My Breakfasts with George

I knew George Kimball through his work for more than thirty years but I met him only three times. It is perhaps some measure of the man that each was unforgettable.

The first time was in the early 1980s, shortly after I moved to Boston after graduating from Bard College. I wasn’t a writer yet – at least I wasn’t published. But I knew I liked poetry and I knew I liked baseball, so each Opening Day I donned an old baseball uniform, parked myself on the sidewalk beneath Fenway Park’s Green Monster and read baseball poetry for two or three hours to the drunks standing in line for the bleachers. The first year a few newspaper reporters looking for local color stumbled upon me so the second year I sent out press releases. George Kimball called me and asked to meet him late one morning at the Eliot Lounge, the legendary Boston marathon bar. I didn’t know what he looked like. “Just ask for me,’ he said. “They know me there.”

I knew Kimball as a writer, both from the Boston Herald and from a story he’d written in 1971 while working for the Boston Phoenix called “Opening Day at Fenway,” which had been re-printed in the fine baseball literary anthology, Baseball I Gave You all the Best Years of My Life, edited by Richard Grossinger and Kevin Kerrane, a source I mined for baseball poetry. The story is more a sketch of characters, about Fat Howie and three cab drivers from Chelsea, and not a game story at all. I figured Kimball might be a kindred spirit.

I walked into the Eliot Lounge for the first time early the next afternoon, a day or two before opening day. I was the only customer and asked the bartender, who I now know was the legendary Tommy Leonard, if he had seen George Kimball. “Not yet,” he said, ‘But he’ll be around.”

As I nursed a beer a figure suddenly loomed nearby, all shoulders and shadow and spoke: “Hi Glenn, I’m George Kimball.”

He was wearing a ratty Army fatigue jacket, boots and a pair of blue jeans, his hair was uncombed and wild. He squinted at me with his one good eye and his face wore something approaching a beard. In short, he looked the way I was trying look. I knew of only two other one-eyed writers and they were both personal; heroes, the poets Robert Creeley and Jim Harrison. I figured I was in good hands.

I was. We talked for the next hour, half an interview and half just a conversation, and Kimball learned I had attended Bard and studied with the prolific poet Robert Kelly. He not only knew Bard, but he knew Kelly. A lifetime before they had both been part of the post-Beat literary scene in New York. As we talked it rapidly became obvious that Kimball had read everything I had and a whole lot more, that he had already lived the kind of life I had only read about, a life full of writing, and writers.

And now he was a sports writer. I couldn’t believe it. After getting out of school with a degree in writing poetry I was unemployable, a security guard and a library aide, but, rather remarkably, I had actually been interviewed twice for jobs as a sportswriter, once at a county weekly in Ohio, and by the Poughkeepsie Journal. Neither had hired me. Yet here was a living example that perhaps those efforts weren’t in vain. Here was someone who, like me, loved sports and literature and, I could tell, was exactly who he was and no one else. It was good to know there was a place for that. And maybe there was a place for me.

He wrote a nice column on me and I read poetry on Opening Day for another seven or eight years. By the time I stopped I had, improbably, become a sports writer for Boston Magazine, and was just beginning my tour of duty as series editor for The Best American Sport Writing and was working on my first book, while working at the Boston Public Library. In a funny way, none of that might have happened had I not started reading baseball poetry outside Fenway Park and been interviewed by George; people remembered the story, and I remembered his example.

I don’t remember meeting George again but we did speak a few times when he called the library for some research help, where I was the defacto go-to-guy for sports reference questions. And on a visit back to Bard once I had run into Robert Kelly and mentioned that I had met Kimball. He had just responded with a smile that told me the memory of their friendship was still real and treasured and told me “Give my love to Brother George.” The next time we spoke, I did.

I met George for the second time a couple years ago. Out of nowhere he sent me an e-mail that he was going to be passing through close to where I live in northwestern Vermont and he wanted to have lunch. I wasn’t going to be around so I had to pass, but a few weeks later he contacted me again. He was on his way to visit his kids, Teddy and Darcy, both of who lived and worked around the Jay Peak ski hill.

I waited for George at a small diner and when he lumbered out of the car, still smoking a cigarette, and I was both happy and sad to see him. Happy to see that he was the same unkempt, distracted wreck of a guy and sad to see that he was so sick. I had known he was ill but it was still a shock to see the shrunken figure of his face and his clothes hanging so loosely.

