Boston

On Finishing What You Started

Fenway Park, 2009

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Toronto Blue Jays vs. Boston Red Sox
Fenway Park
Major League Baseball, American League East
Boston, MA
7:05 PM


Outside the Game:
So, this was it. Or something similar.

It was with some ambivalence that I was approaching the end of this road, even temporarily. On the one had, it was the work of four years coming to fruition. On the other hand, I was going to Boston. No one needs that.

When I bought these tickets back at the start of the year, I got it because it was the only one available at the time that seemed to be sufficiently distant from the launch date of my project at work that would still allow me to see a game at Fenway before the end of the year. Fate would have it be the one where they could claim the wildcard, for whatever the hell that dubious honor is worth.

It is hard to argue against a unanimous decision, and every last person who I spoke to who had grew up in Boston, lived in Boston, or had passed through Boston at one point told me not to drive to Boston. While there is a certain bloody-mindedness that would have me do it just to spite the universal opinion, I decided to err on the side of caution in the land of every last thing that's wrong with the world.

So I found myself in the tender mercies of Amtrak. The fact that the birthplace of the railroad industry as a real item cannot do modern train travel when literally every other nation on Earth can is something of an embarrassment. To be fair, Amtrak has improved over my last interactions with them, but, my fellows, the bar was extremely low to begin. On the Accelas, at least, all of the seats in "Business Class" were First Class airline seats crammed into trains, and they try very hard to make it seem like an airline experience, and I don't even know where to begin with what's wrong holding the airline industry as your goal to achieve.

The name is a lie.

The experience was much like a three year old trying to draw in perspective -- they knew what they were trying to achieve, but did not quite have the motor skills to pull it off, and failed at some rather basic executions. The train, for example, rode like a covered wagon. It was bumpy, noisy, and listed precariously from side to side at several points during the journey, sending people walking in the isle horizontally into the seats they were passing. This isn't new technology, guys. It has literally been around for over 150 years.

Once arriving at Boston's Back Bay Station, it was a short walk to my hotel. I trundled up to my room, dropped off my gear, and then got directions to the nearest pharmacy to get some heat patches for my leg to relieve the searing pain in my knee.

Back at the hotel, I decided to take a stadium tour before the game, and even then, I had two hours to kill before the game, so I went out a little ramble. I started with a walk through the Public Gardens just north of my hotel, and then migrated westward to Boston Commons. I eventually went to the Granary Cemetery and wandered around in the area by the old City Hall before needing to get back to the "T" station to get my "Charlie Card" and ride on "subway trolley." I mean--come on, Boston. Work with me a little, here.

Hope isn't the only thing that dies here.

After the game, I got back to the hotel with no problem. I got some room service and then went to bed.

Mmm.... room service

The Stadium & Fans:

Home plate to center field, Fenway Park

Fenway and Wrigley are the only stadiums of any age worth talking about left in the majors, after the unnecessary closing of Yankee Stadium at the end of last season. It is for this reason that I left Boston for last, and it is because of this that I had to give it due consideration.

Unlike the modern stadiums which allow access to all but the most exclusive areas through rotundas and other modern architectural magic, the old parks often have many areas reachable by ticket-holders only, and this was part of the reason I decided to take a stadium tour. It is the first one I've ever taken, and while it was something to do before the game, and would give me access to all the areas of the park, it was just something I wanted to do.

I got one of the last $12 tickets to the 3 PM tour. The tour was unsurprisingly run by a local college student working part-time at Fenway. The tour was nice in itself, with the expected mix of boosterism and salesmanship, but not without an interesting flourish of history as well. And, as expected, we got to go up on the Green Monster seats, which was a ticket-only area during the game. We had to go there out of turn for the tour because the Red Sox were starting batting practice early, and people on the regular tours are not allowed up there for liability reasons. The rest of the tour was on the Budweiser party deck, the club area, and downstairs in the wooden Grandstand seats.

After the tour, I had about an hour before the gates opened officially, so I wandered around the area, very much similar to Wrigleyville in Chicago, filled with bars and souvenir stores, and parking lots.

Overall, in both Wrigley and Fenway, you can see the parks' origins in old bandboxes that got expanded around to eventually fill in the entire space available to them to the most capacity that could be forced in. It also throws the original Yankee Stadium is such sharp contrast in how much larger and grander it was than its rather small contemporaries with which it shared the league at the time. It was a Collosus amongst pygmies, but it was still of that age, just on a larger and grander scale.

Noted.

And it was with that tragic realization that I knew that there were on two cities left where real baseball was being played, and neither was New York anymore.

