4/20: TODAY IN HISTORY

Hey everyone, happy 4/20!

Why so mellow? Don’t you have any idea what today is? It’s Fenway Park’s 100th birthday!

LOL wait, you can’t hear me because there are corn dogs in your ears and you’re so hungry you want to eat them?

Let me rephrase it.

One freaking century ago, Fenway Park opened as the home of the Boston Red Sox. It is now the oldest ballpark in the country with classic little quirks like the Triangle (the nook off center field where the stadium walls form a triangle corner exactly 420 -!!!- feet from home plate), Pesky’s Pole (the right field foul pole), the Lone Red Seat (shiny soul in the right field bleachers) and the Green Monster (the left field wall that right hand hitters love).

Here’s a 4/20 hallucination for you: imagine going to a Sox game in 1912. Wait, what does 1912 even look like? For starters, it was the year the Titanic sank.

Now that all your knowledge about 1912 is based off a James Cameron movie, imagine strolling into Fenway in either cuffed trousers or ankle-length skirts, applauding primly after an especially good play and indulging in the occasional expletive when things on the field get all balled up.

“Applesauce!” and/or “Horsefeathers!”

Things were a little different then, but at the time, Fenway was basically the Titanic (pre-iceberg oopsies) of ballparks. Made out of concrete and steel, it was one of the brand spankin’ new parks to open that year and its manually operated scoreboard was considered state of the art. When the Sox played out of town, their scores were sent back home via telegraph and were then placed on the scoreboard. Isn’t that adorable?

That’s what live-tweeting an event was like for the early 20th century.

Times have changed. Fenway got itself an electronic scoreboard in 1934 and upper deck seats were added 12 years later. Since then, the Red Sox have won seven World Series titles and 12 AL pennants. Nine years ago, they began a sellout streak, which is now the record in Major League Baseball (718 games).

Today, the Red Sox play against the New York Yankees, the same team they faced one hundred years ago on Fenway’s opening day. There’s going to be a fancy pregame ceremony and both teams will wear 1912 throwback uniforms, which is pretty awesome.

Or as they said a hundred years ago, “Ain’t that the cat’s pajamas!” …or something.