He just started talking, like we’d talked a hundred times before, and we ordered breakfast. Actually, George ordered twice, a massive pile of pancakes, extra butter, double butter, double toast, and I got it; he knew he was going to die, but damned if he was going to act like he was dying. This was a not a man who was going to go quietly.

Nominally, he wanted to talk about this boxing collection he and John Schulian were putting together, and wanted to know if I thought my editor at Houghton Mifflin might be interested. I gave him her information, but told him it was unlikely, as the book business was bad and anthologies a hard sell even in good times. But mostly I think he just wanted to talk, and as sick as he was he probably needed to take a break from the long drive, and he gave me a copy of Four Kings, his fine book on Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Thomas Hearns and Marvin Hagler, and I gave him a copy of the latest edition of The Best American Sports Writing, and we talked about books and writing and writers until the coffee was cold and the last of the melted butter had congealed on his plate. I didn’t expect to see him again.

A few months later, however, I heard from him once more, this time an invitation to meet for breakfast again at a Bistro in Burlington. I walked in and didn’t see George, so I asked a staff person if they had a table for “Kimball” and then I heard a familiar voice say “Are you here to meet George?”

Beer in hand, it was Bill Lee, the former Red Sox pitcher and his wife. I knew Bill a little and we started talking about George and how sick he was, but before we got too far, in he came, with several friends and his son and daughter and their partners and before I knew it I was swept up in the entourage sitting at huge table with about twelve other people all talking at once.

I hardly talked to George at all, but that didn’t really matter. He hadn’t wanted anything but was just being nice and wanted me in the mix. I spent most of the next two hours and two Bloody Marys talking to Bill Lee, not about baseball and not as a writer, but like a neighbor about the kind of things people our age who live in Vermont talk about; cutting wood, making syrup, crossing the border, aging parents and dying friends.

I didn’t see George after that, but I heard from him once in a while on Facebook, and I was thrilled when At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing was picked up by the Library of America, and some friends who knew him better than I kept telling me how he was doing, which was not well, physically, but fabulously otherwise. For as his former colleague at the Boston Herald wrote in his terrific appreciation for that paper yesterday * , “George didn’t ‘fight’ cancer, as is the meaningless cliché. He did something better. He ignored it.”

That he did, writing and writing and writing, to the last second of the last round. I’m just happy to have witnessed a small part of that, which was much more than a legacy, but a lasting lesson.

So today I think I’ll read “Opening Day at Fenway” and all about Fat Howie and three cab drivers from Chelsea one more time. And then get to work. There's alot of things I still have to say.


* http://bostonherald.com/sports/other_sports/general/view.bg?articleid=1350253&position=1

How Long Has This Been Going On?

I've written tweets of ten words, blog posts of fifty to a thousand, articles between 300 and 10,000 words, and books between 20,000 words and 250,000 words. Different genres, different audiences, topics and approaches require different lengths - which isn't even length really. It is time. Write as long as you need the reader's time to tell the story. In regard to books, and in consultation with your editor and according to your contract, you write the book the length it needs to be so when you're done you feel done, with no unanswered questions. Just don't drop a surprise at the end, and dump a book way long or way short on an editor expecting the opposite.

Much the same with chapters - 2,000 words, 15,000 words - write them, as long as they need to be to feel complete and unified. NEVER write a chapter to length just because you're stuck on a number.

The only real regret I have about any book I've written is when I've compromised according to length. As the late great David Halberstam once told a friend of mine "F-'em. It's your book. Your name is on the cover."

I think of chapter breaks like big breaths, where you feel the need to pause, inhale, ponder and move on - and you have to be a reader here, as well as a writer. Be sensitive to when natural transitions occur - an event comes to a close, a conclusion is reached, a character experiences some kind of defining moment, there is a moment of quiet before action, or action before quiet, some contraction in the narrative. Much of it is just learning to listen to your own work.

It helps, when ending a chapter, to find a way to lift it off the page a bit, and cause the reader to reflect a little, just like the end of a long story or magazine piece, where the story turns back on itself a bit, or the way a piece of music echoes earlier themes. Again, if you are just breaking off for the sake of breaking off, don't. And see if a lead for the following chapter comes easily. If it does, you're breaking it at the right place. But if you neither have an end, or a lead, then you simply might not be at the end of the chapter yet, or have already rushed past it. Trust me, it gets easier the more you do it.