The fans were enthusiastic and copious, as Fenway has been sold out for over five years now. Although this game turned out to be of some potential import, I can't image it is much different any other days. And the fans were tried and true, with most of the crowd remaining through the weather difficulties. But more on that later.


At the Game With Oogie:

Look familiar?

I bought these tickets way back in February, and was able to get a decent $100 single in the loge boxes between the dugout and first base. This is the section between the "luxury' seats right along the wall of the field and the wooden seats that fill out the lower deck Grandstand. The seat was incredibly close to the field and well worth the money.

I was sitting next to a couple of older gentlemen who drove down from Maine (beg pardon, who "drahv dahn fra Mahne") to see the game. We got to talking throughout the proceedings, and they were making their yearly pilgrimage down to Fenway. As the game progressed at its slow pace, they expressed concern of getting home before 3 AM, a fear that was not eased when the rain started and we discovered our row was exactly two rows too far down to be under the cover of the upper deck.


The Game:

First pitch, Blue Jays vs. Red Sox

The term "brutal beating" gets bandied about so much these days... But I get ahead of myself.

By virtue of being beaten like a redheaded stepchild the weekend previous by the Yankees, the Red Sox entered the game with a "magic number" of 2, meaning that a combination of any two Red Sox wins or Texas Rangers loses would mathematically lock the Sox into the American League Wild Card. This could happen in this game if the Red Sox won and the Rangers lost.

This was not to be. Red Sox starter Josh Beckett was scratched before the start of the game due to "back spasms," so a Red Sox reliever was put in as a spot starter to try and get the job done.

He did not. After getting the first out in the first, he gave up five straight hits, putting the Sox into a 4-0 hole before they even came to bat. There was some light for Boston, as they got two back in the bottom of the first on a Yukilis two-run home run, and then getting the Blue Jays in order in the top of the second. Stranding the bases loaded in the bottom of the second would be as close as the Sox would get, as Toronto got three more in the third, and two more in the fourth and fifth, staking themselves out to an eventual 11-4 lead.

The game was also s-l-o-w. It was on pace for four hours-plus, as the Sox game to bat in the bottom of the seventh. But they began an unlikely rally, as the new Blue Jays pitcher walked two, and the Red Sox drove one of them in with no outs, making the score a slightly closer 11-5.

Whopise.

And then the sky opened up with the judgment of a vengeful god. Those paying attention to the scoreboard on the Green Monster would have noticed that the Yankees game against the Royals was just starting up after a rather extensive rain delay. The nature of the weather patterns on the east coast would have become apparent as the first desultory drops of rain came down, prompting the jeers of fans to those bailing to shelter at such mild weather. Those jeers would be silenced by the weight of the entire crowd surging to under cover as cold, torrential rain bathed the self-righteousness jeers from the park.

The scoreboard immediately claimed that it was passing weather, and hey, please enjoy the Yankees-Royals game while you wait. I imagine that Bush would receive a warmer welcome at the ACLU national convention.

I was holed up with the guys from Maine for most of it, as we retreated several rows up to get under the overhang. I only made one foray out into the stands to hit the bathroom, and it was like a refuge camp in the Fenway hallways, as people milled around, and the lines at the stands selling beer can only be described as epic.

So we all waited in the seats for a resumption that would not come. After an hour, the scoreboard changed from messages about "passing weather," to messages saying "It's not passing; go home." And a great whine went up from the crowd. In the course of my travels, I'd been to over 30 major league games prior to this. Although there were rain delays of varying lengths, I had never had one prematurely called for weather. Way to go, Boston.


The Scorecard:

Blue Jays vs. Red Sox, 09/28/09. Blue Jays win, 11-5. Rain shortened.

I ended up purchasing three score cards for this contest. The first was outside the stadium, where there was a concessionaire selling them at a discount from inside the stadium. Since there were other parks that had done this, and I couldn't imagine the score card business flourishing enough that the market could sustain more than one per stadium, I bought one, went inside, and immediately found out this was, in fact, not the official program.

Number two is the obvious purchase of an official card inside the stadium. Three was by virtue of the weather previously mentioned. The initial downpour had come largely as a surprise, and there was every indication that the game would continue after a rain delay. So I bought a third card in case the rain did in the first one. It proved unnecessary as the game was called within 15 minutes of my purchase.

The card itself was an average paper bi-fold in a rather thin $5 program. It was spacious enough for an AL game and otherwise unremarkable. I did have to put in the new notation for the rain cancellation instead of a delay, which was a first. A referencing of the rules revealed that the new rule on games called on account of the weather is that at the moment the game is called, the game ends at that exact point. I seemed to recall that the game reverted to the last completed half inning where the home team completed an inning (orafter the visitors batted when the home team was ahead), which would have made the end of the sixth the last official inning, but there appears to have been a rules change at some point.


