Green Monster
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- This article is about the wall at Fenway Park. For other uses, see Green Monster (disambiguation).
The Green Monster is the nickname of the 37-foot, two-inch (11.3 m) left field wall at Fenway Park, home to the Boston Red Sox baseball team.
Part of the original ballpark construction of 1912, the wall is made of wood, but was covered in tin and concrete in 1934, and then hard plastic in 1976. A manual scoreboard is set into the wall. Despite the name, the Green Monster was not painted green until 1947; before that it was covered with advertisements.
The wall is the highest in professional baseball, and is famous for preventing home runs on many line drives that would clear the walls of other ballparks. A side effect of this is to increase the prevalence of doubles, since this is the most common result when the ball is hit off the wall (although some Red Sox leftfielders have become adept at fielding caroms off the wall to throw runners out at second base or hold the batter to a single). Compared with other current major league parks, the wall is fairly shallow, at 310 feet from the plate at the left-field foul line, allowing a high but short fly ball to clear the wall for a home run.
In 2003 additional seating for spectators was added to the top of the wall. In 2005 more seating, known as "The Nation's Nest", was added for members of Red Sox Nation.
There is a ladder on the wall that runs from the top of the scoreboard to the top of the wall. The purpose of the ladder used to be for grounds crew members to climb the wall to retrieve home run balls out of the net that used to sit above the wall. However, when they added the "monster seats" in 2003, this was no longer necessary and the ladder currently serves no purpose. According to Fenway Park tour guides, batted balls have hit the ladder during a game on two occasions. Both times the bizzare bounce off the ladder caused the batter to get an "inside the park" home run.
There is some dispute as to the true distance of the Green Monster from home plate. For many years, it was posted as 315 feet. During the Red Sox pennant race in 1975, an overhead photograph of Fenway Park was shown to a man who had analyzed reconnaissance photos in preparation for bombing missions in World War II. He determined that the foul pole was just 304 feet from home plate, but the marker on the wall was not changed. In 1990, Red Sox management relabeled the distance at 310 feet, but many people still believe it to be closer than that.
From 1912 to 1933, there was a 10-foot-high mound that formed an incline in front of the Green Monster, extending from the left-field foul pole to the center field flag pole. As a result of the mound, a left fielder in Fenway Park had to play the entire territory running uphill. Boston's first star left fielder, Duffy Lewis, mastered the skill so well that the area became known as Duffy's Cliff. In 1934, Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey arranged to flatten the ground in left field so that Duffy's Cliff no longer existed and became part of the lore of Fenway Park.
The Red Sox' mascot is Wally, a furry green monster.
Baseball history
Two home runs over the Green Monster are among the most famous in baseball history.The first was Carlton Fisk's ball off of the left field foul pole in the 12th inning to win Game 6 of the 1975 World Series for the Sox. The second was New York Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent's dinger in a one game playoff between the Red Sox and Yankees to decide the winner of the AL east at the end of the 1978 season.
See also
- Dolphin Stadium, home of the Florida Marlins, has a 33-foot-high "Teal Monster" in left field that is similar to the Green Monster.
External links
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