It sounds simplistic, but it really helps sometime to scattershoot through your library just reading leads and ends to chapters, or magazine pieces - can help to brainstorm your own. You'll also realize that some writers you may like a great deal use the same strategies over and over. Nothing wrong with that, if it works, but I must admit that ever since I did that to a writer who I had always admired and realized that nearly every story ended with a similar sensory impression, my admiration dropped just a little. So don't abandon your change up and throw fastballs every time.

And use you outline as that - an outline. Maybe I'm the outlier, but I've never worried for a second about abandoning the outline as I write, as long as I make sure I cover the same territory. For the writer the writing process is also a learning process - no matter how much I think I know beforehand, I don't make the connections until the act of writing takes place, and that can cause me to recast the rest of the book entirely. One of the most lasting things I ever wrote came about when I was in the process of telling a small story that I expected to write over quickly, but found first one question that I didn't have an answer to, then another, then another, and all of a sudden not only did I have an entire new chapter, but the info in that chapter informed the remainder of the book and provided a entire logic that wasn't there when I started writing, and that I didn't know was there in my research.

Another reason why you do this.

You Better Be

[This column first appeared in Boston Baseball, July 2011]

You want to believe. I mean you really, really, really want to believe.

He’s your favorite, and your kids’ favorite. And the favorite of about half the 617. John Henry likes him, too.

On a team with little personality, he has most of it.

He’s the kind of story you root for. A childhood of poverty. A long struggle just to reach obscurity, and then he was released. Came here as insurance. Started out as an afterthought, the fourth option. Then fought his way – hit his way – into the lineup, then worked his way up: seventh, sixth, fifth, and finally fourth, cleanup. From obscurity to stardom, the scrap heap to the All-Star, a real life Matt Christopher story.

Then it got worse, which in a funny way, could make it even better now. The swing got slow. The fastballs got swung through. Then there was that report from 2003 . . . then the press conference, the denial, the excuse – they always have an excuse - and the slide. The Yankee fans jeered, made fun of him just like Sox fans made fun of A-Rod and Clemens. He stumbled and fell. Hard. Even the Sox started greasing the skids, sending out the word: “He’s finished. Done.” Rumor was they were preparing the papers for his release. And then . . .

Boom! Pow! Kr –unch! Back like a comic book character, a super-hero. Just when it seemed impossible, came the resurrection, like he turned back the clock.
A few years ago you wouldn’t have thought twice. You would have believed, totally. Absolutely.

But now . . . part of you just can’t. I mean it’s easy to forget and you stand and cheer each hard swing and home run and bat flip, and the way he brings the hugs out in the dugout still makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, and makes your kid smile, and you can’t wait to hear him talk because he’s funny even when he doesn’t try to be. After all these years, he’s still your favorite, still the one, the one who stood and delivered when they needed it most, the biggest reason no one chants “1918” anymore.

Yet every once in a while, maybe late at night when you’re sitting at the computer, you start to scan the stats, and that little question in the back of your mind, the one you keep pushing away and ignoring, well, it starts to whisper and then it starts to yell, and that pimple on your tongue starts to swell and you just can’t ignore it any longer.

How do you explain it? At his age, how can you explain it? How can he be having a season that by some measures might just be not one of his best, but the very best of his career? How does that happen? Who else did that at his age? What can explain it? There is the answer on the tip of your tongue you are afraid of, and then there are the other ones.

You tell yourself he’s healthy, that he was hurt and didn’t tell anyone and that now he’s healthy, so of course he’s back.

And the weight. Of course – that’s it! All that weight. He loves life and got too heavy and that slowed his bat, but now he’s in shape again. Just like the Babe - too many hot dogs.

That contract didn’t help either. Worries over the option probably gnawed at him all the time, kept him up, distracted him, but once he got the contract he could relax again. That makes sense.

Or else it was Manny’s fault, and that now that Manny is gone, everything is right again, that maybe they didn’t get along or he had a hard time adjusting to the way he was being pitched when Manny was on his way out the door. Yeah, that’s it. It was that bastard Manny.

