baseball

It's obvious that Major League Baseball fans love the home run, because they voted Sammy Sosa, Ken Griffey, Jr., Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire into the All-Star Game at Fenway Park as starters.

No doubt there is great anticipation of seeing four of the greatest sluggers in history take their hacks against the left-field wall known as the Green Monster. And perhaps they can go the other way, toward right field, and land a ball beyond the red seat that marks the longest homer in Fenway's illustrious history - a homer hit by none other than the Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams, more than 50 years ago. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author and baseball historian David Halberstam, the walk into the park often is as exciting as the game.

"I think walking up to Fenway is thrilling," Halberstam said in a new book published about Fenway. "The approach to it. The smells. You go to Fenway, and you revert to your childhood. You go to Fenway, and you think: 'Something wonderful is going to happen today.'"

In the book - entitled "Fenway, a biography in words and pictures," published this year - writer Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe and photographer Stan Grossfeld, an associated editor at the Globe, pay tribute to one of Major League Baseball's most storied parks. And, due to construction delays on Milwaukee's new stadium, Fenway will be in the national spotlight for perhaps the final time as it hosts its third All-Star Game.

You can't talk about Fenway without talking about the Green Monster, perhaps the most famous outfield wall in baseball history - a wall that Shaughnessy described in his book as a "New England monument, no less so than Bunker Hill Monument, the Old Man of the Mountain or Walden Pond."

The wall was built, Shaughnessy wrote, to keep balls in play. But more memorable are the balls that have sailed over it - home runs like the one hit in 1978 by Bucky Dent, whose pop fly in any other park cleared the Monster and gave the New York Yankees a victory over Boston in a one-game playoff to determine the division champion. And because the Monster is only 309 feet from home plate at the left-field foul pole, plenty of balls have been hit over it. It is the shortest fence of any major-league ballpark, and rules today stipulate that no wall in any park be closer than 325 feet from home plate.

But, as short as it is, at 37 feet high and capped by a 23-foot screen, the Green Monster can frustrate batters like McGwire and Canseco, who may be able to hit the ball far, but not high. It also can make opposing fielders look bad. Jim Palmer told Shaughnessy about the time Baltimore teammate Don Buford saw a ball skip through his legs, turned around to try and retrieve it and then watched the ball zoom through his legs once again after it caromed back off the wall.

It would be difficult to find another sports arena with a feature as famous as Fenway's Green Monster. Frightfully deceiving. Inviting even the most hapless amateur to step tp the plate and try to hit a ball over it.

"You hear a lot about it," Dent told Shaughnessy for the book. "But when you actually walk out there and see the Wall, you realize what an impact it has on you as a player."

Inside the wall is one of baseball's last hand-operated scoreboards that also adds to the allure of Fenway. And with the cozy dimensions of the park - the right-field pole is only 302 feet from home plate - runs could be going up on the board at a fast rate on Tuesday.

It could be the right-field wall that gets McGwire's, Sosa's, Canseco's or Griffey's attention - or, rather, what's beyond that wall. For, just as famous as the Green Monster is a seat in right field that's painted red - the lone red seat in a sea of green ones - that marks the spot where Ted Williams hit the longest measured home run in Fenway's 87-year history. Newspaper accounts at the time claimed that the 1946 blast traveled 450 feet. But the Red Sox measured the distance in the mid-1980s and got an official number of 502 feet.

"It's hard to believe anybody could hit a ball that far," former Boston player Mo Vaughn told Shaughnessy. "I know I've never even come close - not even in batting practice. I mean, it's not even down the line. It's in the gap. You can barely see that thing."

The Monster, the scoreboard, the red seat and the coziness of the park are just some of the features that make Fenway unique. Love it or hate it, the park always seems to evoke emotion, a lot of it captured in the book by Shaughnessy and Grossfeld, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer whose pictures in the book are as riveting as Shaughnessy's written words.

This book, and the equally wonderful FENWAY SAVED, are both perfect gift books for Boston fans and baseball lovers everywhere. Many people come to Boston and one of the first places they go is Fenway Park. It's the oldest park around and, like Wrigley Field in Chicago, it's the REAL THING! Almost unbelievably, the Red Sox plan to knock it down but they say they will be keeping parts of it as a memory.

What's the difference between the two books? FENWAY shows you the whole experience of going to a baseball game at Fenway Park, from the vendors to the fans and the game. The authors had access and got inside the wall and into the dressing room to take shots. They have more big name celebrities giving quotes. FENWAY SAVED, the other gift book, focuses more on the park itself is maybe a more serious one in that it provides more information and perspective and maybe a few more interesting stories along with a roughly equal number of excellent (but a bit less consistently so) photos. The better text balances out the slightly weaker photography. Don't get me wrong, though - the photography is very strong overall.

I give both books a full 5 stars. FENWAY SAVED costs five cents less.

Why the fixation on the men's room at Fenway, Danny Boy? I thought those revealing pictures were insensitive and disgusting, and can't be justified by a Mapplethorpian defense of their artistry.