Fenway Park: Seats, Obstructed Views and Getting There

Fenway Park opened in 1912 and has been in continuous use ever since, which makes it the oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball. Everything good and everything awkward about watching a game there follows from that single fact.

The quirks are structural

Fenway was built into an irregular city block, and the field's dimensions were shaped by the streets around it rather than by any theory of how a baseball field should look.

The Green Monster, the high left field wall, exists because there was not enough room for a normal left field. It turns routine fly balls into wall-scrapers and hard line drives into singles, and it has shaped how teams are built here for a century.

The right field corner is deep and oddly angled, which is why balls hit there do unusual things.

The seating is close to the field by modern standards, and that proximity is genuinely part of the appeal.

Obstructed views are real

Because the grandstand is held up by steel posts, some seats have a post between the seat and part of the field. This is not a rumour or an occasional problem; it is a structural feature of a stadium built before cantilevered construction was standard.

Tickets in these locations are generally marked and priced accordingly. Read the listing carefully. A cheap seat in the grandstand may be cheap because you will be watching part of the game around a column.

Some grandstand seats also face at an angle away from the infield, a legacy of the original layout, which means turning your head for much of the game.

None of this makes the park bad. It makes reading the seat description before purchase considerably more important than at a modern stadium.

Getting there

Fenway is in the middle of a dense neighbourhood with a subway line running to it, which makes it one of the easier major venues in the country to reach without a car.

The Green Line serves the park, and Kenmore station is the usual arrival point for a large share of the crowd. Expect it to be extremely busy before and after a game; that is the system working as intended, not a failure.

Commuter rail into Back Bay or South Station connects onward by subway.

Driving is possible and not advisable. Parking near the park is limited and priced for the occasion, and the surrounding streets were laid out long before anyone imagined the traffic.

Around the park

Yawkey Way and the surrounding blocks fill with people well before first pitch, and the pre-game street scene is part of what people mean when they talk about going to Fenway rather than merely watching a game.

The neighbourhood has plenty of places to eat and drink, and they are correspondingly packed on game days. If you want a meal before a night game, go earlier than seems necessary or go further from the park than seems necessary.

The honest advice

Sit somewhere with an unobstructed view if you can afford it, arrive by train, and get there early enough to walk around the park. Fenway rewards showing up early in a way that newer stadiums do not, because the building itself is a significant part of what you came for.