Monster Memories

Poor Curt Motton never knew what hit him. All he knew was what didn’t hit him, and that was the baseball. Twice. On the same play.

Motton, the former Baltimore outfielder and current Oriole scout, was playing left field in Boston’s Fenway Park in 1970, in the shadow of the famed Green Monster, when a wicked smash headed for the corner.

Motton, who was playing deep, couldn’t get a glove on it, and the ball skipped through his legs. By the time he turned around to retrieve the ball, it caromed off a garage door frame and back through his legs.

“That ball was dancing on me,� Motton said. “It was saying, ‘I’m here. No, I’m there.’ I couldn’t pick it up.�

It had to be the only time in baseball history a ball went through a player’s legs twice on the same play.

And it happened in the only place it could have, baseball’s oldest, most tradition-filled and quirky stadium, the venerable torture chamber/pinball machine/religious shrine that is Fenway Park, site of tonight’s All-Star game.

Ken Griffey Jr., Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are the featured attractions of the game, but top billing goes to the stadium, an 87-year-old, 33,871-seat jewel that, despite its pock marks, many aren’t ready to part with.

The Red Sox in May unveiled plans for a new Fenway to be built next to the old one, with the same dimensions--giant left-field wall included--but with 15,000 more seats and all the modern amenities, including a spacious visiting clubhouse to replace the broom closet teams currently dress in, toilets that actually flush and unobstructed views.

The team has hired consultants to convince politicians and business leaders to back the $550-million project, which they hope to complete by 2003, and you can bet crusty New Englanders who love watching the Sox from the seats their grandfathers watched them are already plotting ways to block the wrecking ball.

But the fact that the most recent plan includes building a new Green Monster and retaining the old elements and peculiarities that give Fenway its charm--and drive baseball players crazy--has made it more palatable to even the most hardened baseball purists.

It seems inevitable now that old Fenway, born in 1912, just a few days after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, will expire soon after the turn of the century, ending a glorious run for one of the world’s most revered sporting venues.

And what a host she has been.

Where else can a 320-foot pop fly turn into a home run that cuts through the heart of New England, as Bucky Dent’s seventh-inning screen shot did on Oct. 2, 1978, giving the Yankees a dramatic win over the Sox in a one-game playoff for the American League East title?

Where else can screaming line drives over the left fielder’s head, home runs in any other park, be turned into singles by a wall that can be as unforgiving as it is tempting?

Where else can one of baseball’s slowest players--Boston’s Dick Stuart in 1963--chug around the bases for an inside-the-park home run because his drive caromed off a ladder on the wall, hit Cleveland outfielder Vic Davalillo in the head and rolled into the corner?

Where else can a slap hitter named Johnny Pesky have a right-field foul pole named after him--Pesky’s Pole--because he claims to have curled eight of his 17 career homers inside the pole, which sits 302 feet from home plate?

And where else can a working stiff get a part-time job that allows him to discover a striking difference between former Sox left fielders Ted Williams, who he described as “fabulous,� and Carl Yastrzemski, who he said was “about as amiable as cement�? Only in Fenway, as Billy Fitzgerald, a 63-year-old ex-school teacher, discovered in 1956. Fitzgerald got a job working inside the hand-operated scoreboard at the base of the left-field wall, and it was an experience he’ll never forget.

Working conditions were awful. Fitzgerald and his mates toiled in a five-foot deep tunnel behind the board. There was no permanent bathroom, rat poison on the floor, and no matter what the weather in Fenway, it was always more extreme inside the scoreboard.

“We always had runny noses and felt terrible because it was so cold at the beginning of the season,� said Fitzgerald, who worked six seasons in the board. “In the summer, it was like a torture chamber. We had doubleheaders every Sunday, and it was miserably hot. By the end of the second game, we were down to our underwear.�

There were occasional card games among employees, and Fitzgerald admitted some guys would have a few beers on the job. With no bathroom, “doubleheaders were an endurance contest,� Fitzgerald said.

When originally built in 1934, the 240-foot-long, 37-foot-high wall was constructed from sheet metal and steel, not the noise-absorbing, Formica-type covering that was added in 1976.