Or else it’s A-Gone. He’s the Cure-All who fixes everything, floats all boats. Makes total sense. Because A-Gone is here, the big guy is back. He gets those pitches again. He’s got a buddy again, an amigo, a guy he can talk hitting with, another lefty, and some protection in the lineup.

That’s what it is. There’s not just one reason, but a lot of reasons. Add them all up and it makes perfect sense. The logic is irrefutable. And now you can turn off the computer and go to sleep.

But you can’t go to sleep. You stare at the ceiling, still awake, wondering.

You better be. You gotta be. You better be.

You better be clean.

Glenn Stout’s next book, Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Season, will be published in October. To order now, visit www.glennstout.net.

Death of a Ballplayer

Enjoy them, appreciate them, cheer them or boo them. Just don’t think for a second that you know them, that you have any idea whatsoever whether or not a given player is a “nice guy.” And that is as true for those who sit in the press box as it is for those who sit in the stands.

As I write this another old ballplayer had passed, a hero of my youth who I recall fondly from the scratchy black and white images that danced across our TV screen, and from the Technicolor baseball cards I sorted over and over again on my bedroom floor, memorizing his hobbies and statistics, using them to create a persona. Over the past twenty-four hours I have read tribute after tribute attesting not only to his ability as an athlete, but to his character as a human being. While the dimensions of his ability can be roughly measured by the numbers, there is no similar metric for virtue. I hope he was a nice guy, and have little reason to think otherwise, but I’ve read nothing from anyone who has any special insight into what the man was really like, who spent more than the odd hour or two in his company when he was fully aware that he was in the public view.

If one writes about sports, one is inevitably asked “What’s [insert name here] like? Is he a nice guy?” Although I haven’t met a large number of professional athletes, I have met and spoken to more than a few, ranging from guys like Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski and Phil Rizzuto to Jim Lonborg, Bill Lee, and Rich Gedman, and lesser known stars of bygone eras like Boston College football players Charlie O’Rourke and Lou Montgomery, former Celtic John Mahnken and many other players whose names now reside in the memory of another generation. Although all of them – even mercurial Ted Williams, despite the fact I had hair halfway down my back - were “nice” to me and, as far as I could tell, “good guys.” But each also knew that what he said and did was being written down and recorded.

I have no real idea whether any of these guys were, in fact, either nice or good. There can be such a vast difference between the public persona and the private that we might as well be talking about separate individuals, and I think most of us don’t have to look back very far or very deeply into our own lives to know that this is true. When I was a kid I had close friends who had fathers that I thought were terrific, guys that played ball with us in the backyard and took us places and made me wish my Dad had the time to do all those things with me. Of course at the time, despite the fact that I spent hours and hours and countless sleepovers in their homes, I didn’t know that one was regularly terrorizing his family with physical violence, and the other was raping his own daughter.

I’ve had people who have far more contact than I with professional athletes assure me that the guy I thought was good was in fact “a mute bleeping turd,” and that the guy that was supposed to be a horror show was actually “the best ever.” One friend who has regular contact with a Local Legend has told me at various times that the guy is either a nightmare or an altar boy, and there is no way to tell which guy you are going to get on a given day, or even from one minute to the next. The truth is that we do not know them at all, not ever, not really, no matter how many games we watch or how often we visit the locker room or play golf with them or see them in a restaurant or in a nightclub or visiting a hospital room or a sitting at a charity banquet or even standing in line at the grocery store.

All we know, really, is what we see on the field, whether they can run and hit, field and throw – at least if we’re willing to forget that the whole PED thing has cast even those perceptions and everything else that has happened in this game over the last two decades into doubt. The rest of our feelings toward them are only the pure projections of a fan, the fantasy we sell ourselves because he plays for “us,” tries to beat “them,” and wears the right colored cap. It is not the passing of the player that we mourn, but our younger, more innocent and less cynical selves, the kid who believed that baseball cards were true, and that virtue and talent were one and the same.

According to SportsIllustrated.com “In the capable hands of Stout, [Fenway 1912] promises to make all other books about Fenway’s construction and first season obsolete.” Glenn’s next book, Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Season, will be published in October. To order now, visit www.glennstout.net. This column originally appeared in Boston Baseball.

JUSTICE II

Let the poor reporting begin.

