley Field.   (I had been to a game at old Comiskey Park before they tore it down, but never to Wrigley.)   It's a wonderful ball park, of course, with a great atmosphere.  More than 38,000 fans turned up to watch the 5th-place Cubs against the 3rd-place Brewers yesterday on a weekday afternoon.  The passions of the Cub fans are awe-inspiring.  When their 3rd baseman Jeff Baker booted a ball that led to unearned runs, the heckling from the stands was unrelenting.  "That's on you, Baker," they screamed after the third unearned run.  Never mind that Baker later drove in the go-ahead run in a 15-3 victory by the Cubbies -- he was a bum for letting them down.

The Cubs, incidentally, acquired Baker in 2009 in a trade with the Rockies, in which the Cubs gave up a minor-league pitcher named Alberto J. Alburquerque.   How did we ever miss that name in our all-time lists of great baseball names??

#2JBrumfield - Thursday, August 05 2010 @ 03:03 PM EDT (#219918) #
I like the Don Kelly/Gene Lamont shot.  I don't know about the Red Sox victory celebrations - that borders on pornographic! :D
POTD - Weekend at Fenway | 9 comments | Create New Account
The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.