This song is about the littering of smashed beer bottles around Fenway Park in Boston. "Land of the glass pinecones" "They smash on the grass when the wind blows" Referring to how heaps of broken brown glass resembles pinecones.posted by benito.strauss at 3:52 PM on April 22, 2012
I grew up in rural Maine, at a time when kids got their drivers' licenses early. My best friend's big brother got his at 16, and his father offered him a deal. Drive accident free for a year, he said, and you can take the car to Boston and watch the Red Sox play at Fenway Park. He made it through the year, and one day in the late summer of 1959, a bunch of us piled into an old Ford station wagon and make the 100-plus-mile drive to the only ballpark that mattered to kids from New England.Bonus, from The Onion News Network: Red Sox Announce Plans To Return Fenway To Original 1912 Conditions
Not that the Red Sox were such a hot ticket back then; for most of the '50s they wandered in the Big League wilderness, almost always finishing behind the hated Yankees. You could get a seat in the second tier for just a couple bucks (a box seat might have set you back a five-spot), and many fans of what my uncle called "the Dead Sox" might have argued that even 75 cents for a bleacher seat was too much. The 1959 season wasn't any different; the Olde Towne Team finished with a record of 75 wins and 79 losses, 19 games behind the pennant-winning White Sox.
According to the endlessly carnivorous Hub sportswriters, team spirit was low to nonexistent. There was the widely believed (but untrue) anecdote about how, after games at Fenway, 25 players left the park in 25 different taxis. Ted Williams, the greatest player ever to wear a Red Sox uniform, was in the twilight of his career, and average attendance hovered around 13,000 per game (compare that to the last few years, when the Red Sox have sold out the park for more than 700 consecutive games).
But they were what we had, and we loved them. We said howdy to Curt Gowdy when he came crackling over the AM band of our transistor radios, and we listened to him, along with Bob Murphy and Bill Crowley, during games that were televised - in beautiful black and white - on weekend afternoons. We groaned and covered our eyes when cleanup hitter Vic Wertz struck out in clutch situations, and pounded our legs in frustration when yet another Red Sox pitcher - Mike Fornieles, or maybe Murray Wall - gave up a bunch of runs. We waited for the days when Ike Delock or Bill Monbouquette ("Monbo") took the mound. Those were pitchers you could count on, we told each other.
Well, mostly.
Win or lose, we cared. We had to care, because who else were we going to root for? The rich-boy Yankees? Please. If you asked a kid what he wanted for his birthday, or where he'd most like to be on the Fourth of July, you could pretty much count on the answer: Fenway Park. We were country kids, clodhopper farmboys and farmgirls. For us, a trip to Portland, Maine or Portsmouth, N.H., was a big deal. And Fenway? That would have been like a trip to Mecca, or Lourdes, or Notre Dame Cathedral. It was the hardball Nirvana we imagined when we heard Gowdy yelling, "That ball's hit deep! Williams back ... back ... up against the wall ... he leaps ... he's got it! Williams made the catch!" It was the miniature park we saw - blurrily, as if through smeared spectacles - on the tiny 19-inch screens of our TVs. To go there was one of the things I wanted most in the world.
And in the late summer of 1959, I got the chance.
I was 12 years old, and although I'd played plenty of baseball in the potato field across from the one-room school I attended in West Durham, Maine, and had watched a few Babe Ruth League games at the nearest high school, I had never seen a professional playing field. The memory of the first time I did is perfectly clear and still wonderful more than 50 years later.
We drove into the grimy city, and after a certain amount of wandering (we were country kids, remember), we found our way to the Fens, where an elderly gent - he must have been all of 40 - took our 50-cent fee and waved us into the half-filled parking lot under a billboard advertising Optimo Cigars. In those days, Fenway was surrounded by sooty buildings and sinister-looking bars, but as we approached the ticket windows, we could hear the organ and smell roasting peanuts - the best sound and aroma combo ever, in this New England boy's humble opinion.
We wandered around a dark concourse, almost feeling our way. We purchased soda and hot dogs. Today you can buy all sorts of good grub at Fenway, including fruit cups, veggie burgers and clam "chowdah," but in '59 your choices were much more limited: peanuts, popcorn, and hot dogs. The pups cost a dime, and when it came to dressing them up, you had one choice and one choice only: mustard-by-the-post.
Snacks in hand, we walked up the ramp toward a framed square of blue New England sky. And when we came out into the sunshine ... man, my breath caught in my throat. Nothing I'd heard on the radio or seen on television could have prepared me for how preposterously beautiful Fenway Park was on that August day. John Updike called it "a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark," but to me there was nothing little about it. It looked like a gigantic green jewel shining in the afternoon sun. I had loved the Red Sox since I was old enough to wave a souvenir pennant in my chubby little fist, but that was the day, that was the moment, when I fell in love with the park. There is nothing like it, literally nothing, in all of professional sports. We saw the Tigers play that day, and Al Kaline hit a double. I heard the crack of the bat, so much louder than it was when it came through a speaker - so much truer - and saw the ball kick off the center-field wall. I ate my hot dog; I drank my soda; I caught a bag of peanuts; I thought I might have died and gone to heaven.
Since the mid-'80s, I've been a season ticket holder. I've seen some great games and some amazing performances. I've watched Bob "The Steamer" Stanley pop beach balls in the bullpen and commiserated with my daughter when she fell in love with Calvin Schiraldi (mostly, I think, it was the hair). I held my youngest son when he burst into tears after his idol, Oil Can Boyd, lost to the Mets in Game 3 of the 1986 World Series. I was on my feet - and in agony - when Tom Brunansky disappeared from view, chasing Ozzie Guillen's ninth-inning drive on Oct. 3, 1990. One of those Fenway eccentricities - in this case, the way the right-field stands jut out - made it impossible for anyone on the first-base side of the park to see the catch. It wasn't until the bleacher creatures leaped to their feet, roaring in triumph, that we knew Brunansky had indeed made the catch and that the AL East title was ours.
Here's what I'm saying, in case you missed it: There are good Red Sox teams and teams that aren't so good, but our ballpark is always the best. It's unique, and you can't really claim it until you've spent time there yourself, getting used to its agreeable strangeness. When you can talk about Canvas Alley and the Pesky Pole, it's yours. When you've seen your share of weird bounces in the left-field corner and watched the giant flag unfurl over the Green Monster a few times, it's yours. When you've heard the bonk of a line-drive caroming off the tin of that selfsame Green Monster, or watched crazed fans with their rally caps turned around backward pounding on the padding over by the home dugout, it's yours. You've reached the inner circle.
Any guy or gal with a Red Sox T-shirt and a TV can be a resident of Red Sox Nation; we welcome all comers. But once you've been to the park a few times, once you've had a chance to breathe that special air, you become part of the smaller circle - an enchanted circle, in my opinion. Then you can claim your citizenship in Fenway nation. There's no better place on Earth.
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posted by escabeche at 1:50 PM on April 20, 2012 [1 favorite]