David Oshinsky: Review of "Fenway Park: 100 Years -- The Official, Definitive History of America’s Most Beloved Ballpark"

David Oshinsky, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, teaches history at the University of Texas and New York University.

No ballpark, with the exception of Wrigley Field in Chicago, is so closely linked to heartache. What rabid Red Sox fan of middle age doesn’t flash back to 1975, when Tony Perez of the Cincinnati Reds helped decide Game 7 of the World Series by blasting Bill (Spaceman) Lee’s absurd blooper pitch into orbit? Or to Bucky Dent’s pennant-crushing, wall-scraping homer three years later? But the fact remains that such moments are not limited to Fenway Park. Take 1946, when Johnny Pesky held on to the ball while Enos (Country) Slaughter scored the winning run in Game 7 of that World Series. The place: Sportsman’s Park, St. Louis. And let’s not forget the ultimate nightmare — Shea Stadium, 1986 — when Bill Buckner opened his legs too wide. Statistics show that the Sox have done well over the years in their hitter-friendly ballpark, largely because they would pack their lineup with lead-footed sluggers. Trouble has come mostly on the road....

For those seeking a more celebratory perspective, “Fenway Park: 100 Years” is a solid choice. (If you don’t live in Boston, it may not be available at your local bookstore. But you can find it online, at BN.com and at redsox.com/Fenwaybook.) A sleek coffee-table volume published jointly by Major League Baseball and the Boston Red Sox, it portrays Fenway as the St. Peter’s Basilica of American sports, a celestial structure, endlessly welcoming and achingly unique. And that’s not just Major League Baseball and the Red Sox talking: the book is larded with the recollections of lifelong Sox fans saying much the same thing. Several are funny and evocative; thank you, Conan O’Brien, James Taylor and Stephen King. Others are not. For some reason, the origins unknown to most of Red Sox Nation, the team has long been the darling of talking heads and intellectuals who lose no chance to impress us with their feel for the game. As a public service, readers of “Fenway Park: 100 Years” are hereby warned to avoid those “First Person” accounts containing the word “Harvard,” especially the one in which a current professor writes that he now occupies “the first row of the EMC Club right behind home plate,” though “out of nostalgia for my youth, I sometimes visit my old seats in the bleachers.”...