Boston Red Sox President and Chief Executive Officer Larry Lucchino leads a tour of improvements to Fenway Park as Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino looks on.
Home sweet home games.
Boston Red Sox fans will find new seats, stairways and other upgrades at Fenway Park when the world champions play their home opener Tuesday.
“There’s a whole bunch of new things on Opening Day that our fans will like,” said Larry Lucchino, the team’s president and chief executive officer.
As workers put the finishing touches on renovations to the 96-year-old storied ballpark last week, Lucchino led a tour around the facility. He pointed out 875 more seats with room for another 100 standing tickets, a new elevator and a stairway in left field that will improve circulation in and out of the park between Gates A and E. In addition, by the time the Tampa Bay Rays play at Fenway during the first weekend in May, the Bleacher Bar & Grill is expected to open in center field.
The other improvements include four new scoreboards – two in left field and two in right. The boards’ “LED” technology will provide information on the batter, the pitcher, the count and other game statistics. More family-style areas have been added onto a left-field deck behind the Coca-Cola Corner with 32 picnic tables.
Lucchino said while it has been a challenge to add seats to the tiny park, the team has managed to increase capacity by 10 percent since he, John Henry and Thomas Werner bought the team in 2002 for $700 million.
“The demand is greater than the supply, so we’ve tried to add new seats every year,” he said. “But our guiding principle is ‘do no harm.’ We don’t want to do anything to change the old-fashioned ambiance, charm, irregularity, idiosyncrasy and energy that’s in the park, so it does get harder.”
That said, Lucchino said he is convinced the team must do more with less in order to keep pace with the New York Yankees. Next year, the Bronx Bombers will open their new $1.3 billion stadium with “dramatic new revenue sources,” he said.
“New York will radically increase their revenue, so we’ve got to do everything we can to make this little engine that could, the Red Sox, keep up with the bullet train that the Yankees are building in the Bronx,” Lucchino said.
New York’s new stadium will open in 2009. Yankee Stadium was built in 1923. Fenway Park, built in 1912, and Chicago’s Wrigley Field, constructed in 1914, are the oldest parks in the nation.
While it appears that there is no room for growth in the 132,911-square-foot Fenway facility, Lucchino said they’ve managed to come up with new ideas.
“We are lucky because we have some very creative people here at the Red Sox organization,” he said. “It does get tougher, but we are nearing the completion of this process. Our legal capacity is 39,000-plus, even though we don’t have that many seats. But we will end up with between 38,000 and 39,000 tickets sold, and that’s bigger than what we had when we got here.”
Janet Marie Smith, the team’s architect, said the ownership is not done with restoring and adding seats to the ballpark.
Over the next year, she said, planning will commence on the right-field roof extension that will add an undetermined number of seats. In addition, three more suites will be added to the roof deck and concrete repair work is needed in the grandstands, box seat and field seats.
The 2008 improvements also will add more seats for the handicapped. Seating replacement gave the club the opportunity to add 15 new wheelchair locations compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act and 15 new companion seats in the front row of the bleachers.
The club also added eight new ADA-compliant wheelchair positions and eight new companion seats in the left-field grandstand near the new elevator.