In the initial report of the disposition of Howard Bryant’s case on Masslive.com, the online news source for the Springfield Republican that covers Western Massachusetts, reporter Fred Contrada, although essentially correct, nevertheless managed to leave an incorrect impression which has since been picked up by numerous other outlets passing off second hand reporting as something more. Contrada accurately reports that Bryant “agreed to serve six months of pretrial probation.” Unfortunately, by failing to define “pretrial probation” a number of subsequent reports and headlines have erroneously stated that Bryant was “sentenced to probation.” That is not the case.

As described under Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 276 Section 87, Bryant was not sentenced to probation. He agreed to a very specific form of probation, commonly known in Massachusetts as “pretrial probation.” This is an administrative, negotiated agreement between Bryant and the court. It DOES NOT contain any admission of guilt and the defendant does not give up either his right to a trial or a presumption of innocence. It is not a “plea bargain,” since there is no plea, or acceptance of any kind of “lesser” charge. In essence, the court offers to make a procedural finding that, after a period of six months, will result in the case being dismissed and disappearing entirely unless the defendant violates terms of probation, which in this case means he is charged with a subsequent crime. Such an agreement is usually offered by the prosecution when the facts and evidence do not merit a trial, i.e. the State has no credible case. It is generally accepted by a defendant because, unlike some other procedural outcomes, such as a continuance without a finding (CWOL), which is sometimes offered in weak or inconsequential cases that the State does not wish to bring to trial, by accepting pretrial probation the defendant never pleads guilty or admits to anything about the charges. With a continuance without a finding (CWOL) the defendant still must admit to something on the record. Bryant, by agreeing to pretrial probation, does not. In six months the case, including his record of pretrial probation, disappears entirely from the record, as if he were never charged or arrested.

In the reporting of this case, what should have been the “lede,” (or, for those non-journalists now reading, the major point), was buried, and it has been buried in nearly every other subsequent report. The most significant point was the statement that “A careful review of all of the statements of percipient witnesses that have been collected do not support allegations that Mr. Bryant struck, choked, pinned against a car or committed any other act of violence against Mrs. Bryant,” a statement that repudiates the States’ own witnesses and the police reports of the incident.

In the end, the State concluded that there was no evidence that a crime was committed, and therefore no crime to prosecute. Case closed.

But it takes an open mind – and accurate reporting - to admit that.

JUSTICE

Earlier this morning my friend and colleague Howard Bryant was exonerated of criminal charges stemming from an incident in late February in Buckland, Massachusetts that resulted in his arrest and being charged with domestic assault and battery, assault and battery on a police officer and resisting arrest. To be absolutely clear, the statement released earlier today and signed by both Bryant’s attorney and Jeremy C. Bucci, Chief Trial Counsel of the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office in Greenfield, Massachusetts, reads in part:

“A careful review of all of the statements of percipient witnesses that have been collected do not support allegations that Mr. Bryant struck, choked, pinned against a car or committed any other act of violence against Mrs. Bryant. [emphasis mine] ”

In other words, the prosecutor’s office admits that there is no evidence that Bryant committed a crime, a level of vindication far stronger than a trial finding of “not guilty.” Similarly, neither is the district attorney prosecuting Bryant for either assault and battery on a police officer or resisting arrest. While the negotiated statement contains the usual pap that allows the district attorney’s office to save face politically, Bryant’s vindication is complete and undeniable. He has not “plea bargained” his way to a lesser charge; he is innocent.

This result – justice in a legal sense – is not a surprise to me. Howard Bryant is my friend. We often speak and he called shortly after his arrest, explaining what happened and proclaiming his complete and total innocence, something I never questioned. Yes, Howard and his wife had a dispute, one that unfortunately took place in public and one which they both regret, but one that involved neither violence nor the threat of violence. That is no crime. If such public disputes were criminal then we are all guilty.

I congratulate both Howard and his wife and now ask a question of all those who concluded that, simply because he was charged, that he was guilty or that “He must have done something.” As of earlier this morning, before the disposition of his case was made public, there were no less than 167,000 references to “Howard Bryant” “ESPN” and “assault” on Google – 55,000 from “News” sources alone. This does not include the thousands of reader comments that attacked Bryant’s character that were posted on news stories that reported on the incident in sources such as the Boston Herald, Boston Globe, Masslive.com, ESPN.com and others, or the hours of despicable, vitriol leveled at Bryant from certain Massachusetts-based sports broadcast outlets that were disseminated nationwide through the Internet and cable and satellite television. In combination, this has caused harm to his personal reputation that might well be irreparable.

