Articles

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I hoped to include a section of quotes at the beginning of the book, or at least insert a quote to lead each chapter. But I wasn’t able to get either done, so instead here are the best quotes I’ve found about Fenway Park and Red Sox baseball. “…the Wall giveth and the Wall taketh away.”   “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ball park. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.” “Baseball isn’t a life-and-death matter, but the Red Sox are.” “All literary men are Red Sox fans. To be a Yankee fan in literary society is to endanger your life.” “The Yankees belong to George Steinbrenner and the Dodgers belong to Manifest Destiny, but the Red Sox, more than any other team, belong to the fans.” “An almost inexorable baseball law: A Red Sox ship with a single leak will always find a way to sink … No team is worshipped with such a perverse sense of fatality.” “Boston has two seasons: August and winter.” “The Red Sox are a religion. Every year we re-enact the agony and the temptation in the Garden. Baseball child’s play? Hell, up here in Boston it’s a passion play.” “Almost anywhere in Fenway you feel connected. There are no distant seats. There really is a feeling of connection and intimacy.” “There’s no place like it, and it’s ours.” “… I’ve got this ace in the hole in the back of my mind that it will never happen because Boston is so goddamned corrupt that it’s be forty or fifty years before they grease enough palms.” “Great stretches of Canadian forests have been destroyed to print the paper on which people have written paeans to Fenway Park. There’s something in its intimacy, there’s something in that incredible green-ness. There’s something in the peculiarity of the way that the outfield follows its meandering pathway from right to left …” “The Great Wall of Boston, the left field fence, the Tombstone of the Red Sox. It has done more to bury their pennant chances year in and year out than the generations of scatter-arm shortstops, banjo hitters, crooked-arm pitchers and even the unfriendly press. The Wall is the biggest enemy to Boston since the Redcoats.”