I was smitten.  Like that pretty girl you just can’t take your eyes off of, Fenway Park had me swooning.

On a hot summer day in 2004 Mike and I decided to take a weekend trip to Boston.  The centerpiece of the trip would be two tickets to Fenway Park to see the Red Sox do battle with the Detroit Tigers.

The day before the game we started our Fenway experience with a tour of the stadium.  This was quite cool, as it took us up to the press boxes, into the executive .406 club and best of all, all the way up into the Green Monster seats.  I was amazed at how beautiful this 92-year-old stadium was.  It is the smallest stadium in baseball and the seats are amazingly close to the field.  I was charmed by all of its quirkiness: the famous green monster, the manual scoreboard, Pesky’s foul pole, the odd angles in the outfield, and the utter lack of foul territory.  Even the beams that support the upper deck and leave plenty of seats with an obstructed view add a certain olden-days charm to this stadium.  This was the first time I have been in a stadium and could almost imagine being in that same seat watching the likes of Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and other greats playing ball.

Of course, the seats have a lot to do with the Fenway experience.  The seats in the Grandstand section where Mike and I sat are old wooden seats installed a long, long time ago, and not designed to fit the 21st century baseball fan.  These must easily be the most uncomfortable seats in all of baseball.  Aside from the sore posterior you are inevitably going to have after a Sox game, you are pretty much packed into the stadium like sardines, affording you the opportunity to get to know your fellow fan a little too well.  At one point I stood up in my seat and banged into the fellow sitting next to me.  I apologized, to which he laughed and slapped me on the back — he’s obviously been through this before.

While the game itself wasn’t a marquee match-up, the Sox were on a hot streak going towards September and creeping up on the division leading Yankees, and the fans were into the game.  The knuckleballer, Tim Wakefield was pitching for the Sox against Wilfredo Ledezma.  With Wakefield’s knuckleball consistently hitting 65 mph on the radar gun, it was amazing to see the Detroit hitters continue to take huge swings-and-misses, looking completely baffled.  These were easily the worst looking swings I’d seen since watching Randy Johnson make the Arizona Diamondbacks look silly over five years before.  The only offense the tigers could muster was a lazy fly-ball homerun over the green monster by Craig Monroe in the top of the 5th, one of 3 hits and 7 strikeouts the Tigers put up against Wakefield.

Meanwhile, the Red Sox scored 4 in the bottom of the 5th with a 2-out rally and RBI singles by Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz and Kevin Millar.  In the 7th, Mark Bellhorn popped a 2-run homer to right scoring Johnny Damon, and the Red Sox swept the series with a 6-1 win.

Between the cramped conditions, high ticket prices and obstructed views, their are a lot of reasons not to like Fenway Park, but what I found was that their are so many more reasons to love Fenway.  Its a true classic and an ageless beauty.