“How does one regain his or her reputation?” is a question that has no easy answer. ESPN deserves some credit for not only standing behind Bryant from the start and rapidly disseminating today’s legal proceedings through ESPN.com, but that is just the beginning. For all those who publicly jumped to a conclusion of guilt, and, just as significantly, for those who by their silence left the same unmistakable impression, their complicity in that question remains. Whether they choose now to respond with continued cowardice or a measure of public courage and shame will prove telling.

Justice requires a response.

The Four Fenways

In this the one hundredth season of Fenway Park there is a tendency to see the ballpark as a single entity, a place that is somehow timeless, where a bygone era, while not preserved under glass, has nonetheless been protected, uncorrupted by the crass changes that elsewhere have stripped the game of its history. Not so. While Fenway still occupies the same physical space, it is Fenway Park’s ability to absorb change that has allowed it to remain standing to this day, the ballpark equivalent of Faneuil Hall. While that place survives to this day its origins are similarly buried. Wander its space today and it is impossible to imagine that Faneuil Hall itself started out as little more that a glorified sheep barn.

Fenway Park is a historical artifact and to see it clearly today one needs to examine it like an archaeologist. There are, I believe four Fenways, four distinct eras in the history of this place, four layers that history needs to examine and then peel back and remove to understand why it has survived.

At age one hundred, Fenway Park today – let’s call it Fenway IV - is dominated by everything that is now draped over its surface and essential structure. Never before has Fenway been more utilitarian, supporting all the accoutrements – save comfortable seats - that one now expects in any other modern “retro” ballpark. The ubiquitous and unrelenting barrages of piped in sound and signage, the restaurants, food courts, and pedestrian malls today makes the Fenway experience – apart from the actual contest – more like going to Faneuil Hall than going to a ballgame. Since the Henry/Warner group took over a decade ago, Fenway Park, far from clinging to its past, has instead embraced the future so rapidly that the past has become subservient. It’s most genuine elements, once functional features like that ladder on the left field wall, are now vestigial organs without purpose, footnotes of a history long gone.

It is staggering to me to think that fans of recent vintage have no memory of what I think of as Fenway III, classic Fenway which lasted from the re-construction of 1933/34 until the last decade. Fenway III, which bridged the era of Babe Ruth almost to the present, is the ballpark that I discovered and fell in love with when I first came to Boston in 1981. For more than fifty years Fenway was essentially the same, a quiet, solid, stodgy venue that for the most part no one thought of as very special and which stayed in the background, deferring to the game on the field. Watch footage of any game of this era today and one is struck by the starkness of the place, how barren and spare it appears, as plain and understated as Ned Martin. Not that Fenway remained static during this time period; it did not, but change took place at an almost glacial pace – bullpens in 1940, lights in 1947, etc. Fenway III was the ballpark that fathers took their sons to and then watched as those sons grew to fathers who took their sons to Fenway, a cross-generational experience whose essential nature changed only slightly over the years.

But even this classic version is a corruption of what preceded it. Fenway II existed from September of 1912 until Tom Yawkey bought the team and tore most of old Fenway down. This Fenway, much of which was built over a two-week period in September 1912 to increase the parks’ seating capacity for the 1912 World’s Series, spent the next twenty years in a state of decay, baking and bleaching under the summer sun. By the 1930s portions were condemned, making Fenway Park perhaps the most dangerous building in Boston. Its partial burning in the winter of 1933/34 was a blessing; had it not turned to smoke and ash it simply would have rotted away.

No one alive today remembers Fenway I, the infant ballpark, which lasted just less than a season. Consisting only of a simple concrete grandstand that barely extended past the dugouts, a small covered pavilion and a rectangle of bleachers seats isolated in center field, bound together by only a rough plank fence, Fenway I was almost formless. An outpost on outskirts, it was not shaped by the city. Instead, it was a place the city grew to surround and then a place its people eventually embraced on its own, changed to be sure, but somewhere underneath it all, still at the center of something approaching love.


[Glenn Stout’s next book Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Season, will be published in October. To order now, visit www.glennstout.net This essay first appeared in Boston Baseball, May 2011.]