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Last night we went to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox cream the LA Angels. My dad got tickets for his birthday, so we've waited months for our chance to seat in the old wooden seats and look out on America's sweetheart of a baseball field. Fenway is the oldest baseball stadium still in use in the country, and there are odd things about it (apparently). For one thing, it's smack dab in the middle of the city. Really. No vast parking lots for fans. Right next to a thoroughfare. Surrounded by bars and restaurants and office buildings and the same two-lane streets as everywhere else in town. And there's the Green Monster and the Triangle and Williamsburg and one single red seat in the sea of green ones (look it up on Wikipedia if you're very curious about the place -- too much baseball lingo gets in my way of really understanding a lot of the significance of things). I think it's neat that the score board is still updated manually by a guy who sits inside, and occasionally walks out to update scores of other Major League games throughout the game.
We took the T down and were fairly carried into the train and then down the street by the hoards of red and navy clad people. At least there was no need to carry and read a map; if we'd wanted to go in some other direction we would have been hard pressed to do so. We made it a true ballpark experience with hot dogs and beer and swapping facts with other fans and crunching peanut shells under foot. And lucky for us, it was a good game too! Well, it was a slow start, but at the sixth inning things picked up with the Sox scoring twice. And we got to see Papi Ortiz hit a home run that broke the record for the most number of home runs by a designated hitter. It was pitcher Daisuke's first game back after being out with injuries too, so everyone was pretty jazzed to see their boy back on the mound.
In the end the score was 4-1, Sox triumphant. And much yelling and cheering and singing and clapping later, we dragged our sorry butts across the river to the nearest T not mobbed by 45,000 jubilant fans, and fell into bed to dream of a World Series victory. Go Sox!