The Accommodations:

Boston Plaza Hotel & Towers

I made my hotel reservation back when I bought my ticket in February, and as the nervous economic situation was just starting to get its steam at that point, I got a very reasonable rate for a room at the Boston Plaza Hotel & Towers, just south of Boston Commons and the Public Gardens. This hotel has been here a while, and is likely the illustration for "fancy-schmancy" in the OED, if it carried a definition for such a word. It is in the register for historic hotels in America, whatever that is. Impressive-sounding, though, isn't it? The place has an honest-to-goodness ballroom, and that's all you really need to know.

It was interesting that the doors to their rooms make watertight bulkheads on naval ships seem flimsy. I thought that the key to my room was not working properly, until I sheepishly discovered that I just wasn't pulling the door open hard enough. Once inside the bulkhead, you can be summoned by a doorbell that ever room has, perhaps because there is no chance in the world that you would hear anything short of manic pounding on the Brobdingnagian doors once inside the room.

On Going There and Back Again

Back Bay Station

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
Hoboken, NJ


Outside the Game:
There was not much to do today except get back home. I didn't bother to set my alarm clock at the hotel (not needing to be anywhere before noon), so I woke up when I woke up, stumbled downstairs to the breakfast buffet, and ate the hotel out of house and home. I don't know why I was so hungry, but I do know that I had at least one of everything and two of most.

Since my knee was acting up after all the walking around the day before, I went back up to my room and packed up my stuff while filling the tub up for a needed soak. After that, it was time for checkout.

The train station was only a few minutes walk away, and I had an hour or so to kill before the Amtrak train was rumored to show up. I killed it walking around the "Southwest Corridor Park," and came to two realizations about Boston.

The first was why no one in Boston could drive. And the answer is simply that the traffic system in Boston was arranged by someone on drugs -- and not fun, gateway drugs, but someone on a hard-assed cocaine binge, or perhaps LSD. Further research is necessary to determine the exact cocktail of pharmaceuticals. Contrary to every single other city planning on the face of Earth, the crosswalk patterns in Boston are not arranged so that the two parallel-traveling sides of pedestrian traffic cross at the same time. Oh no, we could not have that. At intersections, two sides of the street going perpendicular to each other cross at the same time, meaning that you could be stranded at a corner with no legal way to cross. No wonder people in Boston can't drive -- this is the system they were taught. There are probably ex-traffic wardens in Mogadishu who would look at this state of affairs and shake his head sadly over the travesty to civic organization.

The other is why I don't cotton to Boston. And it boils down to it being a completely self-conscious city, a statement which needs to be unpacked a bit more. NYC, for example, is built on one single principle: capitalism. Everything that is there, everything that happens there, and everything that goes there is there to make a buck, from the lowliest artist dreaming to make it big, to the douchebag suburban stock manager who commutes there every morning. Because old can sometimes equal money, there's still a bunch of old things there, but only as long as they are valuable as old things. New Jersey, for example, is completely function over form. With very few exceptions, most of the cities and towns in New Jersey have one or two old buildings, and beyond that, you couldn't prove that the place wasn't built in the 70s (or at most, the 50s) because it is just rebuilt and rebuilt to the current standards of suburban living. As a contrast to Boston, there is San Francisco, which in a lot of ways is like Boston, but without the self-consciousness. San Francisco, for lack of a better world, is more "practical" in its organic-ness, in that while there is a lot of form, there is also a lot of function to that form, and that the development was more organic and less self-possessed. Boston, while it has an excellent record with historic preservation and being a haven for the arts, is... not quite smug about it, perhaps, but it definitely seems to be doing it more for how other people who perceive it instead of how it is used. In New York, something is there because it makes money. In New Jersey, something is there because a mom needs it. In San Francisco, something is there because someone is using it. In Boston, something is there because someone thinks they should have "one of those."

Or perhaps I think I can actually edit this down even further: If you got the people at "Things White People Like" to design a city from scratch, it would look an awful lot like Boston.

After some walking around, I wandered back to Back Bay Station to catch my Accela back to NYC. The train showed up vaguely at the time it was expected, and after crashing down in the sort-of-filled mid-day train, I promptly lapsed into a nap for an hour or so.

The ride back to the city was uneventful beside an announcement from the train staff about the importance of locking the rest room doors, which I have to imagine was prompted by a specific incident that we missed in our car.

I was dropped back into midtown at rush hour, and after a day in Boston, I found myself smiling in spite of myself as I leaned a shoulder into some guy who wouldn't get the hell out of my way.


The Accommodations:
Home, for whatever it is worth.

Click here to see all the photos from this trip.

2009 Stand-Alone trip