Fenway Park

Mickey Mantle once said that playing 18 seasons at Yankee Stadium was the best thing that could have ever happened to a ball player. Unfortunately, that Yankee Stadium that Mantle referred to was torn down and rebuilt with a luxury boxes, club seats, and where for $5, you can see half of the stadium.

The chant was clear even on television, so it must have been deafening if you were one of the lucky 37,000 or so in the stands. During the middle innings of Saturday’s showdown with the Kansas City Royals at Fenway Park, the now familiar wave of “Yankees Suck! Yankees Suck!” cascaded down from the bleachers.

And it was downright depressing.

Think about the mystique of leftfield at Fenway. Punctuated by the famous and historic 37 foot tall, 310 foot deep wall, the Green Monster.
Some of the greatest players to play the game. Williams. Yaz. Manny. Those are just three of the precious few who have had the pride and privalige of playing leftfield at Fenway Park for the Boston Red Sox.

I had touched on this topic last summer when the Red Sox surpassed the Cleveland Indians previous record of 455 consecutive sellouts and I am quite sure that being a Yankee fan I will be accused of being a Red Sox hater and biased in my writing.  

To be truthful, I do hate the Red Sox. But you can see in my previous articles that I also give credit where credit is due.  Deep down, as a fan of baseball, there are certain things that are true regardless of my opinion and I do not have issue with admitting and/or debating these things.

While I know Bleacher Report is not really for full length books, I thought I'd review a baseball book I just read, entitled Theology: How a Boy Wonder Led the Red Sox to the Promised Land.

Red Sox fans, this is your kind of book. Not only does it go into detail on Theo Epstein's early life right up to the present, but it does this in a way that everyone can understand.

Have you ever experienced a dream so vivid, so real, that once awoken from you used everything you could think of to enter its surreal shadows again?

Or perhaps at such a place that you were completely at peace, perfect amid your surroundings like you actually were made for this world?

Those moments are few and broadcast with great care throughout one’s life journey. They are so rare indeed that by the time you find yourself within the ethereal grasp of one, anything past has been long forgotten, dismissed somewhere between a dream and a fantasy.