Ultimate Baseball Road Trip by Josh Pahigian, Kevin O’Connell Read Free Book Online

energy-efficient bulbs.
    Monsters Aplenty
    Aside from spawning backyard Wiffle Ball replicas throughout New England, Fenway’s Wall has been copied at several professional fields. The most notable of these from a Red Sox fan’s perspective are the facsimiles at JetBlue Park in Fort Myers, Florida, where the Red Sox have played their Spring Training games since 2012, Hadlock Field in Portland, Maine, where the Red Sox’ Double-A prospects play, and Fluor Field in Greenville, South Carolina, where the franchise’s Single-A prospects play. This is a savvy move. By the time aspiring Sox left-fielders, pitchers, and hitters reach the Show, they already know how a thirty-seven-foot-high fence in left field can change a game.
    Although we do so with less enthusiasm, we must also mention that the Bucky Dent Baseball School in Delray Beach, Florida, also features a Monster replica. The highlight of Dent’s career came in 1978, of course, when he lifted the Yankees to victory in a one-game playoff at Fenway Park to determine the American League East crown. The winning blow came in the seventh inning when Dent lofted a Mike Torrez pitch into the screen for a three-run homer. To this day, Dent is referred to throughout New England as “Bucky F---ing Dent.” As for the biggest difference between the real Green Monster and Dent’s replica? Rather than featuring a slate scoreboard like the one in Boston, Dent’s scoreboard is painted onto the wall and frozen in time to appear exactly as it did after his home run. The line score shows that three runs have just crossed the plate for the Yankees, that number 21 (Torrez) is pitching for the Red Sox, and number 49 (Ron Guidry) is pitching for the Yankees.
THE PRU
    On the right-field skyline, the Prudential Tower rises in the distance beyond the Bleachers. You’ll be able to see it if your seats are on the third base side. During the 1986 World Series, Boston’s corporate types displayed their yankee (with a lower case “y”) ingenuity when they turned the Pru into a giant billboard. A coordinated effort signaled “#1” in the form of office lights left on overnight. During the 2004 and 2007 World Series, the strategically illuminated offices read, “Go Sox.”
THE RED SEAT
    The story of how a solitary red seat came to reside among the sea of green seats in Fenway’s Bleachers is a rather colorful one. The seat, which sits in the thirty-seventh row of Section 42, high above the visitors’ bullpen, became an unlikely Fenway landmark on a Sunday in June of 1946 when it was the landing spot of the longest home run in Fenway history. A fifty-six-year-old construction worker from Albany, New York, named Joseph Boucher was sitting on one of the actual bleacher benches that filled the Bleachers back then. And he was wearing a big straw hat to keep the late-afternoon sun out of his eyes. He squinted, but he didn’t quite see the 502-foot homer Ted Williams hit off Detroit’s Fred Hutchinson. Not until the last minute. That’s when the incoming projectile punched a hole in Boucher’s hat and left him with a bump on his noggin the size of a baseball. To ease Boucher’s suffering, Tom Yawkey awarded him season tickets for life. And the lifelong Yankee rooter, according to Red Sox lore anyway, cheered for the Red Sox forever after.
    Decades later, when the Red Sox replaced the old benches with chair-backs in the 1970s, they decided to commemorate the spot where Boucher had been sitting. Local fans and sportswriters agreed no one had come close to hitting a ball that high into the bleachers since Williams, and so the newly minted red chair became the official marker of the longest homer in Fenway history. As a testament to Williams’s prowess, the seat easily withstood the onslaught of the Steroid Era, even as the admittedly juiced David Ortiz set a Red Sox record with fifty-four home runs in 2006.
RETIRED NUMBERS
    According to the official Red Sox guidelines, players need accrue at