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Located
in the heart of Boston, Fenway Park is home to the Boston
Red Sox. Its opening was on April 20, 1912 and it is the
oldest ballpark still in active use in Major League
Baseball. Although the seating capacity of the Fenway Park
is 35, 000; the Red Sox fit 47,627 people for a September
22, 1935 game against the New York Yankees. |
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However fire laws prevalent during the 1940's ended that
sort of crowding and the biggest postwar crowd was
36,388 for a game against the Cleveland Indians in 1978.
The Red Sox won the first ever World Series at Fenway
Park in the parks first ever season, and went on to win
it three more times by 1918. However the curse of the
Bambino prevented them from winning it for another eight
- six years. However this curse was lifted in 2004 when
they won one of the most memorable games in World Series
history till date when Carlton Fisk ended Game 6 against
the Cincinnati Reds with a 12th-inning home run over the
Green Monster just inside the left field foul pole. |
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The Green
Monster is a 37 feet tall structure with seats atop it. It
has a manually operated scoreboard that displays the line
score and scores of other American League games. Down the
sides of the scoreboard are the initials of Thomas A. Yawkey
and Jean R. Yawkey, who owned the Red Sox from 1933-93,
these initials are in Morse code. The Green Monster has been
green only since 1947, before that, the left-field wall was
covered with advertisements. The original wall, made of
wood, got burnt with the rest of the stadium in a fire on
January 5, 1934. The wall created after the fire, was a 37 -
foot wall with tin over wooden railroad ties. The current
wall is made of plastic and was erected in 1976. |
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The
right field plate was made closer to the fence by
removing the bullpens from fair territory, thus helping
Red Sox star Ted Williams to hit more home runs. Lights
were set up in the stadium on June 13, 1947 enabling the
Red Sox to play home night games. At the same time, a
message board was also installed above the center-field
bleachers. 1983 saw the addition of private suites to
the roof, and also the setting up of a glassed-up
seating section called the 600 club behind home plate in
1988. That foul pole was once nicknamed "Pesky’s Pole,"
because Johnny Pesky hit it so many times for home runs. |
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The Red
Sox are not the only inhabitants of the Fenway Park. The
AFL’s Boston Patriots played there from 1963-68 and the
Boston Redskins played there before that. The Boston Yanks
and the Boston College and Boston University football teams
played there, too. Fenway once hosted a World Series that
did not include the Red Sox. |
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