“When a ball hit the wall you’d be shellshocked,� Fitzgerald said. “It was like anti-aircraft fire. It was brutal.�

But you couldn’t beat the benefits. Between most innings, Williams would poke his head through an opening in the wall to chat with Fitzgerald, who gave the Sox star the news on out-of-town games.

“I was a celebrity in my neighborhood because I was talking to Ted Williams every day,� Fitzgerald said.

The Green Monster is Fenway’s signature feature, but it wasn’t for the first 22 years. Rather, it was a 10-foot-high sloped area in front of the wall, named Duffy’s Cliff because of the talent of former Sox left fielder Duffy Lewis.

Former Sox owner Thomas A. Yawkey’s 1933 renovation of Fenway gave birth to the Green Monster, and two years later, a 23-foot-high screen was added to the top of the wall. The Citgo sign that looms over the Monster was built in 1965. Today, the initials of Yawkey and his wife, Jean, are set in Morse code on the scoreboard.

Because Fenway was squeezed into Boston’s asymmetrical maze of streets and rail lines--it is currently framed by Brookline Avenue, Yawkey Way, Lansdowne Street (behind the Monster), Ipswich Street and Van Ness Street--it yielded a field whose diabolical dimensions leave many players like tourists trying to navigate their cars through the Hub--lost.

From the foul pole 302 feet down the right-field line, the wall tapers dramatically, and straight-away right is 380 feet. It was 403 feet until the Sox, knowing many of Williams’ long drives would be caught, added bullpens in 1940, Williams’ second season.

But Williams didn’t need a shorter porch in 1946. Far up in the right-field bleachers is a single red seat among a sea of green--seat 21 in row 37 of section 42--that marks the spot where Williams hit the longest measured homer in Fenway, 502 feet.

In right-center, where the bullpens end, the wall quickly juts out to 420 feet, creating a treacherous triangular area for center fielders because of the distance from the plate, the angles of the walls and the two framed garage doors that can wreak havoc on balls.

The center-field wall connects to the Green Monster, the two meeting just to the left of straightaway center. For most of the century, the Sox posted a sign that read 315 feet at the left-field pole, but an enterprising Boston Globe reporter sneaked into Fenway one night and measured the wall at 309 feet 3 inches from the plate. The Sox, under duress, changed it to 310.

A ladder that stretches from the upper left-hand corner of the scoreboard to the top of the Monster--built so employees can retrieve home run balls in the screen--has provided some of Fenway’s more comical caroms. It’s the only ladder in fair territory in baseball’s 30 parks.

The wall’s massive dimensions make it appear closer than it is, and that has made it a siren for right-handed hitters.

“But the Monster takes away a lot of homers too,� Angel outfielder Garret Anderson said. “Line drives off the top of the wall are homers anywhere else but singles and doubles there. It’s not as much a hitter’s park as people think.�

It’s not a pitchers park, though. There is virtually no foul territory from the middle of the outfield lines to the poles, and balls that are caught elsewhere often drop into the bleachers, giving batters a second chance.

And the bleachers in shallow left are almost parallel to an imaginary line between second and third, so grounders down the line usually carom back to the infield.

“I have to sprint out and get those balls,� Angel shortstop Gary DiSarcina said. “That’s unlike any other place.�

It’s also one of the toughest parks to coach third in. The Monster allows left fielders to play so shallow, it’s difficult to send a runner home from second on a single to left.

If the new Fenway is built, tentative plans call for the Green Monster to be left where it is and made into a public park. But even if the new park retains the defining features of the old one, part of Boston will die with Fenway.

Though many of the memories are sour--the Red Sox haven’t won a World Series since 1918, the season before they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees--Fenway has helped spawn an intimacy between fans, team and stadium that no other franchise can match.

Perhaps Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who produced a wonderful essay/photo book on Fenway this year, summed it up best:

“When they raze Fenway, it’ll be like cutting down an old tree,� Shaughnessy wrote. “Count the rings. There’s one for each celebration and heartache suffered by Red Sox fans.